On 06/Nov/2006, at 8:21 AM, sastry wrote:
If you go back to Kiran's 17K rant you find that one of his red
lines is a
work area that appears to create a hierarchy between a "boss" and
"others".
It appears that teh industry wants to pretend that there is no
hierarchy in
an environment in which such hierarchy clearly exists and the need
for that
pretence adds needless stress and creates unnecessary friction.
I may not have been clear, but I was trying to imply that:
a. If the boss is trying to imply superiority by physical appearance
than by actions, there's a problem.
b. If the boss occupies a space that inhibits his staff from
approaching him, there's a bigger problem. In a startup, the boss is
expected to be in the middle of his staff, continuously taking inputs
and giving feedback.
The boss is the nerve centre. If the nerve centre is boxed away in
the name of status or private space, your communication channels will
not work.
This doesn't apply as much to companies that have established stable
channels, but even there, attempting a setup where the boss is
remotely located (or half the world away, as I've seen) without a
local decision making authority is guaranteed to take the company
down. I've seen bosses attempt to manage remotely via a local stooge
who's not allowed to think independently. It always, inevitably,
*painfully* fails.
--
Kiran Jonnalagadda
http://jace.seacrow.com/
