I don’t usually write about big companies because the stuff is not applicable to us small-frys. But, as you may have heard, Bill Gates is leaving the day to day work at Microsoft to devote more time to philantrhopy. It turns out there are some lessons we can use – in large part because Microsoft was a small company recently enough that some of us can remember. Bill Gates and I actually share the same birthday (but he’s a year younger – the whippersnapper).

Here are links to two very interesting article by great writers who’ve been intimate with Microsoft for decades.

Robert Cringely quotes Jeff Angus saying that Microsoft’s management “system” in the 1980′s was basically to guess at unimportant decisions and base important ones on trying to emulate the more powerful people in the organization. Cringely says it’s still the same today.

” Almost nothing operational was written down…The tragedy wasn’t that so many poor decisions got made — as a functional monopoly, Microsoft had the cash flow to insulate itself from the most severe consequences — but that no one cared to track and codify past failures as a way to help managers create guidelines of paths to follow and avoid.”

This prompts the question “How did the company get so big?”

Joel Spolsky shares a very interesting story from when he used to work there, and had to have his work reviewed personally by Bill Gates.

“Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer.”

Then Joel goes on to imply that technical expertise matters more than managerial ability, and disses “the MBA who believes that management is a generic function.”

I actually have no idea how Microsoft got so big. I think it was a combination of timing; being smart enough to exploit the timing; having a good enough product; great marketing; and being ruthless. But that’s just my opinion. Your company is not going to be that big, and it’s not Microsoft, so how they got that big is not the lesson for you.

The one for you is that management IS an generic function – to a point. And the smaller your company, the sooner you hit that point. But conversely, the larger you want your company to grow, the more you need to systemize (or genericize) management. The three levels of management is one way to systemize it.

Takeaways:

• As a small company you must intimately know your customers, your product and how the two relate.
• If you want the company to grow, that information must not just reside in people’s heads. You need a system to pass it around so good work doesn’t depend on certain individuals being in certain positions.
• “That information” that I referred to is not just information – it’s emotion, relationships, intuition, skills, as well as information. But it still needs to be passed around.

[tags] management, growing company, Microsoft, Bill Gates [/tags]