Thank you Yves, you describe what I term the "business culture" very well. A year ago I might have agreed with anybody who described this as the "only" way to run a business. Now I believe that it may not even be the best way.
Where did Gmail come from? Or Amazon Mom, Google Glass, etc.? These products were not built to satisfy a specific need for a given life cycle; they were created because somebody thought that it would be cool to do that and then the business supported the experiment to build that product the best way that they could, without an immediate concern to whether that product would be profitable. Talk to anybody at Amazon and they will tell you that their driving goal is to build the best product for their customers. Not the most profitable product or the product that fills a niche, just the best product they can build. If you go to Google and say "we should build a router for X specific market segment" they will laugh you out the door; if you say "we should build a router because we can do it better than anybody else" then you have a new project to work on. Much of Drucker's work does apply to a "craft culture" and some of it blatantly doesn't, like managing top-down resource constraints. The Capabilities Maturity Model is generic enough that it could apply to either and it makes no mention of how or why a product is being developed. I'm interested in books and resources about working in and creating a bottom-up "craft culture" organization. Or in learning that I am now insane and need to spend some time in a padded room without Internet. On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 9:21 AM Yves Dorfsman <y...@zioup.com> wrote: > > On Dec 21, 2015 9:51 AM, "Atom Powers" <atom.pow...@gmail.com > > <mailto:atom.pow...@gmail.com>> wrote: > > > > A business culture organization is one where you do work because > it is > > profitable to do the work. You build products because you want > people > > to buy those products. Examples: Comcast, Dell, Oracle, and > almost > > everybody with publicly traded stock. > > > > A craft culture organization is one where you do work because it > > improves the product. You build products because you want to > build the > > best thing. Examples: Amazon, Google, Lego, and often private > companies. > > > > On 2015-12-21 09:03, Atom Powers wrote: > > Of course business cultures try to make the best product they can (as > long as > > it is cost effective) and craft cultures try to make money (on the best > > products they can make). It isn't a black-and-white distinction. You > could > > probably also call this a top-down (business) vs bottom-up (craft) > culture. > > > > I don't buy this... To me craft resonate with Maturity Level 1 (※) you're > playing around, learning, with no care for cost nor efficiency. "Business" > resonate with Maturity Level 3 (※) and up with understanding of costs, > profit, long and short term goals etc... Yes there are people doing > "business" at each level of maturity, and some businesses move through > levels while other cater for different levels in different departments (eg: > R&D vs Production, startups vs established market). > > There is no such thing as "the" best product, products are design for a > specific need for a given life cycle. Everything real-world product is a > compromise (even mustard!). For example, what is "the best network switch"? > For people who don't need VLANs in their home, the 60$ one, for my own home > the 200$ one, but I hope my ISP is using the 3000$ one an has two of them. > > > ※ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model#Levels > > -- > http://yves.zioup.com > gpg: 4096R/32B0F416 > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss@lists.lopsa.org > https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ > -- Perfection is just a word I use occasionally with mustard. --Atom Powers--
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