I've been thinking a bit lately about the culture we have at Microsoft. I'm glad to have been around in the "grade school" days, and proud to be part of the "teenage" years at Microsoft. It's fascinating to see us grow to adulthood.
At Microsoft, there's always been a strong culture of personal responsibility, ownership, and accountability. I find it fascinating to see some fundamental shifts occurring as we grow into a larger company. Most significantly, I think we're finding that to do our best work, we need to rely on others outside our own group.
I started at Microsoft when our entire US Channel Marketing team was 10 or so people. We were working together to launch Windows 3.0. When a department is small, it's easy to work together. We would run down the hall or poke our head up over a cubicle wall to get a question answered. We knew exactly who to go to to get an answer. Things were so tightly integrated that it was impossible not to work collaboratively, there was just too much to get done.
That's not to say there weren't egos involved. In fact, dealing with people I considered unreasonable was a regular occurrence. To do what we had to do we needed a super-dose of confidence, reasonable or not. We were building new products to sell to new customers through a new channel. We didn't have the luxury of market tests and well-researched marketing plans. We didn't have time to follow the rules. We were making it up as we went along.
We hired people who were smart, independent, and competitive. We rarely brought in those who had lots of experience from other companies. We worked fast and we worked hard. We deliberatively built the culture we have now.
Along the way, groups (and teams) began to specialize. Divisions were created that were good at operating systems. Others were good at developer languages. Still others at consumer multimedia. In marketing, there were teams that were good at PR. Others at merchandising or packaging. Others at communications.
Before some of us old-timers knew it, we were a >gulp< big company. After gaining all the efficiencies we could by specializing, we began to recognize that there was a LOT of redundancy. There were teams in every division doing packaging. Or PR. Or communications. And there were individual subsidiaries doing all of it on a smaller--but collectively global--scale.
As a company, we're putting a lot of emphasis on developing cross-group collaboration skills. In fact, the team I manage is directly responsible for developing tools and processes for enabling more effective communication worldwide, especially between employees and partners. We're actively partnering with our Knowledge Networking Group to make sure our internal portal takes advantage of every best practice in the company. We're collecting business requirements from our subsidiaries to make sure our tools are global. And most recently, we've moved a lot of our development to a central team that's tightly integrated into other development efforts company-wide. Increasingly, we're giving up individual ownership of some aspects of our jobs to do things more efficiently, with less redundancy.
And along the way, cultures clash. Approaches change. And we continue to evolve: Individual -> team. Sole ownership -> shared objectives. Competitive rewards -> team recognition. Multinational -> global. Aggressive -> benevolent.
Does this cause pain? Ya. Is it worth it? Ya.
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