What business can learn from open source
Posted on July 1st, 2006 by Jackie Danicki
This has been blogged by everyone, several months ago, and maybe even by me. No matter; I did not have open comments then, and now I do, and there’s one person in particular who asked me for the link and who might give an interesting reaction here. So: What business can learn from open source, by Paul Graham. Here’s a teaser:
The average office is a miserable place to get work done. And a lot of what makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with professionalism. The sterility of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency. But suggesting efficiency is a different thing from actually being efficient.The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed. And it’s not just the way offices look that’s bleak. The way people act is just as bad.
Filed under: Life
Stephanie Winston’s book “Organized For Success” is fantastic. She interviews pretty renowned business leaders for their best tips. I’m working on my office. At the moment, it looks like the scene of a crime. No dead bodies (not that I could find them); it just looks ransacked.
It is generally about the size of organisations. They get more bureaucratic and less flexible as they get larger. There’s also the fact that the line between the guy who collects the profit at the top and the worker on the ground gets longer, and that most people in between are focussed on their job, more than the bottom line. The focus gets lost.
Large companies then try and create central functions, believing that they can organise things, that they will become more efficient as a result. So, some central functions get created to order desks (which the graphic designers don’t like) and computer equipment at prices above retail that has to go through ordering committees.
The problem is that the centralisation slows the company down, and makes things less directly accountable to the people on the front line. They become not servants, in a way that an external company providing services does, but masters.