A dynamical hierarchy is defining the work. When it is a marketing question then the marketing guys come in and will be dominant. And if it is a technical problem than the engineers would come in. In a small startup company there are regular group discussions and concerning the body language for example, you see the person who is the president, the CEO, his body language is very much that of the boss. You can see others around who seem to be subservient to him and others who are more his equal and will challenge him. They kept talking about the Silicon Valley model, because the whole idea is that this kind of an organization, that free open space and all, is what leads to innovation. So here they are told we are a high-end company, we are a product company, we are innovation driven and we are venture capital funded, therefore we are like this. And therefore all the people in the company start becoming like that. There is a kind of a studied casualness, informality, the jeans, the T-shirts, the way in which people talk to each other, very informal, very we all together. To Upadhya it seems that a lot of it is very engineered. It is not just you and me and all together we are doing something, there is engineering behind that freedom, that so-called freedom.
Dynamical hierarchy in an engineered ‘free’ space
Upadhya’s observation is that every project faces a crisis at some point. And often it is a problem of time, a time crunch, so what really happens when they go ‘firefighting’ is that they just go in day and night for over 7 days or on weekends to put in extra hours to get is sorted out.
