Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

From the article.

"Essentially, Nokia has forgotten how to bring innovative products to market. This is despite a rich R&D base, which has pioneered many of the innovations competitors now feature. Instead, a risk-averse bureaucracy has grown up that stifles innovation – it makes progress slow or non-existent."

An old and familiar story.

"his diagnosis may be familiar, but the proposals quite radical. ... a bloodbath of middle managers – starting with 300 to 500 staff at senior VP, VP or director level. This he calls a GRO program, or Get-Rid-Of."

Yahoo had 300 or so VPs before its fall. How do companies end up with five hundred + VPs? What value do they provide exactly? (Genuine question, not snark. From what I've seen most people at VP level spend all their time in internecine politics)

Does anyone know how many VPs Apple has? or Google? (though I suspect , with no proof or numbers, that the latter would have relatively high numbers, given the "middle agedness" Google seems to demonstrate these days)

But what does "VP" mean? These titles are distributed pretty liberally, do not have a consistent rank/role across employers, and tend to represent very different things between say the UK, US and Finland. E.g - look at your average investment bank: VP is basically rank-and-file, and form the core group of the people that do the work.

"But what does "VP" mean? "

Good Question. At Yahoo (and other places like Intuit) these guys are about two rungs from the CEO. That is the sense in which I used it.

I can imagine it's because Nokia is (or used to be) a huge company. Also Scandinavian businesses are generally not very hierarchical.

This seems to be a good heuristic , find out the ratio of the doers versus middle-managers , the higher this number is the better it is.

One other company that exhibits this nimbleness ala Apple despite its size is Goldman Sachs. From personal experience , among other things , GS gets this ratio right where it counts.

How about various militaries?

at least the bottom levels of regular military hierarchies are usually quite well defined in terms of structure, titles and numbers. which is sort of the whole point: people know what is expected of them.

how much similarity there is between various countries I don't know, but it would surprised me if at least western military hierarchies are very different. (similarity between nations makes cooperation easier, but where there are differences there usually exist mappings. for instance between different systems of rank)

Yes. I was interested in how many `manager'-types vs `doers' there are in the various militaries. I read in a recent Economist that e.g. the German Bundeswehr is relatively top-heavy with too many officers.

From http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html, there are about 58 VPs and SVPs at Google. I am not sure if it's too many for a company its size.

Someone with knowledge on corporate organization might want to chime in.

While I worked at Yahoo someone did an analysis of the employee database and calculated the average number of reportees for each "manager". The numbers came close to suggesting Yahoo was organized as a binary tree.

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