Friends coworkers clients
Saturday, November 17th, 2007San Francisco, Day 1, 3pm-midnight
At Citizen Space, my afternoon is editing interviews. Andrea emails me. She’s seen my Gmail chat headline “in SF - at http://citizenspace.us/ and tells me it looks great. I feel good knowing that she’s checked out where I am and something I care about. I’ve only recently started updating my whereabouts on Gmail chat, so her message encourages me to keep it up.
While I work, Tara and Chris present to a client. Earlier I’d thought he was a friend, then a coworker, and now he’s a client. As the meeting unfolds on the whiteboards, each of them contribute jokes, suggestions and questions. I know this is a new long-term goal of mine: to have clients who are friends and coworkers.
* * *
Later that night, back in Haight-Ashbury at the People’s Cafe, I get an email from Geoff Slinker (yes, we have the same letters in our last names) who started the great Workplace Democracy listserve.
“If a company is setup such that management is reviewed by those they manage and if a series of bad reviews results in a change of position or leaving the company what happens if the Owner of the business is also the CEO and the company gives the CEO several bad scores on his/her review?
Could you as the Owner relinquish the position as CEO?
It stands to reason that if you have setup such a review process you have already addressed the issues of command and control. Therefore I think you could.”
He mentions an article by Ralph Stayer, the CEO of Johnsonville Sausage — “How I Learned to Let My Workers Lead.” Rereading it, I’m uplifted by the geese metaphor:
Similar Posts:“I tried to picture what Johnsonville would have to be to sell the most expensive sausage in the industry and still have the biggest market share. What I saw in my mind’s eye was definitely not an organization where I made all the decisions and owned all the problems. What I saw was an organization where people took responsibility for their own work, for the product, for the company as a whole. If that happened, our product and service quality would improve, our margins would rise, and we could reduce costs and successfully enter new markets. Johnsonville would be much less vulnerable to competition.
The image that best captured the organizational end state I had in mind for Johnsonville was a flock of geese on the wing. I didn’t want an organizational chart with traditional lines and boxes, but a “V” of individuals who knew the common goal, took turns leading, and adjusted their structure to the task at hand. Geese fly in a wedge, for instance, but land in waves. Most important, each individual bird is responsible for its own performance.”