1. Ramez Naam

2. A Book in Progress

3. I Want Your Stories, Examples, Feedback mez@morethanhuman.org twitter: @ramez

4. BoingBoing?

6. How to Sabotage the Enemy

7. Munitions

8. Factories

9. Communications

10. Organizations

11. Sounds a Lot Like…

12. Life in a Big Business

13. For Example

14. Sabotage Technique #1 Insist on doing everything through channels. Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.

15. Follow the Process

16. Sabotage Technique #3 When possible, refer all matters to committees, for further study and consideration. Attempt to make the committees as large as possible never less than five.

17. Committees

18. Virtual Teams

19. Shared Accountability

20. as Sabotage

21. Sabotage Technique #7 Advocate caution. Be reasonable and urge your fellow conferees to be reasonable and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

22. CYA

23. Sabotage Technique #8 Be worried about the propriety of any decision raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

24. Mind Your Business

25. Follow Orders from Above

26. Reminds Me of…

28. Why is this funny?

29. Stereotype

30. Committees, Process, Big Companies

31. Slow

32. Cumbersome

33. Dumb

34. Does it Have to Be that Way?

35. Our Heroes

41. A Conundrum

42. Is There Room?

43. In a Big Organization?

44. Lone Ranger

45. Maverick

46. Change Maker

47. Is it even a good idea?

48. What I think:

49. Yes and Yes

50. Sometimes

51. Today

52. Structure an Organization

53. Encourage Change and Innovation

54. Be an Effective Change Maker

55. From the Bottoms Up

56. Story

63. Evolution

64. of Ideas

65. Distributed Computing

66. Using Humans…

67. Wisdom of the Crowds

68. Inside an Organization

69. Descends from History

70. Twentieth Century

71. Distributed Systems

72. Beat Top-Down Systems

73. Economics

74. Markets outperformed Command Economies

75. Governance

76. Democracy created more happiness than Authoritarianism

77. The Wisdom of Crowds Beat Wisdom of the Party, King, or Committee

78. Smarter Than + + + + + +

79. Why Do Western Businesses Look Like Communist States from the 70s?

81. Three Problems with Top Down 1.Slow 2.Information Gets Distorted 3.Lost Brainpower How Do We Get Out of This?

82. Three Pillars 1.Distributed Autonomy & Bias for Action 2.Darwinian Evolution of Ideas 3.Sliding Scale of Self-Determination

83. 1. DISTRIBUTED AUTONOMY & BIAS FOR ACTION

84. Organization: A Network of Brains

85. Mainframe Model

86. Distributed Computing Model

87. Tight Information / Action Loop

88. Rapid Cycle Time

89. Logic Embedded at the Edge

90. Bias for Action

91. Three Ingredients for Local Autonomy 1.Goals are Clear to Everyone 2.People are Empowered 3.Clear, Simple Decision Making

92. CLEAR GOALS

93. If the People on the Edge

94. Know Where Youre Going

95. They Can Row in that Direction

96. On Their Own

97. If they Dont

98. Good Luck

99. Value of the Top

100. (CEOs, VPs, Managers, etc..)

101. Clearly Articulate a Direction

102. and

103. Reasons Behind It

104. SIMPLE LINES OF DECISION MAKING

105. Question

106. How Many People Can Say Yes?

107. How Many Can Say No?

108. Committees Bias Towards No

109. Mythical Man Month

110. Communications Overhead

111. Grows with the Square of the Number of People Involved

112. 2 People – 1 Connection 12

113. 3 People – 3 Connections 123

114. 4 People – 6 Connections 1234

115. 5 People – 10 Connections 12345

116. 10 People – 55 Connections 12345678910

117. N 2 – N 2 N = Number of Nodes or People Overhead =

118. Applies to Decisions

119. Difficulty of Decision Making

120. Is N 2 with Number of People

121. As Number of Stakeholders Increases

122. Odds Any One Person Can Say Yes Decrease

123. Number of People Who Can Say No Increases

124. Large Decision Bodies

125. (mostly ) Inherently Conservative

126. If You Want Nothing Done

127. Create a Committee

128. Or Spread Ownership

129. If You Want Things to Happen

130. Empower Individuals

131. or Self-Organizing Groups

132. of Like Minded Individuals

133. How do you Prevent Mistakes?

134. Hire Great People

135. Trust Them

136. Create Sandboxes

137. Where Failure is Okay

138. From Which You Can Learn

139. Use Science!

141. Use Data, Metrics, Experiments

142. Empower

143. Objective

144. Transparent

145. Example: Live Search Relevance

146. http://www.live.com

148. Engineers Create & Submit Experiments

149. Experiments are Evaluated on Metrics

150. Like

151. Comparison to a Truth Set

152. User Click Rates on Results

153. All Automated

154. Anyone Can Run an Experiment (within reason)

155. If an Experiment Improves on the Key Metrics, It Ships

156. Very Little Opinion Involved

157. Result

158. Everyone on the Team

159. Knows What to Expect

160. Is Empowered to Improve the Site

161. Regardless of Level, Title, Rank

162. Rapid Problem Solution Cycle

163. Find a Problem?

164. Or an Opportunity?

165. No Need for This

166. Just Fix It

167. Fast

168. Efficient

169. Empowered

170. Uses that Distributed Brainpower

171. 2. DARWINIAN EVOLUTION

172. Ideas

173. Information

174. Patterns

175. Most Valuable Thing

176. In the World

179. Layout of that Page

180. Can Double Revenue

181. Or Cut it In Half

182. Just a Bit of Pattern

183. No Extra Cost or Resources

184. Huge Impact on Success

185. Other Patterns

186. Assembly Line

187. Germ Theory of Disease

188. Graphical User Interface

189. HTML & HTTP

190. Information and Ideas

191. Primary Source of Growth

192. Modern Company

193. Among Other Things

194. Idea Creation Machine

195. Pattern Creation Machine

196. To Get the Best Ideas

197. Harness All Your Available IQ

198. Create Lots and Lots of Ideas

199. (Most of them Bad)

200. Test Them

201. Scientific Method

202. Darwinian Method

203. Capitalist Method

206. Rule of Thumb

207. Highest Paid Person in the Room

208. Will Usually Be Wrong

209. Compared to Experiment

210. Trust Data

211. Trust Customers

212. Trust Results

213. More Than Management

214. More than Your Own Ideas

216. Layout Picked by Darwin

217. Thousands of Experiments

223. A Word of Caution

224. Pick the Right Metrics

225. Short Term Success

226. Can Reduce

227. Long Term

228. Revenue vs. Customer Satisfaction

229. If You Need To

230. Mix of Metrics

231. A Word of Pragmatism

232. No Metric is Perfect

233. Keep Improving Them

234. Dont Get Paralyzed

235. Right Direction

236. Good

237. Keep Making it Better

238. Invest

239. Ability to Experiment

240. Good Metrics

241. Rapid Innovation

242. Sandboxes

243. 3. LIMITED SELF-GOVERNANCE

244. Embrace Democracy Give Employees a Vote in: –Peer Evaluation –Immediate Management Why? –They Know Things Management Doesnt! –It Will Make them Happy

245. Embrace Democracy Requires Right Incentives –Employee Compensation tied to Team Performance –Cant Just Vote for Boss Who Will Let You Slack!

246. WHAT YOU CAN DO

247. Shift the Conversation

248. Away from How

249. Towards Why

250. How? Implementation Details

251. move this line of code here

252. What? Deliverables

253. add fault tolerance to our checkout system

254. Why? Motivation

255. lost items from shopping cart is our #2 customer complaint

256. Why? Metric for Success

257. Lost item complaints drop by 80%

258. Shift the Conversation Up How What Why

259. Whats the goal?

260. What problem are we trying to solve?

261. How important is this problem?

262. How do we measure success?

263. Build a Shield

264. How What Why

265. Clarify

266. Why?

267. Organize

268. How What Why

269. Lead

271. Ramez Naam mez@morethanhuman.org twitter: @ramez