Musing about Work

One of the things that I noticed about the company for which I currently work, shortly after arriving, is that they expect to be told what to do by the people running the place, or at least expect to need their permission, and they really like to involve lots of people in their decision making. The first trumps the second; if everyone in a group thinks that something is a good idea, they'll still ask the manager's opinion; if the manager doesn't like it, it doesn't happen; if the manager does, it'll happen.

If the managerial levels aren't involved, then they simply ask everyone who might possibly be involved, or was involved, or they think should be involved, in whatever is being discussed. Part of this is the technology; its a lot easy to just say 'send/reply to all' and be relatively confident that the people who really should be asked are in that list than it is to selectively say 'these people, not those'. I find that though I don't like getting these 'everybody and their brother' emails, there are people who do like it; they say its how they keep aware of whats going on in the organization.

Communication can be tough, that way. People have different needs and desires about what they want, and they don't always know that they do want something, or that something is useful to them. Sometimes, like me, they keep isolated, deliberately ignoring emails, and then find that the emails, however portentiously worded, really did have something that they needed to know. Not necessarily wanted to know, but needed to know. There’s a concept called ‘push’ marketing, and one called ‘on-demand marketing’; both are relevant here.

On a different note: This place has a lot of managers -- if I had to guess, I'd say there's about fifteen to twenty levels of them, bottom to top, with thousands at the bottom level and as many as ten or fifteen at the next-to-top -- so its not all that uncommon to get emails from them -- usually stern or cheery notes with roughly the same content: we're all in this together, we're doing good but we've got to do better, and the way to do that is for you to do what we say. Go team go fight team fight win team win. Yawn.
But an email we got yesterday was different, because in it the person writing asked for the thoughts of every single person in his organization about what could be done to improve the effectiveness of the organization (that kind of note, though rare, is not uncommon; the annual ‘PBC’ process is essentially that). What made this note unique was that the sender asked for the responses to come directly to him. Not filtered through the intervening levels of managers, not to the common email box that gets vetted by his secretary, arranged by topic or whatever, but directly to him.

Given organizational paranoia, its not out of the question that this is A Trick; he's going to track who doesn't respond and put them on the Fire These Guys list. But I don't think so. This guy has a reputation for being a nice guy, someone who is easy to talk to (unlike, say, his subordinates, who are easy to talk to so long as you're nodding up and down as you do), and he asks good questions. I'm quite impressed by this email of his, and I'm going to think about the response, and send it back. Directly to him.

It will be interesting to see what comes of it.