Endless Knots

Did wholesale flattening contribute to BP Gulf disaster?

This post is purely speculative as I have no inside knowledge of what's gone on at BP. However, I can't get this out of my mind. Here's the background, from an unpublished piece that Jeff Stamps and I have written.

When Tony Hayward took over at BP in 2007, he called for a widely reported massive reorganization (one of many links to his announcement). He said his company was determined “to improve performance by simplifying how the company is structured and run.” While emphasizing that BP had the right strategy and proper resources to execute against it, he described BP’s problem this way: “…we are not consistent and our organization has grown too complex.”

To remedy the situation, BP planned to adopt more standardized procedures and reduce the number of management layers from eleven to seven.” What major benefit did Hayward expect to gain from redesigning the organization? “… [T]he revenue boost expected from greatly improved operational efficiency over the longer term.”

No one would argue that simplification is indeed more efficient, but here’s the rub: It’s not necessarily more effective.

Reorganization can bring real benefits: Better organizational design offers enormous competitive advantage. Organization, after all, leverages all other advantages. But did BP engage this challenge with the right frame of mind? Certainly, the study Hayward commissioned that identified “7,500 ‘operational interfaces’–that is, potential management blockages” was on the right track. Gaining organizational benefits of the type BP’s chief desires will not be easy for his or for any other enterprise. Nor is it easy to remove four levels in an organization of roughly 100,000 people. Based on our research, it might even be suicidal.

Dogmatic global mandates, like one that says an organization must have no more than seven levels or that all managers should have the identical number of people reporting to them, ignore other realities of business life. The number of levels your organization needs, or the optimal reporting span of your leaders, our research shows, is likely a function of what those units are actually doing.

So...stepping out of that piece, I have to ask this question: was the flattening that Hayward undertook in part responsible for safety oversight with the contractor (Transocean) running the Deepwater Horizon rig? Was the safety organization at BP flattened to the point that key connectors were eliminated, perhaps those farther down in the organization with day-to-day oversight?

Do you think this is possible?

The Persuasion 75

Yet after I hung up, I thought and thought and thought and, by the time Tonin came back that night, something had clicked. Then when we talked about it together, something clicked for both of us.

“World Game. Think about it,” Tonin said. “That it’s a game makes people want to play. It’s straightaway brilliant.”

In my case, I was more intrigued with Fuller’s story—an architect without credentials who wrote poetry and built bubbles of love so big we could see them from the sky.

We’d been searching for several years now for something that made sense, at least had some of the compulsion of the anti-war movement. We weren’t certain that we wanted to pick up overnight and speed back to New York but we were sufficiently infected with Teddy’s enthusiasm to want to learn more.

Already a Fuller fan, Tonin was more than happy to update his knowledge. And so the following week, we hopped into the fire engine and drove the fifty miles to the cavernous public library in Knoxville where we found a mountain of material about Buckminster Fuller. It appeared that his adherents were widely distributed.

We discovered that Fuller had written more than a dozen books; countless pictures had been taken of him and his zany inventions; for the past 15 years, he’d self-published bulletins of the World Design Science Institute, also his creation, and the Knoxville Public Library had copies of them all. Just the "chronofile" of his life was fifty pages long.

—“The Persuasion,” p. 75

Brings tears to an author's keyboard

Via alert, this post came up from a student, apparently, close to departure. First, "Books on the Shelf that I will not be reading before I leave school, that is," after which follows a long list.

After that: "And the books I have read that I will miss..."

First on the list? "Virtual Teams, Lipnack & Stamps (1997)."

No idea who you are, blogger, but thanks!

6 countries, 24 hours and a virtual team stat

I had occasion to chat with Colin Rainier earlier this week. (No, I'm not switching industries - if you follow the link, you'll see what I mean.) We'd had a bit of trouble scheduling the call as Colin was one of those whose travel plans were affected by that nasty plume of ash that was pouring out of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull (I love that word - should be in spelling bees) volcano.

Colin had to get to a meeting in Nice, or thereabouts, in fact a tiny village even more beautiful than Nice (Eze). To get there, he flew from his home in #1 Bermuda (below, the view from his office window, which he kindly sent) to #2 Newark to #3 Porto (Portugal) to #4 Geneva, where he picked up a car, swinging through #5 Italy and finally arriving in #6 Eze (France.) Right. Six countries, for a brief meeting, then turned around and came home, all within 24 hours.

His colleagues at the meeting had even greater adventures getting there - ferries, trains, cars, and such.

That the subject of our call was virtual working was not lost on Colin who went on to cite his experiences with same and this phenomenal stat: he figures that his "expense ratio is 40% of [his] competitors" due to his use of virtual teams, sourced for the need, then dispersed when the task is done. Well done, Colin, especially when you have the good fortune to be "assembling" those teams while looking out on this.

Virtual high school reunion?

My friend Bill writes, asking a question I'm also interested in as I can't make it to my important high school reunion this year. Anyone know?

Hi Jessica,
Have you ever heard of a H.S. class doing your virtual meeting kind of stuff in lieu of going to the expense of flying or driving from all over the place just to get to a disappointing town with few accommodations -- like Tenafly, NJ.?

Economist webcast on virtual teams

Remember the Economist Intelligence Unit's study where 1 in 3 virtual teams said they were poorly managed? Turns out Denis McCauley whose EIU's Global Technology Research also put together "Managing Virtual Teams," a webcast with three panelists - Jasmine Whitbread, CEO of Save the Children; Matt Rogers, founder of Aroxo.com, and Ghislaine Caulat, consultant at Ashridge Consulting (who observes that you can fill a room with books about virtual teams - sorry, I contributed to the glut). Impressive to hear how far along Save the Children is (they have "knowledge sharing teams," for instance, around child nutrition; their finance people around the world are in a community of practice) and how at ease with the idea Rogers is. If you're agitated about virtual teams, this webcast will calm you right down. Nicely done.

Dining in with Lake and Finn

I warned you that this one was coming. Will keep it brief with this preface. Their mother, Daughter #1, went to culinary school. I think that explains the wide array of items in their diet. It may even be more foods than you eat in a week. All home-made, of course.

In case you can't read it (iPhone camera again): avocado, banana, sweet potato, pear, brown rice cereal, baby oatmeal, peas, carrotws, apples, yogurt, butternut squash, chicken, beets, green beans, broccoli, tofu, Arctic char (!), ricotta, lentils, and brown rice.

And the happy eaters

Two hearts for the iPad writers

When grandsons Lake and Finn were born last September, my friend Donna warned me that something unexpected was about to happen. "You grow another heart," she said. In our case, I'm afraid I'm growing two. I've done my best to keep the boys mainly off the blog. I mean, who wants to read about someone else's grandchildren? But then something happens that I think you'll enjoy so please indulge me as I share two posts - this and the next.

What prompts this one was an interaction they had last night, which I wish I'd been able to video.

The boys are identical twins, an endlessly complex and fascinating relationship that is rare. If Wikipedia is right: barely .2% of the world population, only 10 million of nearly 7 billion people, is in a pair of identical twins. As you likely know, Identical twins happen when a fertilized egg splits into two embryos. So what was one becomes two - completely different from fraternal twins.

Watching the twins interact is, of course, endlessly fascinating. When they were newborns, they would be put down near each other and invariably they would find a way to drift together. Now they're getting big enough to really notice each other and act on it.

Last night was such a time. They'd had dinner (see next post), taken their baths, and were listening to a little bedtime music that their dad had chosen, in this case, "Paperback Writer." Naturally, we expect great things of them (and for them to follow precisely in their grandparents' footsteps) but probably they won't put out any paperbacks, thus the title of this post. Perhaps they will be iPad writers.

They've got fine taste in music, naturally. They like the Beatles. They like "The Wheels on the Bus." They like "Itsy-Bitsy Twinnies" (formerly "Itsy-bitsy Spider"). Thus they were groovin' to the tunes when the following happened. Lake on the left, reaching out for Finny, who'd rolled over to inspect what his brother was doing, leading to Lake defending himself, all of which ended with a squeal or two from Finn and a very triumphant Lake. Double click the pics to see the sequence.

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Ah, Brooklyn

Stunning day yesterday in the best borough. Step out the door and be entertained by the martial arts/music/dance practitioners of Capoeira, performing on the sidewalk on Flatbush. First two pics are the dancers/martial artists; third is their musical accompaniment.

 

Then truck on up the street to Grand Army Plaza where the Farmers Market is now in full swing. Here's just one stall with the most spectacular flowers and herbs.

And then there's this from a nearby street. If only I could upload the aroma of the first lilacs of the year.

The Persuasion 74

“We’re playing a game to redistribute the world’s resources so that everyone has enough.”

He took a breath and I saw the small door to gaining some context.

“I don’t get how it’s a game. Is there a board with players or what?”

Teddy laughed. The “board,” such as it was, comprised a huge floor map of the world the size of a basketball court. “It’s the Fuller Projection,” Teddy said, “not the stupid Mercator Projection, which really distorts the land mass relative to the size of the ocean.” I’d never thought whether those great big maps of the world with their bumpy mountains that hung on our elementary classroom walls were stupid, distorted or otherwise.

“OK.” Fuller had his own projection. “So what about the players?”

Teddy didn’t seem to hear my skepticism, going on with more detail than I could absorb: Players took on the roles of governments, corporations, NGOs, and religions; they assumed their proper places on the map, equipped with the resources they had. Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America had most of the people and most of the natural resources. “We’re playing World Game all the time,” Teddy said, “whether we know it or not.” He said that everyone had common responsibility for the whole thing and that when you played it, you got to see what was involved “in making the world work, all of it. It’s really intense.”

He was very intense, very emphatic, far more certain than Teddy had ever sounded before and I was absolutely certain that I couldn’t comprehend much of what Teddy was talking about.

—“The Persuasion,” p. 74