AA183 - The People vs. The Ivory Tower: Challenging Centralized Corporate Structures

welcome to the Arguing Agile Podcast, where Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel and Product Manager Brian Orlando argue about product management, leadership, and business agility, so you don't have to. Welcome back to the podcast Feels like we were just here, as a product manager, I try to advocate , as much as I can for the product operating model. it's not Agile Transformation anymore. Remember, it's Marty Cagan wrote a book, transformed product operating model now. Okay, we need a team with all the skills that the team needs to deliver What is being asked for the value, right? We don't want to wait on people. There's a concept of throughput that's on top of this So I've come to believe over the period of career that the consolidation of skill and money into this ivory tower style apparatus inside of a business, like an area that is outside of any of the teams doing the work, like we've got to take. All of this particular HR is a good one. Finance is a good one. You see this in a lot of companies, but sometimes they'll take specialist roles DBA, stuff like that. we got to consolidate all this into an ivory tower. And then we'll stand on the castle walls and you come and beg for the quote resources and we'll throw the lettuce down at you I want to make the case for the people versus the ivory tower. And I want to talk about why, why this consolidation of skill. Like how you see it, how it manifests, and then the people that are going to represent and say, No, this is a good thing. Like, what points are they going to use to defend it? And then what points are the, basically the rest of us that are trying to do a good job and run a good business and don't play games what we're gonna, what we're gonna say. So there's two sides. It's the people, In the ivory tower, the people versus the I Ivory tower. That right. Okay. Well let the hearing begin. Cha-Chung! Oh, okay., this is a great format and I'm excited by this. Let's start with my favorite one that I think is the easiest to critique. And it is economies of scale. They will say, Hey, if we consolidate across departments, we can save on labor. We can save on bulk purchases. We can save on vendor, vendor relationships. Another good one is like, I will choose your ALM for you. And then you will use the ALM I choose and no other ALM to do your work. And then we'll save all money as a company because I chose an ALM. the economy is a scale is one of those things that's been really bastardized over the years, right? Under the guise of saving money at the expense of something. They just stop at saving money. Ultimately, what this comes about as is you're saving money. It is a short term thing, right? So the person making the decision maybe is rewarded based on that. And it was kind of touched on that on a different broadcast. If that's what you're being measured on, that's what you'll do. So buy a cheaper tool. We're saving money consolidate team members into a specialist team. We need fewer of them because they're not. Why should why should we have those on the teams? We can just round robin those around as we see fit under the fallacy of utilization optimization. It's like a conceptual. idea. It's not anything that has to be proven. One of the tenants of agility is the team develops its own processes. But that's a core tenant right there. For business agility, it certainly is a core tenant. Like we're either going to be moving towards more business agility or you're going to be removing our business agility. You can wear any color you want home as long as it's red like that was I mean, wait a minute. not even shades of red are allowed in some companies. So I agree with you there. unfortunately, people that are making these decisions. of consolidation. just don't know any better, right? They're rewarded based on the results of those actions, so that's what they're gonna gravitate to. Sadly, the teams are not consulted in this. The teams are just handed down these decisions. and they have to perform using a tool that perhaps doesn't suit them, using a structure that's definitely not going to suit them. But yeah, so tools, I can kind of like, everybody can gripe and kind of just get over it. It's not a perfect tool, but. but org design, I mean, when they say that, okay, well, you're not going to have all of the architects through the whole business are now going to be controlled by the ivory tower. And we're going to have everything. So whenever you want to make changes to certain core systems or really probably any system at all, you have to get signed off from one of our architects. So now they're putting delays in. I've just like economies of scale, it sounds good financially on paper when everything's a spreadsheet, but it does, it completely fails in the real world. Absolutely. So one of the things that makes it easier for this kind of thing to kind of. You know, take hold gravitate is the ease at which you can massage numbers like to your point, you know in a spreadsheet You could easily illustrate savings cost savings is where that typically comes down as But there isn't a corresponding column. What are you giving up? Right. That's never on the spreadsheet. And the representation on that spreadsheet for that column would come from people that are impacted because these people making decisions, they're not impacted. Except they get their bonus if they get the savings done. Even a simple thing like the tools, right, that you're saying. Decisions are made based on cost. Mm hmm. And being able to negotiate a cheaper contract with a vendor. As opposed to, hey team. Go figure out what tool you need and then we'll go see if we can strike up a good deal, right? Yeah, well, that would require, I mean, look, what you just pointed out is a great example because contracts, purchasing, things like that, like a large organizations that need contracts and purchasing as a separate business unit. Because they're trying to control everything. Funny thing is like the I can't remember the name of the book. About Netflix's culture, early culture. And they had, they didn't have any purchase rules or anything. Anybody could buy anything at Netflix. You know, now if you go and spend 60, 000 on the corporate card for some luxury vacation, whatever, you're probably going to get fired. But for the most part, that kind of a model gives the team the autonomy to get the optimum solution in place as opposed to one that's purely dictated on dollars well, speaking of dictating things Along the lines of this is standardization standardization for standardization's sake right again along with economies of scale I figured this is another one that's slung out there with some bold claims and Without ever seeing numbers to back up these claims. I'll give you an example scrum masters, for example, all of this, we're going to take all the scrum masters away from the teams with the team that the capital one actually did the opposite of this. They, they took all the scrum masters away from the central. centralized body and said the teams are going to own them. They do, they went there. They, now they got beat up in the news because that little nuance of the decision wasn't right. this is the opposite of that standardization. So we have to take all the scrum masters from the teams and then we have to, Put them in some sort of a business agility office or something like that, where they're loaned to teams and it sounds good on paper it even sounds good to me, actually. Hey, we'll loan you an agile coach for three months kind of whip your team into shape, help you along help identify some things in the organization. This person isn't beholden to anybody in your business unit or your reporting structures or whatever. So they're a little more free. to recommend things. It sounds good in theory. And then you don't measure the effectiveness of that. You'd have no way to measure it. So I've always seen that. I can even make a case where it sounds good, but in actuality, I've never seen it be applied and then measured and then shown to the employees like, this is what you guys got. Don't you think it's great? I have seen it. It is very rare. So that comes down using your example of scrum masters, coaches, etc. It comes down to doing an assessment before they come in, and then doing an assessment periodically if it's a very long initiative or just doing it at the end and say, is there a marked improvement, right? But I've seen this standardization approach for other things QA or DevOps or even product people where they're told, well, you're a product owner, right? You can, you can serve three teams. You can serve four teams and each team's focus is different. Disparate products lines or product at least products, right? Yeah, it's too big of an ask but those that make the decision They can justify it because now you only have to hire one instead of four So it's just again purely a unit measure cost savings that angle that they're playing with. They're not looking at the other side of the equation as I call it right which is What are you giving up by doing that? You have poor quality information because one person cannot be in front of four different groups of customers often enough. Work with four different teams. All of that. So standardization looks good because we've done this this way. Like PMO is a classic example of that. The standard PMO, they would document everything a project manager needs to do. Right? While at the same time telling you the definition of a project is it's a unique endeavor. Well, if it's unique, how can you standardize it? How can you standardize your approach to it? But that's what they do. I remember joining a PMO many years ago. On my first day, I was handed a binder. The physical binder. It had everything I needed in there. Nicely tabbed. This is what you do. So if you didn't follow that, then guess what? you're not conforming and therefore, in their eyes, you're not performing the role so you find yourself closer to the door, the exit. It's sad because people have ideas and they're not entertained. It's just whatever's captured in the standard, this is our internal standard. I think when teams lose the ability to figure out the best way of working for them and the business that they're involved in they will put that mental mode that discovers things, the explore, exploit loop they'll kind of put that on the back burner and they won't use that muscle and then that muscle will kind of deteriorate as they, well, we'll just, we'll let the ivory tower tell us what hammer to use. And then the ivory tower, everyone on boards, they get one hammer maybe it's a sledgehammer. It legitimately is a hammer in name, I guess, but I mean, if your job is to do tiny little finish nails, I mean a sledgehammer is not the right whoa, it's you know, no, but we bought a thousand of those sledgehammers and it was cheaper for hammer. This is our standard is what you're exactly I guess the other, the other argument against this would be like, well, Brian, that's ridiculous. I mean, if we take on a new thing of work and the people can approach the central Authority here and ask for an exception to the process and whatever, you know what I mean? Like that would be the that would be the pushback. That's true They could do that, but there's probably gonna be so much inertia, right? and their Suggestions ideas will probably be just squashed. I imagine. the flip side of it is Well, if we let the teams do what they want, we'll have anarchy right? Yeah, right and we can't have that this goes back to another podcast we did about illusion of control. We gotta be in control We gotta know what everybody's doing. And we're going to be able to pick somebody up here and put them over here because at the end of the day, everybody is a Lego piece, right? So, unfortunately, this whole idea of economies of scale is easy to illustrate on paper. So to speak, in a spreadsheet. But in reality, it is actually costing the company. I don't want to spend any time talking about scaling because like now that I'm, Like firmly on the business side. I see that scaling is just like a organizational design failure. You failed to draw borders around. It's, it's one or more teams, basically there's a limit, right? Who are, who are operating a business. And have some metrics and whatever and that those teams can coordinate amongst themselves to make those customers happy Like yeah, if you keep drawing bigger and bigger circles, you'll add more and more customers But I feel you should be breaking those customer pools down You should be working to break down your pools of customers and then let your teams follow, you know along with that again That's super complicated. Maybe we'll leave that for another podcast, There's something that you dipped into that is interesting and that's the concept of flexibility let's say we have, we're engaged in like seven different lines of business and every one of those lines of business has a product manager. Okay, we're going to take all the product managers out of the reporting structures of their individual businesses and the ivory tower is now going to own all the product. So we'll have a CPO. Gary, the sales guy, right? He plays golf with the CEO. He's a smart guy. And then he'll own all of the product managers and then they'll be loaned back to their business units. And then when we need them to do corporate things, to spin up new initiatives and we'll take them back. And I mean, that will be sold under the guise of being more agile, we can be more flexible because we got these quote resources maybe they, do they need to do a refinement every. week with their teams. Maybe we can cut that to every other week and you know, the team can do some of the work and they can just ask the person when they need help or whatever and they can go do this other thing in part time. This is legitimately, this is how I've seen things like this pitched. Yeah, distorted view of the benefits of doing it that way. I agree with you. First of all, the difficulty is Not having data to defend the situation that is being thrust upon you, honestly. Not having data. They have the data, they have the spreadsheets, because it's easy to measure cost. It's harder to measure benefits. It's harder, to measure the opportunity costs quite difficult, right? Like what, what are we giving up by not doing? Well, that's, I mean, in the product management example, you have no idea what you're getting. You don't know what those product managers would've discovered, right. Had you not put this additional stream of work. you can apply that to anybody else. I mean, you, the product, I only, it's easy for me to apply to product management because I am a product manager. I'm sure you could do it with development. I mean, what refactoring could you be doing or what investigation of new technologies could you be doing? Like there are things you could be doing, but for some reason, the ivory tower, when they make this pitch, they paint it as well, Brian's only dedicated to Brian and Ohm's company a, and he spends all his time over there. Surely that can't take all of his time. He's got to maybe we can't have him sitting around he only was working 42. 5 hours a week. We, well, that's, that's another, at least 20 hours, at least 20 more hours. We can be squeezing on a Brian. Yeah, that's the kind of pitch that would be made for this category. So it's disingenuous. I'm trying to think of a way to defend this point for the Ivory Tower where it would be genuine. I would just, but again, it's just like, in the Ivory Tower, you're so far from the work, you have no idea what opportunities are missed by removing that person. I think my experience and looking at, looking to your left and right your competitors or other, or even other companies that are suffering. You might be able to see that, but you can't measure it. the other side effect of this kind of centralized approach, right? Is it tends to give rise to specialties, right? So instead of having the core, Skills that are needed on the team level. You now have people that are in this pocket and they're specialists, right? So then what happens? Well, you need a specialist on your team. So you have to make a requisition to that department. And if someone's available, you get that person. If they're not available, you have to wait or you get somebody else. You know, at the same time, what happens is these specialists say, well, we're special, now we have special skills, right? We want more money. Right? So everything's costing more. Now. I've seen this with testing. I've seen this with dba. I've seen this with architects. I've seen, I've seen this with DevOps. Scrum Masters. I've seen this with Agile Coaches slash Scrum Masters. I've seen this with product people, and the first groups that this happens to, this kind of like, We're going to take them away and we're going to put them in this pool. Is all the finance people, HR recruiting like that wing of the company they take those people away. I've never seen those people stay in a distributed. Yeah where like your, your recruiter is this particular person. They know your teams, they know your line of business. They know your customers. They work in the ivory tower and they don't report to you. So you, you get a, this is where like If you ever have been applying for jobs and you get like Hey we thanks for applying. We looked at your resume and we, we like you or whatever. And you look at, you're watching like, holy cow. It's been like six weeks since I put that. Application in, this is one of the reasons why like a recruiter who's dedicated to the teams who are hurting and need positions like filled, they would never be able to sit on like I asked somebody on my team, like I say, Hey, this is my top priority. I need to get it done. Who can accomplish that? Well, my developers. Can't go and screen resumes and write a job description and release it out on all the platforms and whatever, right? So I need the recruiter from my company to do it. Well, if they worked for me filling the, the position on my team, I would hand them something just like on the board with the rest of the team. I'd write hey, we need to fill this position. That's their task. Pick it up. And then every day Hey, this is where we're at. This is the but boy! To, to, to not be accountable to the team. Wow. That's a, that's a whole new world. Where can I sign up for that? Exactly. Well that organization is circling the drain. I just don't know. I mean, like you say it, but it's, it's so regular. My problem with all of the ivory tower's points in these categories that we've kind of gone over is they don't make a case with like, let me measure the condition now. Let me suggest a change. Let me make the change. Let me measure the condition after the change. And then let's discuss. What you're getting, let's discuss the quality of service. Like anybody who's in this, if I take a, like in team topologies, X as a service is a valid mode of operations for teams Method of working between teams. I can't remember what it's called in the book. I'm sorry. I'm failing. Sorry, Manuel Pais any other guy. I forgot. Skelton. Um, this is why I need to get my Twitter back up and working so I can zing those guys and be like another reference to teen topologies in this week's podcast. I'll give you an example of this this this whole kind of madness a company I work for we used to book our own travel. We were consultants traveling out to customer sites all the time So we'd book our own travel somebody wised up and said these people have been spending too long Researching the flight flights and hotels and rental cars So what we're gonna do is we're gonna hire one person and they're our internal travel agent. So you just talk to brandy You Dude, it sounds great in theory, in theory it sounds great. It was great because we didn't have to take the pain to go research. It was wonderful. Hang on, hang on, hang on. Before you tell me the rest of the story, before you tell me the story now. Let me pitch it for you. Let me pitch it. Go, go, go. Let me be the ivory tower, okay? Yeah, yeah. Alright. In the ivory tower. Okay, I, Brian the executive at Brian and Ohm's totally not travel company. I'm gonna say listen We're gonna get somebody who comes from a travel agency. It's gonna be a sweet gig for them. They're gonna be our internal travel agent. They'll handle the project managers. They'll handle executives They'll handle sales basically, but I would start with one department Let me just start with the project managers. Maybe there's only like 10, 12 of them. I don't know how many people that were in your circumstance, but there's like a near a dozen or more than that. It's you're not far off. Okay. But it can't be too many because then that person get overwhelmed. Cause a lot of, but let's say like 50 percent of the people are on the road at a time. That's not that bad at seven people constantly traveling. So as a travel agent you want the travel to be as pleasant and efficient as possible for the person and the customer and the company. Where I think it would be a great benefit to the company is when you want to book a trip, that person comes and talks to you, figures out how you like to move around, figures out if you like to fly in the morning, the day before, day after, figures out if you want to take some vacation in between, because they'll build that into the ticket, and they kind of talk about your agenda, they look up maps, figure out where you're going and stuff like that, because maybe you don't want to fly in and then drive all the way across town They're figuring out all those little details coming up with a map, actually listen to what you're saying and then can get you deals based on their expertise that you could not get yourself. so they might get a deal on the airline ticket where you, you don't have that kind of access. I work with contract people that could do this. Back in the day when you would do like a laptop purchasing and stuff like that, but the corporate. Contracts. Acquisition. Well, I remember it. Well, she got great deals on laptops and I was like, I don't know where you're getting it And they were high they were high end machines top of the of the line machines But she got great deals on these if you went through her you but the business didn't make you go through her But the people I knew was like just go go through the purchasing person She knows the right people to talk to anyway So this is that they know the right people to talk to if you're operating in certain cities Maybe you can get a travel agent that already has contacts in those cities Maybe you hire the right person for where you do business you And it could be a really great, I mean, a quality of life benefit for the travelers in your company. That is exactly how the marketing brochure was produced. Okay. The reality now. Okay. Hit me with the reality. The reality was, this actually happened this way, right? So initially they said, what are some of your biggest frustrations, people? Your travel people. Well, we call and we have to just. Stay on the line till we get a human to answer us, right? All that goes away because guess what? We hired a human now. All right, so you call that person. And wait because she's talking to somebody else. So the wait didn't really disappear at all. It was still there. She didn't come to you. You went to her and you said, I'm traveling. I need to travel these dates from this city to this city. She's like, I got you, right? I'll put you in a hotel nearby. Okay, hangs up the phone. Next thing you know, electronic tickets are delivered into your mailbox. And then you realize, oh. You've got a, you've got a two hopper, you've got 14 hours in Minneapolis. That's how it, but it was cheap to do that specific booking, which is why she did it. Because her mandate was to get the cheapest possible travel. But cheapest in what way? Turn a six hour flight into a 23 hour flight. So the company's still paying. they paid us for travel. Right? So the company's still paying. they put us in a hotel That's the other side of town. But coming back to this model of centralizing travel, in that case, it didn't last long because everybody protested, right? And they said, this isn't working, we're gonna go direct, anyway. You want me to travel? I'm gonna book my own flight because I know I don't want to get out the house at 4am. Yeah, I don't care if you're saving money. I was gonna say that where this stuff would break down is the minute that sales is inconvenience like I understand like the project managers, they probably could get away with a travel agent is like booking the cheapest stuff. And then when they say, okay, we got this internal travel person, now sales has gotta use them, and then sales starts using them, then yeah. Then things will be like, wait, oh yeah, this is, that's right. This won't work for me anymore. so this is, that was the case for the ivory tower. I feel we kind of talked about, I mean, we didn't really represent it very well because honestly, it's not really very metric based. so the case against the ivory tower. the defense rests. time to call to the stand, the people. Alignment with business goals. Let's start with alignment with business goals, because in the ivory tower, the people in the ivory tower are playing a game. Now you, you opened up this podcast talking about incentives. Yeah. The ivory tower's incentives are divorced from reality a lot of times. The incentives in the ivory tower is to look good in the ivory tower. And to stay living in the ivory tower. Because Lord forbid you get cast out. Yeah, because you're judged by your peers, right? That are also in the same ivory tower. You've never lived a day in those people's shoes that you're impacting and that's a big problem. I'll quantify that. I know what you're thinking. The ivory tower gets funded by all of the businesses that it supports, quote, supports, and all of the business. Let's, let's say for example, that you, you're a, a holding company, like the Ivory Tower is a holding company, right? Mm-Hmm. and the business, the the independent businesses. Are separate, right? So the, the independent businesses usually have general managers, somebody who's like a head of that business, right? And the heads of those businesses, they have a lot of power. I mean, they, you could call the middle managers I think they would be managing directors or something like that, but they're like a tiny step above middle managers. Okay. But usually the GMs, they have the ear of the CEO of the holding company above them. Or whatever, P. E. or V. C., whatever our situation is. And you can only get away with being a bumbling, incompetent ivory tower group. Until one of the GMs says I'm not going to pay into your group. I'm not going to pay to use your travel consultant anymore. I'm going to part time get my own, or I'm going to use this service and I'm going to pay for that. I'm going to pay for it out of my margins because I'm not, I'm not paying into it. So I'm not giving you, I'm going to figure out whatever I give you overhead. And I'm going to deduct from the overhead the cost of the travel people. Same thing. This is a, this is a slightly more risque, right? I'm not using your development teams. I'm going to go get my own offshore development shop. And I'm going to stop paying into your it service, project management, PMO. Basically, I'm gonna stop paying your PMO, all this money that we deliver to you to deliver software and services. I'm taking that and I'm taking that to an offshore company over here. And it's actually going to cost me less and I get better service. And I've been vetting these contracts with my R and D money or whatever so the minute one person rebels. And puts their foot down and the people running this, the, the departments in the ivory tower can't control them because the GM really has all, I mean, the people closest to the work really have more control over the work. It's just, they just need that like torches and pitchfork moment to be like, I'm not paying for this service. It's not good anymore. And then the CEO of the holding company They're they're not like the king of France in this affair. they're more like America, like sitting out and be like, well, we'll find out who comes out on top. It's a bad situation that can escalate quickly, you know? And then someone in the ivory tower finds themselves cast out. It's not pretty because nobody wins. People are upset at the GM for rebelling. People are upset at the holding company for not acting sooner. People are upset at the employees because everything always rolls downhill I have seen this happen at least once. Anyway, I don't want to harp on that. The point is, aligning with business goals, if the people in the ivory tower fail to align with my business goals and fail to deliver on my business goals, I, the person running the organization, the sub organization I guess, I gotta tread water. I can't just drown because I'm waiting on you to make a decision or whatever. So I'm gonna find my own way, and there will be contention. So rather than doing that, I'd rather just avoid that and just keep all the people aligned with my business and my business goals or my product. just keep them all swimming in the stream together and not play this game of, well, a little bit here and we have to ask for people when we need whatever I don't want to play that game. I don't want to play games is what I'm saying. Well, you're in corporate America, you have to play games. I don't think so. I don't think that's true at all. I think, I think the, the, the more you divide. The more you divide the people that make the decisions away from the people doing the work, the terrible, the more terrible your business is run. Absolutely. So true. You just don't see it that way at the time. Maybe it depends on, depends on whose point of view you're looking at it from. You don't see it that way because if you're in the ivory tower, basically everybody else down because they're in the tower, everybody else down there are rebellious. So then what do you do to control and if you can't control, replace them, right? that's problematic again. Cause you're not, you're replacing them. Not with people that align with your business goals. You're replacing 'em with people that will do what you say, right? Yeah. That, that's a very ivory tower decision. But you can't really muck around in businesses when you're in the ivory tower because you'll, you'll quickly lose your hold. the amount of interference that you can do from the ivory tower is limited. Yeah. that's an interesting topic to talk about. it's not this podcast, but that's management meddling. That's a Deming thing. We'll go into it on the Deming podcast. we have one coming up. Yeah, so stub out three hours out of your day It'll be a marathon for sure management meddling. Yeah, so a process that's in statistical control And then management coming in and not understanding that the process is in statistical control because they haven't measured anything They're just making assumptions. Yeah, so they're messing around with a process that's in statistical control And they think that it's not in control. They think that special circumstances are affecting the process. So they meddle, they muck around in the process. Right, which in turn makes it go out of control. That's right. The positive feedback loop. I don't think we need to measure, run studies, do whatever, to agree that If the decision making process lives closest to the people doing the work, you get faster decision making. And the people that are closest to the work can make more complex decisions faster. And more effective decisions as well, right? Accountability is a dirty word when you're in the ivory tower. Accountability means, accountability is about blame in the ivory tower. Hey, I'm gonna hold you accountable. Like accountability when I'm a product manager running a product with teams that, that we all work together to build the best product, deliver the best service to the customer. Accountability is about me taking ownership. Of the customer success, you know what I mean? it's a different relationship with accountability depending on where you're parked it's different than responsibility, right which is often thrust upon you nobody can make you accountable. They can say this is what your brief is, right? But you have to make yourself accountable for something whereas responsibility is This is your responsibility, go do it. Well, there's no, so if the accountability is in the business unit, in the line of service, basically, in this stream, value stream, I don't know, there's lots of terms. If the accountability is with the team doing the work, discovering the work, producing the work. there's not an opportunity for blame shifting if you have to go back up to the ivory tower to ask for workers and then they temporarily join the business unit and then come back, or maybe you have to wait on them maybe they weren't successful, they joined the company to deliver whatever, and then, They went back to the ivory tower, but then the thing wasn't successful. Now the ivory tower is going to be defending their people. There's a lot of blame, some games that are happening. And again, like none of this helps me as a product manager. I don't need to play a game with blame. I just need people dedicated to doing the work. As from a product manager's perspective, it's just adding noise. That's all it is you know, cause the customer doesn't care whose fault it was. Within the organization. They just know they didn't get value and they wanted it. Yeah the other thing we did an episode on Kanban and one of the things in combine is Analyzing your policies through your streams of work or through I'm sorry through your lanes on your board. Yeah Columns, that's what they're called through your columns on your board so that You can identify you do that. You optimize your columns and you optimize your policies from column to column. And you do that so that you can reduce bottlenecks. You can understand where your bottlenecks are, understand the flow to see where your flow is impeded and then work on reducing those bottlenecks. I feel with the ivory tower in the cycle of all that, that I just described oh, we, now we got to wait for a person and the person joins, it might not be the right person and they might not, now they got to understand our business context. They don't know anything about our customers, all that kind of stuff you're just introducing another bottleneck that, why? We don't need that. In the lean kind of concept where Kanban originated, you're introducing delays. Yeah. And also you don't have the right people looking at that board and because they're not accountable, you've got this distance, right? So one of the things that the policies also do is they add, they ensure quality. Something cannot be moved out of a column into another until you know, that rigorous you know, the other thing we talked about this on a previous podcast, but I can't remember which podcast it was. It's been a long time since we said when people temporarily join your team and then hop off, right? Because they're going back to the holding company or going back to the ivory tower. Whatever learnings. That you had to come to whatever discoveries you had to come to. They're taking some of that with them away from your team. And when you add like QA, for example, if we don't have a QA team, a testers assigned to our team for a period of you know, a period of weeks or whatever, and they, they test the stuff for us and then they go back to the pool of QA and the next time we put out a big release let's say we're like Airbnb, for example, they're constantly Releasing updates to their software. They just hold them all because they want a big marketing pop. They want a big marketing push when they push out their versions. So they only push out the versions, I think twice a year or something like that. It doesn't mean they're not testing, right? It doesn't mean they're not releasing. They're releasing. It's just, they don't send it to production to the app stores and all that kind of stuff. But let's pretend, for example, we're constantly testing, but we only release once every so often. Well, in that release, we're doing the big integration tests, and we're doing the full end to end type of test of our application. Maybe they do quarterly releases? Let's pretend it's quarterly releases. So let's pretend I was on a hike and then I decided that I want to do quarterly releases. So every quarter we're requesting from the testing ivory tower business segment, Hey, we need a tester to run through the quarterly release test plan, full in integration end to end, whatever. And then we're getting, maybe we get the same person quarter to quarter, but maybe we get a different person. Is the quality of the tests the same? I mean, theoretically, if all the test cases are being exercised in the way they're being written, theoretically, it shouldn't matter who the person is, but that's not really true. No, it's not true because other than just tests are binary, right? They either pass or fail. They don't kind of sort of pass so that, from that perspective, you could say, well, you could get any. Monkey to press a button? No. The the point is, if you're doing this, you, that is, you just hit, that is their viewpoint. That is their viewpoint. That's the ivory tower's viewpoint. That's the Yes, yes. The benefit of someone with a a good test skill set. They can think like the customer, they understand how the customers use the software. They understand metrics. they've researched these things. They're not just running test scripts and reporting on the F they're giving suggestions about like, Hey most customers in this segment like the way you've lined the buttons up, someone that's in this specific segment, I've got to go through all this workflow, whereas normal customers don't so maybe if we're thinking about this specific customer, this is not the best. They can think beyond the test. Right to help product make better decisions or not. I mean, they're just raising a conversation that needs to happen. You know, that's invaluable in my opinion. But you know, the other thing is knowledge, like just simply process knowledge, right? Whenever we run. These tests every quarter in this example, we find that that's a fine when you run them on a staging thing. But then when you put this thing in production, it balks. Why is that? And they figure out that right? and then they're gone. somebody else comes in and they have to rediscover all that and stumble over everything that was already discovered again from a testing perspective. Yeah. So yeah, it's, it's just not a good model. You ever work with like a support, like development support team that they basically catch bugs in production and fix bugs. It's not a great process, , yeah, it's like a bug fix team. Team. Like a, like A-A-K-T-L-O team or like a hypercare, you know what mean? Like a big project management. They do hypercare period BAU team, and usually the, all these different phrases, the hyper, the hypercare developers are like. The B squad, like they're not bored. They're not the 18 that way. They're not, they're not a players. Let's put it that way. And you know, you're hoping you get your favorite hyper care developer when you report a bug, you're hoping they take your bug and you're like, Oh, I got this guy. Oh man. And you know, that kind of stuff, like there's no room for that. You know, there's no room for that. If I had somebody embedded on my team. Who when we didn't even talk about sometimes the ivory tower hires the people they want to hire Oh sure, you don't even get often you don't even get a choice like oh, what kind of testers are you hiring? So when we get a tester, they don't you know, they're completely insufficient For what we really need to that's a big, there's a lot of big problems here that are not on my list. It would, this podcast would be two hours if I went down all the rabbit holes that I wanted to go down. We don't have time for it. Conway's law. Conway's law, the structure of a system tends to mirror the structure of the organizations that create them. So if the ivory tower is this command and control apparatus, like I I've seen in the past that companies that have ivory towers, they tend to have either a chaotic infrastructure, That's always falling over or they have a mega monolith. It's like And I know neither of those are desirable Right. So yeah, absolutely. You're right. Absolutely. So conway nailed it. His law goes back a while and even today it is absolutely true organizations form themselves eventually to reflect the mindset and the structure right and so the other side of it is then what's the alternative? Right? To that. You either have chaos or you have monolith that isn't nimble. What's the alternative? Storm the Bastille. That's what the alternative is. Storm the Bastille, you don't need that. I mean, I would think that if you have an ivory tower, all of your sub organizations, all of your sub organizations and groups are going to start looking like the ivory tower. That's exactly right. And then that organizational, that bad organizational design will start trickling down. And having more influence until your business, your smaller businesses or whatever, they start becoming ineffective. It's like weeds. They grow. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So what's the alternative? A distributed model? Just don't do any of this. I would keep in the Take a vitamin. Don't do any of this. I would keep in the overhead, I would keep only the absolute necessary things that need to be in the overhead, in the overhead. Honestly, I'd put nothing in the ivory tower if it were up to me, but it's not up to me. I was just gonna say, look, other than, so we talked about how, Ideal cases, teams, they don't have HR. They don't have any of these functions that they need on the team. Right. So if you were to design a structure, an ideal structure what would you keep outside the team is what I'm trying to say. this is a difficult question because it's very contextual, you almost need, let's pretend Brian and Ohm's holding company, right? We, someone gave us a ton of money cause they were a very bored billionaire. Any of you bored billionaires that are out there, feel free, I'm going to lay out a business plan for you right now. So Brian and Ohm get a couple billion dollars just sitting around. So what I would do is you would need. At the top of the business, you would need a visionary and an integrator. You, so straight out of the traction book, every startup has a, a visionary and an integrator. You have an operations person and you have an ideas person, right? You got your Steve Jobs and your Wozniak, like that, that's what you have. Okay. If you're going to be acquiring companies and spinning them off to do their own thing I assume there's a reason why you bring all these companies together under one house The only reason that you would bring companies together is because they're very very very alike. I would think you know, so If they're alike and they're operating well Maybe you can look at the worst operating parts of the company and maybe take that consolidation. Yeah, that makes sense. If you're acquiring companies, let's say in the same vertical, right? So you buy a competitor, so you don't need to off. That's a standard case. Yeah, yeah. I think there are specific functions that you might want to keep outside the team. For example, legal, there may not even be a need to have legal on every team. Most companies, I'm like most startups, like tiny startups, they get their legal. They get their HR, meaning actual HR, not recruitment, not HR. They usually use staffing firms for recruitment. Staffing firms, headhunters, that kind of stuff for recruitment. So a lot of those functions really are outside of the business. I'm not against taking those things into the ivory tower. Any function I take into the ivory tower, I want metrics gives you the performance of those ivory tower derived services. This is the problem. any service that you claim is going to be increasing the quality of life by taking this away from the companies and doing it as a service in the ivory tower, then you need to declare a service manager, like just like they can play the role, be part time, right? Yeah, we're very, it's a very popular thing to have someone play the role, right? Yes. But you need some kind of service manager to be part time. Looking at metrics of how happy people are with that service, what the times of delay are basically I constantly want to know if we just broke up this central service and gave it back to the business units, would it be more costly? To the business unit or cheaper and whether they be happier or not with it inside of their function. I constantly want to just watch those two things. So I guess what I'm saying is it's very contextual. I don't really have a good answer. My good answer is I would want to watch those two measures and constantly be adjusting and then make decisions quickly. If I find out that the majority of businesses the majority of subsidiaries when we pull them their teams that hire people hate using our corporate centralized recruiting because it's and here's all the reasons they put on the survey or whatever. It's slow. It's this, it's whatever, they don't know my business. So I constantly would want to be looking at that function is like a service management function. And I feel this, the function of service management is even less well understood than agile coaching and scrum masters and stuff. Well, we know this. We did a podcast. Absolutely. I'm starting to understand its importance. I really am. I'd like to have Brian back on. I can get him back because I'm really coming into understanding of, you just need someone, you Just saying someone with a who can measure this is the quality of service of this Line of service that we're delivering and they need to raise a flag when the flag needs to be raised And I think that's someone's full time potentially could be someone's full time job depending on how big we are, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean when we're smaller And let's say Brian and Om's holding company only owns like two subsidiary businesses. Well then maybe we can do the job of service management. Right, right. You know. Yeah, and that's, that's true, that's true. You know, one of the other functions that I see people Because what else are we doing? Buying yachts? What else are we doing? Yeah, buying and selling yachts. That's a Separate company. So one of the other functions I've seen being outsourced like this, just from purely from a cost perspective is accounting type functions like doing payroll, for example, right? Yeah. There are companies that do that for pennies on the dollar. If you were to get that in house, it would cost you more. Absolutely. So then that makes sense. Right? The teams don't need that on the team. And that makes sense. So we're not saying we're eliminating the ivory tower. We're just simply saying it's more like a small efficiency apartment and not a huge multi layered castle. I don't know. Not me. I'm for eliminating it. Like siege the Bastille!. Burn it down. There we go. The people rest. The people rest. I think yeah. I hope you enjoyed this podcast, Om. I enjoyed this podcast throwing stones at the ivory tower. I don't know if we made a difference in the world here. Well the jury's still out. That's right. The jury is in deliberations. We'll let you know when they make their, it might be a couple weeks. Yeah, we'll get back to you. All right, well thank you again for staying with us this long. Let us know other topics that you're interested in. That's right. Like and subscribe. And thank you for staying with us.