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The third approach to management innovation to creating a,

a company with a different management model, is, is a bottom up approach, and

given that it's so seldom that we see companies experiment with these sort of

big bang top down approaches.

And given that most big organizations are managed in a very traditional way

it's very worthwhile to explore what this bottom-up approach looks like.

Indeed, many of the people I speak to about this, these sort of

issues are indeed middle managers who are saying themselves, look, I can't wait for

my Chief Executive to, to make a big change, I need to do something myself.

So, let's just take a look at a couple of examples of people who I know quite well,

who have taken this sort of bottom-up approach to experimenting with new

ways of working to create, you know, their version of the company of the future.

The first is Ross Smith at Microsoft.

He works as a director of testing of software, you know,

so his team does, you know, what many people think would be fairly tedious work,

which is testing security software.

Ross runs this team of 70 people.

He was based for many years in Redmond, in Microsoft's headquarters, he's,

he's, recently moved.

and, he does this in a very unusual way.

He basically said to himself, look, I've got all these smart people working for me.

they, there's no point in me telling them what to do,

they understand the details of this far better than I do.

So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to inject a little bit of fun and

vibrancy into this organization.

The details of this story, I'm going to leave you to, to read,

in your own time because we've got a case study about it in the course room.

But the essence was, it was built on trust.

It was the essence of it was, was to try to get people to take the initiative to

figure out for themselves, how best to spend their time at work.

What hours to work, what projects to work on.

He inv, invented some very, kind of creative ways of testing software,

using kind of, almost game, game based approaches.

He called the project 42Projects, so, the 42 relates back to

a very famous story from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

Again, I'm not going to go into the details of it.

Suffice it to say, that over the following five or

six years, Ross Smith's team was one of the most productive.

So, software teams in the whole of the Microsoft world, they became so,

shall we say, trusting of him in terms of his style of working that when

the opportunity came to do a big reorganization,

they actually turned it into a completely bottom-up process.

They called it a We-Org,

rather than a Re-Org, a We-Org, we take responsibility for figuring out

ourselves what structure of the unit is going to be, who's going to do which job?

So, rather than have, you know, a,

a few senior people divide up the teams and create the new structure.

They did it entirely on organic kind of bottom up basis.

So, that's what Russel Smith has been up to and, and I met him 10 years ago and

even now 10 years on, he is still doing much the same sort of

thing in a slightly different part of Microsoft now.

Really trying to create within the, the enormous Microsoft world, his own kind

of little pocket of a very very flat empowered decentralized operation.

So that's the first.

The second example I'm going to offer you, his name is Jordan Cohen.

And he works, or worked at the time, at Pfizer.

Pfizer is a big pharmaceutical company.

And again, the details of this are in a case study on the course room.

But essentially, Jordan as, as director of organizational development said,

why is it that people are spending so much time doing really mundane basic stuff?

They're booking their own travel expense, travel, travel claims.

They are working on their own PowerPoint and

Excel sheets, things which could easily be done by somebody else.

And so, he took it upon himself to create essentially an outsourcing service.

He actually went over to India and found some, some small organizations who

would provide that service back to Pfizer in North America.

And it became knows as PfizerWorks, as a mechanism to essentially,

help knowledged workers to be more productive in their work,

to focus on the high end of work, and not do the low-end stuff.

So, he had nobody telling him to do this, he took it upon himself, it was a,

a bottom-up initiative for

trying to change the way that they worked in the organization.

As I was saying, read the details,

it's a fascinating case of a guy doing something a little bit unusual.

Now, you put those two stories together, and

I could have easily given you a half a dozen other stories of companies I

know doing similar things where individuals have taken initiative.

And let me identify six kind of themes, six kind of common themes that can persist

across all these types of individual cases in order to make these things work.

The first is about alignment in a case like Ross Smith or Jordan Cohen,

making sure that what he did aligned, in some sort of sense, with priorities

that the company was already pursuing, made their job a whole lot easier.

It just became a bit more palatable to sell it, when he

could show that what he was doing was linked to what the company wanted to do.

Secondly, put it in the language of business.

What does that mean?

It means, show that there are financial savings.

In the case of Ross Smith, it's about productivity improvements.

In the case of Jordan Cohen,

it like saving significant amount of time of knowledge workers and turning that

into money, which is essentially being put into more high-value added activities.

thirdly, there was a really experimental approach to all these things.

And in all cases they kind of, they did that thing, they did,

tried it a little bit, they, they worked on it and

they improved it, they tested it and gradually the system worked better.

Fourth, in both cases they built, if you like partners or

coalitions, Jordan in particular spent a lot of time

working across Pfizer in a lateral way trying to get people to buy into his idea.

They begged, borrowed, and stole technology and

resources to help him to do his thing, in order to build it.

Because that links into the fifth point,

which is about staying under the radar as long as possible.

In other words, in a case where you're doing something a little bit unusual,

you do not need the visibility of,

of the Chief Executive, whilst it's just a fledging idea.

Make sure that you build whatever it is, and show that it works before you go

above the radar, as it were, so that people could see what it is.

Because, of course, once you're visible, they then,

are in a position to evaluate what you're doing, and

you'd better make sure it's kind of working before you have that feasibility.

So all of those things together, I'll get to the sixth point in a second, are kind

of a, a formula, a recipe book for management innovation from the bottom up.

This is also entrepreneurship, or corporate entrepreneurship.

This idea has been around for many, many years.

This idea that we should seek forgiveness rather than permission, we go ahead and do

things, we build support first, and then worry, worry about permission afterwards.

However, having said all of that, and I've got great admiration for

Jordan and Ross and people of their ilk, for trying things and

sticking their neck out to try to make a difference.

It is worth acknowledging that this is a lonely road.

Do not expect to be, shall we say, thanks for your work, and, and

because I've seen many, many of these types of

corporate entrepreneurs initia takers, initiative takers try new things, and

many of them at some point run out of, run out of patience.

Because they realize that, you know,

despite all their good efforts, despite the successes they've achieved,

the organization doesn't really thank them for their work.

Many of them actually end up choosing to leave the companies that they've,

that they've made their initiatives in just because of a, a sort of a,

a sort of level of frustration that they haven't made a bigger impact.

So, I think you can see that this bottom-up approach,

not withstanding it to enormous merits, has its frustrations as well.

And arguably the, the approach which perhaps works best is some combination of

bottom-up and top-down, whereby we've got people like Jordan Cohen and

Ross Smith taking initiative, making changes in their organizations, allied to

senior executives who were really kind of pushing a mandate for change from above.

But I will be very honest with you,

this combination doesn't work together very often.

There just, you know,

it's just not that frequent that we see the stars aligned in such a way.

So, this one of the reasons of course why management innovation continues to be

a somewhat frustrating game.

4.2.5 How can you change your management model? (Part 5)

Managing the Company of the Future

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