2022/11/21/organizational-anti-pattern-old-new-thing

[utterances-bot]

Organizational Anti-Patterns #2: The Old New Thing

At some point in your career all the stars will align. You’re working on an exciting, groundbreaking new project. Even better everyone else in your organization thinks the same. They’re falling over themselves to help out, remove blockers, get stuff done for you. The CEO calls out your project in...

https://www.thecandidstartup.org/2022/11/21/organizational-anti-pattern-old-new-thing.html

[Wayne82]

As an individual, I kind of have the similar feelings of the inner conflict that is between exciting about new stuff with the impulsion of wanting to move to the next one, and the duty of continuously improving and polishing existing project/product with the gradually growing boredom. That is indeed the human nature.

As a company or organization, however, I think they could improve this, by 1) know what is the right thing to do, 2) know how to motivate the team to do it the right way. (Easy to say, hard to do. :) Worth to keep on thinking, though.)

BTW, thanks for the reference of "Things you should never do, part 1", a lot of great experience to learn from. And it is interesting to know a fundamental law of programming: It’s harder to read code than to write it. :)

[timwiegand]

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback @Wayne82. That point about it being harder to read than write is quite subtle. You might think surely its easier to read than write, but try coming back to some code you wrote 6 months ago and see how long it takes you to figure out what's going on.

[IanBadcoe]

This is essentially why I left Autodesk, except without the good view that someone in a reasonably strategic position has, at my level it looked more like:

Year 1 : We make submarines! Year 2 : Did we say "submarines"? We meant helicopters... Year 3 : Turns out some customers were using the submarines, meet the heli-sub. Year 4 : The industry is turning against awkward multi-function vehicles... Year 5 : We make toasters!

[ark-gl]

This post has great and very true observations. But what is the solution or even the root of the problem? A corporation cannot stop trying New Things - if it did, it would remain one product company. Do you think the root problem is short attention span and lack of conviction to ride over the Trough of Disillusionment to see if the Plateau of Productivity will be eventually reached and how high it will be? Would smaller number of larger bets with more conviction be a solution? Peter Thiel talked about something similar from the venture capitalist PoV. He observed that their smaller investments (less conviction, smaller commitment) has higher failure rate than larger investments.

[timwiegand]

The core problem is that, for a large corporation trying new things, it doesn't matter whether they succeed or not. The existing money machine carries on printing money. As a VP it's easier to ignore the hard decision of either killing a project off or committing the resources needed to make it succeed. Much more fun to chase after the new shiny thing.

Yes, bigger bets can help, in a reverse Conway maneuver kind of way. I think that's one reason why corporations rely on acquisitions rather than home grown projects for new things. If you've spent a ton of money and made a lot of noise about an acquisition, it becomes too big to fail.