Management Experiment at Architel
December 31, 2007
Architel is the engine that has allowed Scott and I to fund more than five other businesses/initiatives since 2001. This little IT services company was founded with a simple idea: align the interest of the customer and the IT provider; we seek to accomplish this by providing all-you-can-eat support for a flat-monthly fee. In 2003 I took over as CEO and by the end of 2005 I turned over the reins to Scott Ryan.
Stowe Boyd is writing in a post titled ‘The Cult of the CEO Gene’ about Gary Hamel’s new book. The premise is that, "American companies need to respond to new challenges in the global economy by rethinking how they are organized, in essence, allowing — or encouraging — power to migrate from the center to the edge."
Ironically, in a way this is how we have orgainzed Architel for 2008. Back in November Brad Merritt, who has joined the team to build WhiteBox, recommended we move to team based management at Architel. He saw the problems our centralized control system caused, specifically as we grew past 100 clients accountability degraded significantly. We divided the company into four team, each with an equal number of clients. Now we have four mini companies operating under the same standards and guidelines, but specifically responsible for their assigned customers. Two of the teams have been experimenting with ideas that would have been too scary to adopt companywide. Some of those experiments are working and others are not. The interesting thing is that we are seeing innovations being developed at the edge ~ something that rarely happened before.
I will be writing about our experiment throughout 2008, but in the meantime check out Gary’s book, The Future of Management.
