Justin talks to Yadin Porter de León, Head of Content Marketing at Druva Inc.
They discuss how technology companies like to push the productivity cost savings from using their technology, and yet those cost savings never seem to involve firing people. Thus they are really about enhancing the value side of the equation, and now about saving cost, but that’s not what they talk about, which is odd.
They talk about how there are lots of average managers, and when they go to cut costs, they often choose highly visible internal things to cut instead of more substantial (and more difficult) savings. A company in a death spiral will be removing free snacks, buying cheap coffee and scratchy toilet paper, rather than getting rid of under-performing managers or making hard business decisions.
The discuss how management is a skill, which requires both theory and practice to get good at. People aren’t just born as great managers, any more than people are born being great at programming in C.
They also talk about the cargo cult of startup management, where people blindly copy the practices of other successful companies without any understanding of whether or not they actually work. Worse, many startups attempt to abandon management altogether in an attempt to avoid the mistakes of others, and then missing out on all the benefits that good management provides.
There’s are reasons for organisations to have managers. Not knowing those reasons isn’t a good reason to try to do without management.
Chapters

* 00:00:00.000 Intro
* 00:00:15.856 Episode Intro
* 00:02:29.295 Interview
* 00:06:14.900 Productivity vs Firing People
* 00:10:04.650 Death Spiral
* 00:11:57.186 Bathroom Judging
* 00:15:31.575 Management is a Skill
* 00:19:55.865 Startups and Management
* 00:24:40.866 Outtakes

Links

* Yadin works at Druva, who make data protection software. This episode was recorded just before Druva presented at Cloud Field Day 1.
* An article in The Atlantic about holacracy at Zappos, and another one in Fortune.
* A collection of Peter Drucker’s best writing on management in The Essential Drucker. Worth the read.

Sponsors

This episode of The Eigencast was sponsored by PivotNine. Research, analysis, advice.