Empowering employee decision-making can transform company culture and lead towards massive success. It's time to learn a little from how Toyota bucked the trend.
Excellent, vivid examples and helpful, simple breakdown of the key areas leaders should consider to design their distributed leadership model. Love it!
Really cool examples with Toyota and Kodak. This article reminded me of something Jocko Willink defines as "decentralized command". He also talks about how the key to accomplishing decentralized command is company culture, which you tie in as well. Awesome article, appreciate you sharing.
Great examples, Jeff! On my teams, I usually have everyone tell me what is going on with our nurses (I work in healthcare) and I have a team that manages our nurse’s schedules, but I never actually considered giving more autonomy to the nurses themselves. Getting feedback from them directly could be helpful and a game changer!
Geff, yours is an excellent analysis of the decision making process and its importance. I believe that it is going to even more important in the future. The way things are developing the future will be dominated by Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) where each member is an individual entrepreneur that collaborate in building projects such as refineries or power plant or any project for that matter. These projects I believe are the most complex projects as they involve all kinds of activities such as earth works, civils, structures, equipment piping, electrical and instrumentation. There are other aspects that complicated matters such as life threatening high pressures, high temperatures, acids and other chemical so quality control must be very rigorous. This is already too long not to list many other factors that are involved in those projects. From experience often those projects are quite messy in its execution. Even those the most complex plants could be done by individual entrepreneurs combined int project team.
The key for this type of operation are work breakdown structure and itemized costing of a project. This has to be done upfront and it is a quite tedious job, but once done it can be largely used on other projects. This kind of organization was impossible in the past but with advancement of computerization and now AI it is possible to do project of any size and complexity.
I am working on a Renaissance 2.0 that is in essence the Global Project Plan to stop and start reversing global warming by 2035 and one of the sections is more detailed analysis of DAOs and its modus operandi. Properly designed this type of companies can, and I think, will replace corporations. It will be by far the most efficient organisation. The decision making process will be one of the crucial elements of these organisations.
I have just started publishing the project motivation on Substack about three weeks ago. Have a look. I think that there is potential for collaboration in the future.
Great review Jeff! Hopefully the command and control type decision-making is now old news as we continue to empower our teams. Start with trust, explain the why but give them space on the how
Excellent, vivid examples and helpful, simple breakdown of the key areas leaders should consider to design their distributed leadership model. Love it!
So glad you like it Kathy! Thanks for caring enough to leave a comment.
Really cool examples with Toyota and Kodak. This article reminded me of something Jocko Willink defines as "decentralized command". He also talks about how the key to accomplishing decentralized command is company culture, which you tie in as well. Awesome article, appreciate you sharing.
Thanks Petti! And I’m flattered to have the same thinking as Jocko. It makes me feel cooler
Great examples, Jeff! On my teams, I usually have everyone tell me what is going on with our nurses (I work in healthcare) and I have a team that manages our nurse’s schedules, but I never actually considered giving more autonomy to the nurses themselves. Getting feedback from them directly could be helpful and a game changer!
Geff, yours is an excellent analysis of the decision making process and its importance. I believe that it is going to even more important in the future. The way things are developing the future will be dominated by Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) where each member is an individual entrepreneur that collaborate in building projects such as refineries or power plant or any project for that matter. These projects I believe are the most complex projects as they involve all kinds of activities such as earth works, civils, structures, equipment piping, electrical and instrumentation. There are other aspects that complicated matters such as life threatening high pressures, high temperatures, acids and other chemical so quality control must be very rigorous. This is already too long not to list many other factors that are involved in those projects. From experience often those projects are quite messy in its execution. Even those the most complex plants could be done by individual entrepreneurs combined int project team.
The key for this type of operation are work breakdown structure and itemized costing of a project. This has to be done upfront and it is a quite tedious job, but once done it can be largely used on other projects. This kind of organization was impossible in the past but with advancement of computerization and now AI it is possible to do project of any size and complexity.
I am working on a Renaissance 2.0 that is in essence the Global Project Plan to stop and start reversing global warming by 2035 and one of the sections is more detailed analysis of DAOs and its modus operandi. Properly designed this type of companies can, and I think, will replace corporations. It will be by far the most efficient organisation. The decision making process will be one of the crucial elements of these organisations.
I have just started publishing the project motivation on Substack about three weeks ago. Have a look. I think that there is potential for collaboration in the future.
Great review Jeff! Hopefully the command and control type decision-making is now old news as we continue to empower our teams. Start with trust, explain the why but give them space on the how