ThoughtWorks Sale - So What?
Dr Russ Lewis ??
Connecting human dynamics with organisational performance | Dr of Digital Transformation & AI | Author Agile for Managers | MANAGE TENSIONS NOT PEOPLE | Leader-coach, educator, speaker, angel, lifelong learner
The sale of Thoughtworks (TW) proves the hypothesis that the social model of software development ?is financially valid.
I heard the news via Twitter yesterday from Martin Fowler and he wrote a blog post ?about it.
What was far more interesting than the facts (20 years old, bought by Apax Funds, 4500 employees, global business) is that TW breaks all the rules of traditionally-organised, hierarchical businesses.
The TW founders believed that you could build a sustainable business by only hiring great people, those with the right attitudes and with high competence. With the first of those people they decided to adopt a three-pillar model (unashamedly borrowed from Ben & Jerry's) whereby three things mattered:
- Sustainable Business - this is the ONLY pillar of the traditional model
- Software Excellence - which engages the best people
- Social Justice - so the world is a better place because of them
Making money is necessary to support the other two, but it's like the oxygen we need to breathe for life, needed for life but nobody's purpose in life. Excellence and social justice provide balance and tension such that TW turn-down lucrative work they cannot believe-in and upset clients because they will not compromise on quality.
Building great software depends on culture, trust, experimentation and having smart people collaborate to achieve a shared outcome. None of these are easily quantified or controlled but Fowler, often the voice of TW passionately believes that people matter most in the software business.
Traditional (western) orgs are optimised according to Taylor's principles of Scientific Management whereby all the clever stuff is done in the minds of the people at the top and the dirty, manual labour done by machines and/or workers at the bottom. Of course, that doesn't map to "knowledge-work" where the clever stuff happens in the conversations and thinking-processes of everyone involved in solving the problem, which is encoded into instructions for the computers which now do the work. The nature of work has changed, but the legacy operating model of large organisations has not.