Information Age | CorporateIntel

Facebook moved into a new office complex earlier this year, which Mark Zuckerberg has described as “the largest open floor plan in the world.” With over 400,000 square feet, it is reported not to offer a single private office. There are conference rooms, shared spaces, and all kinds of creative gathering areas meant to protect the startup environment that is core to the company’s zeitgeist as it evolves into a corporate behemoth. It’s a wild, energetic, real-time experiment in organizational development that is already being praised and criticized from inside and outside the company. Whatever your assessment might be, it’s a test of human behavior worth watching.

For a moment, I’d like to think of the Facebook campus not as a model of space planning, but as a model of team planning. Long before the debate raged on whether private offices had run their course of usefulness—and just how truly dreadful the industrial cubicle could be—company leaders were debating the “optimal” way to arrange organizational charts in the Information Age. If you’ve spent any time with me in product development, you know I like to quote the sometimes overused phrase, “People in companies get stuff done in spite of org charts, not because of them.” It’s a bias I maintain for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is seeing it in action almost every day. Another bias I hold applies to the “optimal” way to build these org charts. I’ll confess to that in a moment, but the title of this article has likely already given away my leaning.

Let’s start with the basics. The rise of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century, emerging from prior Agrarian Societies, led to thousands of individuals working for single companies, for the most part creating efficiencies in the manufacturing model. Most of us are familiar with the innovation of Henry Ford as something of the father of mass production with his 20th Century Assembly Line. The premise of the organizational charts for these early corporate conglomerates surmised that a few knowledge workers and a Big Boss would send instructions down the pyramid to a wide base of workers who hopefully wouldn’t ask too many questions. Executives were at the top, middle managers squeezed in the sandwich, and individuals contributors down below busy doing their hands-on functions repeatedly. If the model sounds blunt and easy to follow, there is a reason for that—it dates back to the earliest days of broad warfare, mostly perfected by the Romans. You have an Emperor, you have Generals, you have Captains, and you have Soldiers. It worked for thousands of years in capturing terrain, albeit at the cost of mostly Soldiers, and it worked for hundreds of years in mass producing products, too often without much consideration of job satisfaction.

As education and information became more available in later decades, and asking questions became the norm, the inflexible org chart became a lot more difficult to maintain. As workers collaborated more and followed instructions less, human resources departments (formerly known as personnel offices) looked to break out of the traditional top-down structures and unleash creativity. Standard org charts evolved along the lines of two basic models: Functional Departments and Cross-Functional Teams.

Functional Departments place similarly skilled workers into groups led by senior individuals with advanced experienced in a discipline. This creates a Legal department, an Art department, an Engineering department, a Finance department, a Sales and Marketing department, and the like. Over the course of your career you might aspire to become the VP of Finance or the VP of Marketing, and these VPs, now sometimes called C-Level executives (Chief Financial Officer, Chief Marketing Officer) point the functional expertise of their teams into a Chief Executive Officer. Your company may organize itself this way. It is a very common and familiar way to organize. It’s also still very close to the old military hierarchy.

Cross-Functional Teams break the model of Artist reporting to Art Director and Engineer reporting to Engineering Director. They place multi-disciplinary groups under a generalist manager who is often more “cat herder” than boss. In this model, a smaller group of people with engineering, finance, marketing, design, and manufacturing expertise might all report to someone called a Project Lead, Product Manager, or General Manager, who is in essence a mini-CEO. Unlike Functional Departments, Cross-Functional Teams are likely to be less “permanent” in structure. The team might be ad hoc, assigned to an initiative, ready to be broken up and redeployed following a product release. Functional experts on the team might have a dual reporting relationship to the team leader and a senior expert in their area of expertise offering professional mentorship, so that a team leader who doesn’t know the law doesn’t have to render legal oversight (always a good idea). Over time Cross-Functional teams can evolve into more permanent Business Units with profit and loss responsibility for a specific line of products and extensions. If you have ever been in a company comprised of Battling Business Units , you know it can be even less fun than being buried on a Functional Team.

It is at the intersection of these two models that we all learn the necessity of Matrix Management, which unfortunately in the Information Age is the only real way we have to collaborate in an ongoing manner. Sometimes we need a Functional Department to help us advance in our area of expertise, and sometimes we need a Cross-Functional team to get stuff done with people who are good at different things. Most companies go back and forth between Functional Departments and Cross-Functional Teams, and just when you think your company has settled into a comfortable structure, along comes the inevitable memo announcing the company re-org. Companies re-org over and over in search of optimizing their growth models, but the truth is, neither approach is perfect, and whichever one your company is currently utilizing, be prepared to have it change. Re-orgs are certain because change is certain. The opposite would be sameness, and as much as you might think you want that, running in place is the surest way possible to go out of business.

Oh, about that bias of mine—I believe anything in a company that leads to entrenched fiefdoms stalls creativity. Functional Departments are usually fiefdoms. Business Units are usually fiefdoms. Again, this is why Matrix Management is a reality, particularly in managing empowered, innovative individuals who join together in a mission that is unlikely to last a lifetime, but has a real chance to change the world now. If we take that back to the visual metaphor of the open floor plan, I tend to see greater strength in the output and engagement of Cross-Functional Teams than I do Functional Departments. That doesn’t mean I am against having an exemplary CFO, CTO, or CIO setting the bar for excellence in a discipline. It just means that whatever the org chart says at the moment, I don’t want any walls between artists talking to engineers, lawyers talked to sales people, accountants talking to marketers, or anyone so distant from customers that they forget who pays everyone’s salary.

You see, at the root of all this, there only is one Emperor, one General, one CEO, one Boss who matters most. That is the voice of the Customer, whom we almost never place on the org chart. Start by putting the Customer at the top of the hierarchy, and you’ll soon understand why who reports to whom doesn’t really matter when it’s time to tally the scorecard. That’s why the walls gotta go, figuratively or literally. Go out on the floor and try to bump into a few people. You may be surprised how much you learn and how good it feels.

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This article originally appeared on Inc.

“There are no second acts in American lives.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon, 1941

“I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York’s boom days.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, My Lost City, 1932

Like many everyday admirers of American literature, I grew up only hearing the first use of Fitzgerald’s famous quote, which in fact was published posthumously. And like many people who misinterpreted that quote due to a lack of context, I grew up confused, conflicted, and even angry every time I read it. Fitzgerald the social observer worried about the American Dream, but he also celebrated idealism and courage. Would he want to be remembered for an inaccurate observation that is not only untrue but damaging? I doubt it.

Without diving into a diatribe on American literature, let’s just lift from the earlier interpretation of Fitzgerald’s quote and bury the latter forever. To the complete contrary, I assert with full confidence that it is entirely the DNA of American lives to reignite with second acts—in many cases, multiple second acts. In fact you can have as many acts as you want. Your life’s work can be singular, dual, multifaceted, multithreaded, a sine curve of milestones, or a pastiche of overlapping landmarks. If anyone tells you otherwise, run away as far as you can as quickly as you can and clear your mind of the naysayer’s rub.

Our economy is a place that celebrates reinvention. Our democracy is a place where resilience triumphs over cynicism. I believe these things not because I am a Pollyanna motivator (quite the opposite if you know me), but because I see these traits in winners who repeatedly defy the odds. Entrepreneurs, respected leaders, creative professionals who challenge the status quo—they all have to be good at what they do, but they all get knocked down for believing that change has to happen. They seldom bring change to the world on their first try, and when they win, they seldom win once. Why is that? Because before Act One is over, Act Two is in the works, and probably Act Three.

There is only one thing that can prevent an Act Two curtain from rising: Your own decision that a failure is too much to bear. The Information Age has turned that notion wholeheartedly on its head. As long as there is learning extracted from failure, failure is a pit stop, not an endpoint. As long as risk is sufficiently mitigated to bypass a cataclysmic wipeout of resources, you are not failing if you are learning. You are on a path to where you need to go. You are on your way to Act Two.

Read Walter Issacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. We all know Jobs founded Apple. Then he got kicked out of his own company for being an uncontrollable rebel, the very thing that put Apple on the map. Jobs gets fired around p.206 in Chapter 17. He is personally devastated, emotionally crushed. That’s when his Act Two begins. The book ends on p.571 in Chapter 42. Through it all, Jobs’s Act Two is fueled by a spirit of resilience and a commitment to personal reinvention. He lives an arc that resonates.

Read Neil Gabler’s biography of Walt Disney. Disney Bros. loses control of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit around p.109 in Chapter 3. Mickey Mouse is born in Chapter 4. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves—which simultaneously almost crushed Disney’s financial interests and then put the Disney name into American lore forever—arrives in Chapter 6. Disneyland doesn’t even make an appearance until Chapter 10. The book continues until Chapter 11 is finally exhausted on p.633. If you’re looking to count second acts, start early.

Reinvention does not only apply to the famous. When I personally decided to return to writing after a twenty-five year hiatus, a lot of people made snide remarks, both to my face and behind my back. I had enjoyed a respected career in management at the intersection of entertainment and technology, but I never wanted to consider that my whole story. Starting over and writing a novel with a half-century under my belt seemed absurd to almost everyone around me. I would be competing with established authors who had amassed a lifetime of credits. I would be doing it for a fraction of the income I earned previously. There was absolutely no way to predict critical or commercial success of any kind. Critics can be harsh, public evaluation even more ominous. It was a challenge filled with possibility, a path to sharing ideas with authenticity and voice that was mine. That sounded like a decent Act Two to me. I wonder what Act Three will be.

In my new book, Endless Encores, a seasoned CEO spends an entire evening stranded in an airport executive club talking with a rising young manager who is about to hit the wall on his first failure. The less experienced leader is terrified that all he has ever wanted to achieve is about to be lost in a single product cycle. It’s a business parable, with only a few simple plot points, yet it encompasses a Socratic dialogue around what it means to learn from failure. Daphne, the veteran, has survived a seemingly infinite number of product launches, enough of them successful to keep her in the game. Paul, the rookie, comes to learn what it means to embrace resilience and reinvent himself to form a career of linking “acts” that over time reveal the arc of his personal development.

Neither Daphne nor Paul would ever buy into the idea of a terminal Act Two, let alone Act One. That’s a driving factor in the purpose that underlies their lives. Products have to sell, but more importantly, teams have to work well together and values have to emerge as shared conduits to satisfaction. Few of us get this right the first time. No one gets it right every time. You don’t have to get it right every time. You just have to know that potential for improvement always exists, recognize the aspiration for excellence as a mandate, and approach the ideal with unbridled enthusiasm. The curtain goes up on Act Two when you commit the passion to ensuring that it happens.

Don’t misquote or misunderstand Fitzgerald. Don’t tell me there are no second acts in our lives. As long as you are learning and readying yourself for what comes next, you can start anew any time you want. The courage to pursue that can only come from you.

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This article originally appeared on The Good Men Project.