When I asked my managers what they needed, I unknowingly gamified the budgeting process. The game worked as follows: The objective was for each manager to build the largest organization possible and thereby expand the importance of his function. Through the transitive property of status, he could increase his own importance as well.
This will always happen with closed allocation, no matter how much it is tweaked. It's an inherent property of closed allocation systems that the definition of work is driven by managerial status assertions rather than the needs of the business, which can only be assessed, at the lower levels, organically.
Closed allocation doesn't invariably destroy a company, and it's only in software that open allocation is obviously superior. (An open-allocation nuclear plant may not be the best idea.) Most industrial efforts can tolerate the inefficiencies that come with closed allocation. Software often can't, because software efforts tend to be binary in outcome (most lose, a few are big winners) and closed allocation generally creates enough needless complexity to cripple the company before it really succeeds.
Can you name open allocation companies that aren't operating with massive free cashflow? Because you always bring up Valve when raising your theory that open allocation is the magical escape hatch from economics, and it always seems to me that's the only major example you have.
Google and Microsoft also have massive free cashflow and they don't use open allocation. So perhaps the magic of Valve's "open allocation" is that they're just sitting on a cash fountain and it doesn't matter that much how they spend it.
Isn't SuperCell (Clash of Clans) using open allocation as well ? They did it before becoming a cash fountain.
My feeling is that open allocation is the most efficient with very dedicated employee and strong constrains. The manpower limitation being one of these constrains. Self organization is also more efficient with few people because communication is then more efficient. Obviously when the number of employee grows, these two conditions are much harder to met. Cashflow can only hide the inefficiency.
> Obviously when the number of employee grows, these two conditions are much harder to met.
This is what I mean about the "magical escape hatch from economics". Coordination is easy if you have massive surplus, because you can recover from any fuckups.
In constrained environments on large problems, it falls to bits. Toyota delegates serious authority to its workers, but they are still working inside a system they help to design. It's not an ivory tower sitting next to a golden brook.
I'd be interested to see how many companies use open allocation that have succeeded and how many have failed. I'm going to guess that the failure rate is pretty close to the mean failure rate for all new businesses.
Have you ever considered that Valve is successful because of open allocation? It's not like this massive cashflow was conferred upon them by God.
That success exists because they're doing things right.
If you look at closed-allocation software companies that succeed, what you find is that a politically fortunate subset does exist on essentially open-allocation terms. They work on what they want, where they want, aren't penalized for creative output, and get shit done. That small percentage ends up driving the whole company. That being the case, why not improve the odds by giving more people (or, even, all the engineers) that freedom?
Google and Microsoft also have massive free cashflow and they don't use open allocation.
Microsoft has been in decline for 15 years and a large part of that is stack-ranking, which goes hand-in-hand with closed allocation.
Google is doing OK, but it's in cultural decline and has been since the ~2009 introduction of more traditional management... which is around when Google's engineering organization became more rigidly closed. (From 2002-2007, Google was somewhere between open and closed allocation, solidly mid-spectrum because it was engineer-driven.)
> Have you ever considered that Valve is successful because of open allocation? It's not like this massive cashflow was conferred upon them by God.
Have you considered that every company which stumbles into a network-effects monopoly is successful regardless of how they run the place? "Conferred by lucky timing" is still an exogenous cause. We've learnt from the Windows and mobile App Stores that you can wind up in this position with and without creative output penalties and management bullshit.
> Microsoft has been in decline for 15 years and a large part of that is stack-ranking, which goes hand-in-hand with closed allocation.
It's definitely declining. It's been declining for decades. This decline has taken the form of a business so profitable that 4 out of 5 divisions by themselves would qualify as Fortune 500 entries.
And Google has been drinking cash from the same river for its entire life. The only diversification from advertising revnue they have is mobile devices, and it's only because they bought Motorola outright.
If you own a gold mine, you make profits because the market demands gold. Not because you are good to your staff, or bad to your staff. What makes you successful is the ownership of the gold mine.
Like I said, you have (so far as I can tell) one and only one example of any seriousness. One data point does not uphold a theory which completely ignores that economics is the subject of satisfying unlimited wants with limited means in the face of unlimited arrangements.
This will always happen with closed allocation, no matter how much it is tweaked. It's an inherent property of closed allocation systems that the definition of work is driven by managerial status assertions rather than the needs of the business, which can only be assessed, at the lower levels, organically.
Closed allocation doesn't invariably destroy a company, and it's only in software that open allocation is obviously superior. (An open-allocation nuclear plant may not be the best idea.) Most industrial efforts can tolerate the inefficiencies that come with closed allocation. Software often can't, because software efforts tend to be binary in outcome (most lose, a few are big winners) and closed allocation generally creates enough needless complexity to cripple the company before it really succeeds.