Why your organization will fail to be “the Apple of whatever”

TLDR;

- Functional organization beats matrix through field expertise

- Leadership with collaborative debate is the key

- Building great teams requires humility

- Feedback is the path to learning

- Leave the ego at the door. Yes, your ego.

We want to be the Apple of xyz

You and I heard it too often: “We are the Apple of abc” or “We want to be the Apple of xyz”. And I can totally relate to this idea of a North Star to build an orient on. The reality is, Leaders don't follow and build a north star principle, but follow advice coming from the Milky Way.

During my weakly time chunk reserved for educating myself and learning, I stumbled upon this question myself. But what does it mean? How does an organization of this size build harmonized products where you get this feeling of quality I described in an older post, the feeling that “someone cared”.

To cut it short, if your company is divided in product led business units, it will fail at this goal. This doesn't mean it will fail completely, but it fails in learning and innovating in its behavior. Because claiming one thing and doing the other will not bring you there.

The organization’s why, how and what

But what is there? There are certainly different aspects. From Simon Sinek, we know the circles of why, how an what:

- Why: Vision and Mission

- How: Organization and Leadership

- What: Product and Service

It may be strange, looking at these circles, but the reality is: most people focus on the “what”: This is why a lot has been written about Marketing and the products and services, summing up in:

- Empathy: We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.

- Focus: To do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all the unimportant opportunities.

- Impute: People DO judge a book by its cover. We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.

Also the Why is often referred to as

- Vision: to make the best products on earth, and to leave the world better than we found it.

- Mission: to create technology that empowers people and enriches their lives.

- Values: Accessibility, Education, Environment, Inclusion and Diversity, Privacy, Racial Equity and Justice, Supply Chain Innovation

Less is talked about the how: The organization and people

But my focus was more on the "how", and so I digged deeper.

Researching this topic for myself, I stumbled upon an article in HBR written by two Apple executives in the Apple Academy, the internal educations structure of Apple.

Their answer is divided into two parts:

1. Structure

2. Leadership

First they compare modern matrix-orientend structures with business units to the functional structure, where there is just one team taking care of one topic. The difference reminds me of "divide et impera", a probably Niccolò Machiavelli contributed quote of dividing an organization you lead into smaller chunks that would fight themselves instead of working towards a common goal. Sounds familiar?

A functional organization is the typical Tayloristic model, where labor is divided according to function. In a strict Taylor system, a company is segmented into groups, such as Information Technology (IT), Operations, and Finance.

But you could argue, even a functional structure has different teams looking at different things. That's right. This is namely one of the biggest disadvantages of functional organizations: Silos.

So if the functional organization is not the (only) answer, what should we look at?

Next to the organizational structure, any organization is profoundly influenced by its leadership (what are the overall directions and priorities) and culture (what behavior is encouraged or forbidden)

Smart people

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” – Steve Jobs

Smart people seem to be the core of the leadership and organization, or experts as they are referred to.

When you think about the smartest person you worked with or for, in what environment was this person able to deliver at its best?

Smart people want to work with other smart people, often referred to as “A people hire A people”. They are normally the first to leave an environment, that doesn't allow them to rise.

Having that in mind, the leadership principles make total sense:

The 3 Leadership Principles are:

1. Experts leading experts

2. Immersion in details

3. Collaborative Debate

And the answer to the organization lays in 1 and 3. Smart people (experts) are recognized and valued by other smart people. Which, on the other hand, means that you have to get rid of the people, that don't fit in this pattern, the rotten fruits that influence your total basket. Important to say, whoever is not an expert in Field A can be an expert in Field B.

The core: Collaborative Debate

But even more important and imho the real core is point 3: Collaborative Debate

And the toughest one. A debate where you value the expertise of the other and try to achieve consensus over top-down-decision. and this is where the functional organization makes sense: There is only one leading expert for A. No one outside this team can challenge that. Working together on a project means adding the different expertises to come to the best solution for the project, not the individual.

And it means that if individual ego shows up, this has to be called by teammates and managers. This is where culture helps to get rid of this behavior.

that energy and desire of your team to do something great

It doesn't surprise that Pixar has similar structures and rules. They even add on to use expressive art in their leadership:

"There was something magical about that unique combination of people coming together. How do you harness that energy and desire of your team to do something great, no matter where you are? That’s when the best work happens."

At Pixar an exercise called “leading from the inside out” has participants present a relevant challenge to their collaborators on a project. Then their teammates ask questions but are instructed not to use them as a means of touting their own ideas.

Feedback is essential for good collaboration. Pixar uses lessons from improv theater to help people make the most of the feedback they receive.

1. Accept all offers, i.e. embrace all new ideas instead of rejecting them.

2. Ensure that you’re building on someone else’s idea.

3. Make your teammate look good by enhancing their idea or project.

Pixar uses a format called brain trust to provide valuable feedback introduced by Ed Catmull.

1. Peer-to-Peer Conversations: Only those who knew about filmmaking participated, ensuring valuable feedback.

2. No Overriding the Creative Team: The Brain Trust could not override the decisions of directors or creative teams.

3. Honesty is Key: Encouraging candid feedback, fostering an environment where egos are left at the door.

4. Leaders Must Listen: Ed learned that leaders, including himself and Steve Jobs, needed to allow creative discussions without dominating them.

Your ego is in your way

So leadership asks for a level of humility. If your ego is in your way, get rid of it.

1) Teach yourself to listen, not talk.

2) Teach yourself to give and receive feedback.

3) Teach yourself to lead and follow

Bonus

Two things that I stumbled upon my reasearch are

- DRI – directly responsible individual

- Top 100 Offsite Meeting

The DRI is perhaps one of the keys that functional organization gets things done. According to someone who worked with it, it helps

- When solving a complex, cross-functional engineering issue,

- When it's unclear who's got the ball and what should be happening,

- When everyone knows that something is important, but no one feels like it's their responsibility to see it all the way through

So the DRI is the person that takes care that the company delivers cross functional.

Of course there still can be different priorities in a company, so getting more people to have the bigger picture is crucial. this is where the top100 meeting comes in.

“My job is to work with sort of the Top 100 people…that doesn’t mean they’re all vice presidents. Some of them are just key individual contributors. So when a good idea comes…part of my job is to move it around … get ideas moving among that group of 100 people.”

This is a last interesting bit: Top100 is not about hierarchy. So again: No ego.

Sources

- https://www.apple.com/jobs/pdf/HBR_How_Apple_Is_Organized_For_Innovation-4.pdf

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/11/07/the-three-principles-that-always-drove-apple/

- https://fortune.com/article/inside-apple/

- https://hbr.org/2019/11/cracking-the-code-of-sustained-collaboration

- https://medium.com/management-matters/how-apple-pixar-foster-true-collaboration-and-make-innovation-inevitable-6c79db55626e

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw_RVmCT_gE

- https://slack.com/intl/de-de/blog/transformation/leadership-lessons-from-ed-catmulls-creativity-inc

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/10/02/how-well-does-apples-directly-responsible-individual-dri-model-work-in-practice/#2715e4857a0b7be41d27704b