How Companies Manage Hundreds of Employees Remotely

The Covid-19 crisis has highlighted the practice of some modern virtual companies that can source and manage their employees globally. An interesting case study is developed in this post ‘Managing 185 people in 40 countries. How they do it‘.

In this case study the company Platform.sh is typical of those digital companies that have no office space and coordinate hundreds of employees globally. In this case, the company has been built that way since 2010 and seems to be quite successful on its market.

A few take-away points for me from this paper:

  • basically the money that would otherwise be spent on office amenities is spent in having meetings, including a long all-hands meeting every year for people to know each other and exchange in a physical space. Hence, those setups do not preempt the need to invest in building the relationships – and rely also on the ability to travel globally at least once a year!
  • a focus on the right mix of communication (synchronous / asynchronous) seeking the best effectiveness
  • Lots of writing and explicit behavior expectations to compensate for the missing informal expectations transmittal.

There is a strong benefit at being able to hire talent anywhere without any geographical constraint – and not be limited to some hot spots of coding talents. This in turn allows more diversity and apparently also less cost overall.

All in all, an excellent case study to meditate as we enter in a new era of much more frequent virtual remote work.

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How Some Startups Burn Cash Unsustainably To Gain Market Share

This ranting post “Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage” is gone somewhat viral. It describes in detail how many well-known startups are actually subsidizing users to consume their services in a desperate bid to capture market share and create new markets.

The post explains how a restaurant owner got enrolled without his consent on a food delivery application, only to find that the service was on purpose proposing his food products for delivery at a sharp discount compared to the selling prices (without even counting delivery fee) – and of course without his consent. This resulted in some funny experiments where the restaurant owner could order food for a lower price than the startup is paying for it, in reality getting subsidized by the startup!

In general many of the well known brands for new distributed physical services like car transportation (Uber…), food delivery etc, are using their investor’s money to subsidize the service, therefore necessarily skewing the market. This is of course unsustainable. If the vision is to become so market dominant that in the future prices can be imposed like in a monopoly, it is downright unethical. In any case I did not realize how many of the modern convenient physical services of the e-economy are currently in reality not priced as they should be.

In addition as in the case study of the post, poor logistics by the startup meant that the food was delivered cold, impacting the restaurant’s reputation.

“You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It’s used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses. The companies unload their capital cannons on customer acquisition, while this week’s Uber-Grubhub news reminds us, the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and increased prices. But is that even viable?“

There will necessarily be a wake-up call sometimes when those entrepreneurs will fail to show that their business model is unsustainable. And it will probably come sooner than expected. Welcome to the universe of unsustainable unicorns!

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How Logical Razors Can Be Used Daily

While Occam’s Razor is quite famous, I discovered in this post ‘A Look At Razors (No, Not That Kind)‘ that there are a quite a few other well known such logical razors. This Wikipedia entry on philosophical razors also covers the topic. Logical razors serve to act as a heuristic guidance to decide on what is the best explanation for an event.

Occam’s razor is based on simplicity. There are several formulations, I like the one given in the post: “When presented with competing hypothetical answers to a problem, one should select the answer that makes the fewest assumptions.”

Among the other razors, I like Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity“

Popper’s falsifiability principle is also quite interesting: “For a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable“.

Or, Hitchens’ razor: “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

In fact we should use those razors more often than we do. These are quite interesting heuristics worth pondering when faced with some unexpected evidence, theory or observation!

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How Memory and History are Different

In this post ‘The Most Important Question: How do you Know?‘, Valeria Maltoni tackles an interesting and important subject: the difference between history and memory. An interesting topic at the time we live through a historical and momentous historical event – the first pandemics of modern times.

I like the distinction which is proposed, quoting Alessandro Barbero, a famous italian writer of historic novels:

“Memory is individual, it’s the point of view of one person. History is the understanding of what happened from all points of view.”

Valeria Maltoni expands on this: “History is important. Reality its complex. To understand what actually happened, a view of the events from above is critical. One of the ways to learn from the experiences of others is to get out of a personal point of view, widen the gaze. This is what history does. Because it’s the sum of all the things that happened to human beings, history answers the question: What really happened? Memory is important, but by its very nature is limiting. It takes into account only one point of view“.

We will all have our memories of the current historical moment, but history will be needed to complement our understanding. And it will probably take time before this history can be written by people not getting involved in petty political games and interpretations.

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How Power is Shifting to Social Network Connectors

In the book ‘The systems view of life‘, the topic of social networks and specifically how power exists and develops in social networks. We realize that the exercise of power, which was in the Industrial Age through hierarchies, is now becoming quite different.

“The socio-biologist Manuel Castells argues that the paramount form of power in the network society is the power to constitute networks – to connect individuals and institutions to these networks, or exclude them, and to inter-connect different networks.”

“Whereas power as domination is most effectively exercised through a hierarchy, the most effective social structure for power as empowerment is the network. In a social network, people are empowered by being connected to the network. In such a network the success of the whole community depends o the success of its individual members, while the success of each member depends on the success of the community as a whole.“

Power in social networks therefore resides in empowerment through connection. Super-connectors have thus the most power. This quite different perspective helps explain how power is shifting in the most advanced societies – and what makes powerful today.

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How We Need to Learn More Than Ever, but that’s Not The Same as Getting Formal Education

In this post ‘But what could you learn instead?’, Seth Godin reminds us that now is the time to accelerate our learning to face a disrupted world – but that at the same time, learning is not necessarily correlated with formal education.

“Learning takes effort, and it’s hard to find the effort when the world is in flux, when we’re feeling uncertain and when we’re being inundated with bad news. But that’s the moment when learning is more important than ever.”

But learning is quite different to formal education which was developed during the industrial age and is actually a way to ensure conformity and the capability to do hard work.

“This shift [from education to true learning] is difficult to commit to, because unlike education, learning demands change. Learning makes us incompetent just before it enables us to grasp mastery. Learning opens our eyes and changes the way we see, communicate and act.”

Let us remind us always that never have we faced more the need to learn, but that there are myriads of ways to learn and change which are not just formal education.

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How to Build Your New Normal

As we live through unprecedented changes, there is quite a challenge to build our new normal. This Capitalogix post ‘Building Your New Normal‘ provides some pointers.

“Things won’t go back to the way they were, but they will go back to normal. Only, it will be a new normal. It’s a good lesson in being attached to a result, not a medium for a result.”

The point is here: let’s not concentrate on how we were doing things, but back to why we were doing them. The means and technology do not matter, as long as we can align to our longer term purpose. We will adapt our delivery methods, our way of working, but the wider world still needs us because of our purpose.

It is a good time now to sit and reflect how we can deliver our purpose more effectively and to more people.

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How to Change Your Leadership In Times of Disruption

This useful post by Charlene Li ‘5 Ways To Change Your Leadership In This Crisis‘ propose some useful hints at what needs to change to be more effective in this climate of disruption.

The suggested changes include:

  • Developing a disruption mindset
  • Establishing stability and security with structure and process
  • Using openness and transparency to create accountability
  • Communicating in 3D to nurture relationships
  • Identifying opportunities for the future

I like this point of combining driving for disruption while creating some sort of safe space for people not to get lost (through processes and structure). Those recommendations in fact combine assuming leadership for change with providing comfort, thereby creating a fine balance to get everyone onboard.

This balance exercise between leading change and disruption and at the same time providing reassurance to the team is exactly what is required by a leader in those tough and strange times – and that’s certainly quite a rare set of capabilities.

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How Company Culture Is Essential To Prevent Long-Term Catastrophes

This interesting Forbes article ‘Avoid A Company Catastrophe With A Culture-Focused Approach‘ explores the issues of inadequate company culture in terms of long-term catastrophic outcomes, taking the specific example of Boeing and other previous catastrophic failures and major accidents.

A common topic emerges which is the capability for the organization to properly consider divergent opinions. When looking at the changes that are needed within Boeing, the most difficult appears to be “intellectual inclusion — a willingness to actually listen to other people’s opinions. It’s a difficult change that most companies aren’t willing to make. When incorporated correctly, however, it’s very powerful.”

Many organisations I know tend to have a ‘shoot the messenger’ attitude and have tremendous difficulties addressing diverging opinions. However it is quite true that this is an essential capability, even more so today when the world proves unstable and ripe for disruption.

Both on the short term and in the long term, a healthy corporate culture is an essential investment to navigate the hurdles of an uncertain world. It should probably be much more the focus of attention of senior leadership when building a company meant to last.

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How Companies Can be Expected to Become Smaller and Decentralized

In this post focused on journalism ‘What will a post-COVID-19 media look like? I asked my students‘, Frederic Filloux makes the point that in the future, media outlets will be smaller organizations increasingly run as a group.

Crisis are known to accelerate natural trends and it is quite interesting to observe that in the current situation which allows to seek new foundations, the idea that with the new technology, smaller outlets could be more successful is quite interesting.

“The media outlets that will emerge from the global crisis will be lightweight, decentralized, less reliant on advertising, and will bring more explanations and expertise to the table”; and probably they will be also more niche and focused.

Add to the discussion that smaller outfits are also more prone to be generative rather than extractive, and this gives a vision of a new organisational ecosystem that is increasingly focused on making people grow rather than to exploit and produce profit. A quite comforting picture of our common future!

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How Company Ownership Can Be Extractive or Generative

In the very interesting (and recommended) book ‘The systems view of life‘, the work of Marjorie Kelly is mentioned about various ways of owning a company. She opposes extractive and generative ownership.

Her view of ownership design is that five essential patterns work together to achieve either an extractive or a generative design:

  • purpose,
  • membership,
  • governance,
  • capital
  • and networks.

Extractive ownership has a mainly a financial purpose: maximizing profits. It is actually the classical business organisation that emerges from the classical theory. Generative ownership, however, has a living purpose: creating the conditions for life. It is closer to non-profit organisations and is generally more characteristic of smaller, more human-size organisations.

I find this analysis quite interesting as it creates a distinct framework to analyse the economy and the economic actors. And it is quite true that many smaller organisations correspond more to the generative type, as they contribute to develop living networks without focusing exclusively on profit.

Generative vs extractive ownership is quite a useful distinction.

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How to Define Levels of Remote Working Organisational Proficiency

This Medium post ‘The Five Levels of Remote Work — and why you’re probably at Level 2‘ mentions how Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic (managing amongst other products the WordPress platform) defines 5 levels of remote work.

Those 5 levels are (summarized with my interpretation):

  • level 1: majority office-based with some remote work
  • level 2: recreating the office online (fixed hours, large meetings, office-type rituals)
  • level 3: adapting to the remote working medium by changing rituals, minimizing meetings and maximizing asynchronous written information
  • level 4: fully asynchronous work, with no requirement for time coordination. This has also the benefit to avoid interruptions and allow longer focus times
  • level 5: nirvana. Not so clear for me. “Mullenweg equates this level with having more emphasis on ‘environment design’, insofar as the organisation’s culture, and the physical environment people work in is concerned“

The post mentions that “Companies that truly practice asynchronous communication have stepped out of the industrial revolution, and no longer conflate presence with productivity, or hours with output, as one might on the factory floor.” This is probably more like the Collaborative Age will look like.

Also it is worth mentioning that it is recommended to organise physical team bonding events on a periodic basis to support a majority of remote work time.

It is true that most of my corporate clients are stuck on level 2. What remote work level have you achieved so far?

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