It works pretty well,
all in all, in spite of its central control
being limited to a relatively small number of standards. Beyond that, it
mostly lets market forces decide whether, for example, Steve Jobs
capitulates to those who want to run Flash on their iPads, or web
developers the world over capitulate to Steve Jobs' insistence that
Flash will not run on anything Apple.
Speaking of Apple:
Lots of people give it credit for providing a more
secure computing environment than, say, Microsoft.
If risk is all that matters, it's a wonderful solution.
The question of centralized vs decentralized control isn't
merely a
technical issue. Which controls to centralize and which to decentralize
... and how much ... are matters of general systems theory, as important
for deciding how to organize and manage a business as for how to
organize and manage a network. Risk not being the only factor that
matters, the right answer for specific circumstances depends on a wide
variety of factors.
But as we live in an age of short attention spans, silver
bullets,
and a notable distaste for nuance, the purveyors of management silver
bullets appear to have decided centralized control is the right answer,
and never mind the question.
A universal engineering principle says that to optimize the
whole you
have to sub-optimize the parts. On the face of it, it's an argument for
centralized control: Any decision you delegate to the parts could
result in optimization of that part at the expense of the whole.
It's a persuasive argument, and a correct one, so far as it
goes. If
it's the only argument you listen to, though, you'll reach a conclusion
based on only half the story.
Except for this situation, where it's the entire story:
Imagine you run a perfectly siloed organization. Perfectly
siloed
means all responsibilities are clearly allocated to specific
organizational units, each organizational unit is divided into
organizational sub-units with equally clear partitioning of
responsibilities, and all organizational units and sub-units have
perfectly specified interfaces -- ways for work to enter and exit them.
It's the organization as machine: Each part is a well-machined
gear,
cam, or piston. Management? The timing chain, perhaps.
In this model, any proposed change to any unit or sub-unit can
take
one of two forms: Black-box changes and interface changes. Black box
changes are within-silo changes. They improve how an organizational unit
does its work without changing the interfaces, which mean they don't
affect any other organizational unit in any way.
Perfectly siloed organizations should encourage black-box
changes,
leaving them to the discretion of the organizational unit's director,
who, in fractal fashion, delegates sub-black-box improvements to the
sub-black-box managers responsible for each sub-silo within the main
silo.
Interface changes, in contrast, do affect how an organizational
unit
interacts with all the others. They are an entirely different matter,
because in the organization as machine, when someone in design
engineering sneezes, someone in marketing says "Gesundheit."
Which means interface changes must be approved through a
centralized
governance mechanism. (So, usually, are black-box changes, because
really, can we trust our silo managers to be properly responsible?)
Here's the challenge for organizations like this: They become,
over
time, perfectly engineered for their purpose, which means that if the
marketplace changes in any fundamental way they are immensely difficult
to redirect to any other purpose. In addition to being perfectly
engineered they are perfectly rigid and inflexible.
It's what many current business thinkers now recommend as the
way to run an organization.
Not that they describe it this way. They describe it in terms
of
efficiency and velocity, forgetting that while drag racers might also
achieve high velocity, they have a serious limitation:
They don't corner very well.
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