> But you will end up with different divisions trying to solve the same problems in ways that either confound each other or the customer.
That's the tradeoff.
You either allow teams to work independently and lose some efficiency through work duplication. Or, you centralize the work and you lose efficiency through centralized bottlenecks.
For small to medium orgs the centralized approach works better. But as the org grows, the bottlenecks become worse and you're forced to switch to the independent approach which is more scalable.
* The guidance is to allow teams to do work independently in parallel, not give them no direction or strategy of what to work on. Without small discreet teams that can operate without a bunch of external blocking approvals or manual processes, you simply will not get work done as the org scales because your productivity will quadratically approach zero.
* He addresses the cost of coherence (both its creation and its absence) in the post, which is worth reading in full. He also talks about how to structure a product portfolio in order to avoid the “confounding competing solutions” scenario.
In short, you’re not wrong, but the downside you outline is tractable—centralization of decision making is not.
Eh, personally I prefer eight rats in a trenchcoat to the kind of sclerotic bureaucracy that seems to dominate most midsized companies. I might be confused about why the rats are doing different things, but at least they're doing things.
Nor is such a company productive when looked at from the outside.
Google might be a good example of this. Each team likely seems productive internally because they come up with new products quickly but customers wonder why the company is producing 4 different chat apps, 3 video services, and nothing seems to work together.
Google's multiple public facing apps that do the same thing are a unique issue. What's not unusual is for a company to have multiple internal tools, vendors, processes that are duplicative.
That becomes a branding issue. Many large companies own many smaller brands that are kept independent. You see this a lot in food also with mobile where each smaller brand can focus a smaller group. This gives customers choice but keeps profits with the entity.
Nobody wants to deal with a company that behaves like eight rats in a trenchcoat.