{"id":1339,"date":"2013-07-19T20:09:06","date_gmt":"2013-07-19T18:09:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/?p=1339"},"modified":"2024-10-14T13:35:23","modified_gmt":"2024-10-14T11:35:23","slug":"the-gods-of-management-at-microsoft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/2013\/07\/19\/the-gods-of-management-at-microsoft\/","title":{"rendered":"The Gods of Management at Microsoft"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Charles_Handy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Charles Handy<\/a> divided the management cultures in four types on his now classic book on business administration, [amazon_link id=\u201c0195096177\u201d target=\u201c_blank\u201d ]Gods of Management[\/amazon_link]:<\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Zeus culture, a club culture with centralized power in which speed of decisions and accountability are prioritized over any other virtue<\/li>\n<li>Apollo culture, a role-based culture with many rules and procedures, in which stability and predictability are prioritized, creating resistance to change<\/li>\n<li>Athena culture, a task-based culture focused on providing solutions to concrete problems, ideal in times of expansion when new products and technologies get introduced<\/li>\n<li>Dionysus culture, an existential culture in which the organization exists for the sole purpose of helping the professionals to achieve their personal goals<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In the last reorganization, Microsoft <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/news\/Press\/2013\/Jul13\/07-11OneMicrosoft.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" class=\"broken_link\">has shifted<\/a> from an Athena-like culture to an Apollo-like culture, a typical change in business re-organizations also predicted by Handy in his book. However, the general consensus is that this move towards this kind of management culture is inferior, as shown in multiple studies:<\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tau.ac.il\/~spiegel\/papers\/overload-EL.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" class=\"broken_link\">Managerial overload and organization design<\/a>: a divisional organization is more efficient than the functional organization when the number of projects is large, and Microsoft has 13 products and services with revenues of more than 1 billion dollar per&nbsp;year.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/faculty.chicagobooth.edu\/finance\/papers\/orgdsign.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" class=\"broken_link\">Organization Design<\/a>: different management structures are compared based on the internal co-ordination costs imposed on the firm, very relevant to the Microsoft reorganization<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www3.nd.edu\/~tgresik\/IO\/DoubleMoralHazard.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" class=\"broken_link\">A double moral hazard model of organization design<\/a>: a model based on moral hazard to explain why sub-optimal business structures are chosen is introduced, starting from general fact that the divisional structure is more efficient than the functional structure.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Only the malleable nature of software and the command to deploy a common software platform on any device and any type of screen may outstrip the previously presented disadvantages: be that as it may, <span class=\"caps\">MSFT<\/span> is pursuing a much-needed goal for the whole computer industry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Charles Handy divided the management cultures in four types on his now classic book on business administration, [amazon_link id=\u201c0195096177\u201d target=\u201c_blank\u201d ]Gods of Management[\/amazon_link]: Zeus culture, a club culture with centralized power in which speed of decisions and accountability are prioritized over any other virtue Apollo culture, a role-based culture with many rules and procedures, in&nbsp;[\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1339"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1339"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1547,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1339\/revisions\/1547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}