Comment by bronbron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bronbron | Hacker News Reader

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> Ever notice how families or tribes don’t require much process? That is because there is such a strong trust and culture that it supersedes any process. In organizations (or even in a society) where culture is weak, you need an abundance of heavy, precise rules and processes.

I think it's disingenuous to say tribes and families don't "require much process." The processes are just more implicit than explicit. When you ask your parents for a new toy and they evaluate whether to say 'yes', that's a process - just an informal one. The only reason that's really possible is because the relationships are much more intimate and fewer.

When you start to scale into numbers where it's just infeasible for "everyone to know everyone" then formal processes have to take the place of those informal ones. I can't evaluate Jim's request for 10 additional storage disks informally because I don't know the first thing about Jim.

Coordinating lots of people is really hard. I would guess Airbnb is getting about the size where keeping the culture intact will require a sizable time commitment from the top level. Airbnb keeping that same culture at 20,000 employees would probably be a sociological feat all on its own.

I like the Henrik Kniberg definition of culture, 'culture is the stuff people do without thinking about it'. E.g. you could codify most things as processes (which is basically the entire point of things like value stream maps), but a company culture is infuses the kind of things you don't need to make explicit, because they become self-evident.

Think Netflix travel policy ("be responsible") vs more traditional companies with rules and travel agents for implicit vs explicit, or cultural vs process driven.

You actually brought up an interesting point that I was going to address: Netflix also has a legendary policy of expedient, rapid termination (see: The presentation that circulates around every so often).

The caveat to my statement was that you can keep that kind of culture at scale if you're brutal about either ensuring people are good cultural fits, whether that's by stringent hiring processes or swift termination.

Not that I think Netflix necessarily has the wrong approach here - it's a tradeoff to avoid having these explicit processes. But it's food for thought, nonetheless.

Implicit? Tribes invented religions (over and over again) with complex rituals governing every aspect of daily, yearly, and generational life.

Excellent point! I actually wasn't even thinking about religion. I was thinking more broad (e.g. Dowries), but you're absolutely right there are tons of explicit processes as well.

So in summary, if you want your company to be the size (employee wise) of a family, you don't need processes (a written down instruction of how to do something).

If you want your company to be the size of a religion, you do.

> size (employee wise) of a family,

Sure, but what's that - like 10 people? Yeah I'll agree then you don't need processes.

The statement "don't require much process" is a relative statement. It's relative to interactions/relationships "where culture is weak". If you ask two people from different countries to build a house together, then ask two people from the same family, the people in the same family will have less process.

I think you're inadvertently proving my point, though: The family members have less process because they know each other pretty intimately. And while you can have those kinds of relationships in a company that's composed of 5 people, it's really hard to do that in a company of 5000.

> I think you're inadvertently proving my point, though

I don't think so.

> And while you can have those kinds of relationships in a company that's composed of 5 people, it's really hard to do that in a company of 5000.

I think you took my comparison too literally. The comparison was meant to highlight that people who share culture have less process. In a company of 5000, it's harder to have a mono-culture, but the closer you can get to that then the less "process" there is.

> The comparison was meant to highlight that people who share culture have less process.

Yeah, I guess I’ll need a different example to really believe you. I think if cultivating relationships aren't a possibility (and they aren't, logistically, in large enough companies), we naturally (and justifiably) result to explicit processes in order to accomplish things between different groups of people. I don't think culture has anything to do with it.

> I don't think culture has anything to do with it.

Yah, I guess this is where we're missing each other. See, I believe that if you put 2 west coast americans in a room, their morals, likes/dislikes, and goals are more likely to naturally align than by putting in some odd mix of countries with clashing cultures.

It’s a weird statement. Culture being whatever people make together rules and formal processes themselves are culture. The Austrian-Hungarian empire had a legendary bureaucracy, but one would be hard-pressed to call fin-de-siècle Vienna a place of ‘weak culture’.

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