Good To Great - can you “get the right people on the bus” in a technology department?
I’ve recently been conducting a series of workshops for a company who are thinking of using the techniques from Jim Collins‘ book “Good to Great“. It worked out fairly well for the management team but when I presented to the team members, they had difficulties seeing how executive actions in large, American corporates could be made to “scale down” to the lowest level of a technical department.
The book talks about getting the right people “on the bus” before you know exactly where the bus is going. This might work at an executive level but how can it work inside a technology department? Just get any old DBA and hope they can administer whatever you choose sometime in the future? Nah, don’t think so.
Any thoughts?
April 29th, 2007 at 4:49 am
I’ve read the book and it does seem to apply only at executive level.
The problem I’d see in a technology department is that you typically already have a bunch of people (”team” perhaps) who for better or worse already know your systems and the gotchas. They may not be ideal but you’d lose a bunch of institutional memory if you got rid of them.
In the book, the leaders sometimes waited a long time to get the right people together. I guess you could do it if you were patient enough - but you’ve also got the problem that techies (especially good ones) don’t hang around for a long time so you’d also have to have a pretty good environment and rewards to keep them.
April 29th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Not any old DBA - but you don’t need big strategic thinkers who are going to lead the organisation - you just need some techies who do reliable accurate work.
Actually, now that I’m writing this - maybe it’s a different bus and so the idea could work but the kind of people you’re looking for is very different. Except that these guys don’t get to choose where the bus is going?
April 29th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
DBAs don’t know what busses are - at least, not the big ones with wheels.
January 12th, 2010 at 10:12 pm
Great comment, love the design of the site too.