In my last post I talked about the “How to structure a company?” and I just raised some questions. No answers where given. David Koonz mentioned in his comments companies like Gore, and Semco. And I agree, these companies seem to have solved the questions about how to structure a company.

The research Boris did about these companies tells, that companies should not be larger than 100 people and that everybody in the company should have a sense of entrepreneurship. Tom Peters calls this businessing [1].

I, Mr. M. agree completely, but how to do it? Lets take Boris company as an example. He has a big issue to solve. He is the Nr. 1 Certified ScrumMaster Trainer in Europe. Well known, with the best customer base you can think of. He trained 3000 people and dozens of companies. A lot of people know him and a big amount of people wants to get trained by him.

A super cool situation if you want to be successful … wait! What, if he is ill? What if he wants to go on vacation? Shall then customers needs to wait? How can we make sure that a running implementation headed by Boris can be kept running if he is ill? The only possibility to solve this is to replace Boris with a service his company offers, right? A reliable, repeatable way of supporting customers that can help his customers using his expertise even if he is not able to do this by himself.

So, he started this process. He trained and educated, coached and supported people to help him doing this job. He created the bor!sgloger team during the last 6 months. First very few people and now this groups starts to be too large. He can not focus on this group anymore alone. Several freelance people and some employees are now working for him. What do we introduce now? We need a manager and leader for these people, right?

Wait … they do his job! Was this easy for him? That is the next challenge you need to phase. If your company grows, the founders needs to start learning a new job. Managing a company and not doing the job of the company.

[1] Peters, T. J. 1994 The Tom Peters seminar: crazy times call for crazy organizations. Vintage Books.

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