Whither Microsoft's Management Style?

Peter Drucker studied GM as they struggled to change their military-industrial, command-production management model installed during WWII into the decentralized, loosely-coupled business unit structure that most modern corporations emulate to this day.

Credited with minting the term "knowledge worker", Drucker influenced all sorts of people, including Bill Gates. Probably Drucker's largest legacy at Microsoft is management by objectives, in which management and employees (otherwise known as ICs, or Individual Contributors in Microsoft-speak,) work on aligned goals for the greater good. Drucker felt that these goals should fit into the SMART (specific, measurable, agreed, realistic and time-sensitive) framework.

More's the pity then that key tenets of Drucker's thinking seem to be actively ignored at Microsoft, and even SMART has been bent by the reality distortion field generator buried beneath building 34.

Drucker was big on keeping things simple and pointed out that many companies produce too many products, hire too many employees and generally expand into markets that they shouldn't.

So why has Microsoft shown a willingness to hop into any market?

I think it's because of greed.

Power and money creates its own gravity, and having quite a bit of either causes any other closely available money and power to accrete. Accrete enough, and it starts its own fusion reaction, and it will then greedily consume all freely available energy until the energy source is gone. This cycle is repeated across the universe, from stars to exploitative business practices. Microsoft has not been immune from this behavior.

The other thing that (enough) gravity will do for you is bend light.

To fuse Drucker, cosmological oddities and Microsoft's management, I argue that Microsoft's gravity of market power and vaults of cash have bent reality around senior leadership so far that they're able to see stars from behind their teeth and it's only their incessant yapping about how great things are that lets them see any light at all.

It's a well-accepted fact both inside and outside of the company that Microsoft's leaders tend to be reactive to most market opportunities, not proactive, and that when faced with a challenge, the first reaction is to assault it head-on, swinging the mass of the company in front of them to give them enough time to figure out how to absorb the challenge.

You see, greed is about having it all to the exclusion of other things in life to the point of paranoia, and whenever another company comes along and finds another way to extract wealth via software, Microsoft responds like a pit bull protecting a crack house.

The DNA of the company is bound so tightly to selling machine code that it's no wonder that it flails about whenever it tries to do anything different, and that many rank-and-file ICs within the company shrug their shoulders and say, "There they go again."

The issue, of course, is not the course of action leadership at Microsoft usually takes, but how it goes about taking that action. As an employee, I read about company issues in the trade and general press, blogs, forums and see it discussed on the nightly news some days. What I rarely receive is a Q&A talking about why the company has committed itself to a certain course of action and how it fits into the overall corporate strategy for future success.

As a rank-and-filer, I'm left to divine top-level strategy from press releases and external commentators. Worse yet, the only rational, external analysis for Microsoft's actions at times seems to be reduced to the antipodes of either it's a multi-billion dollar market that we're not in or another company that does software found a multi-billion dollar market that we're not in.

So, Drucker be damned, Microsoft enters market after market, cranks out product after product and hires like crazy to cover these two bases.

(I pray at night that BP doesn't decide to enter the software industry, lest I end up on some off-shore platform in the middle of some future global hotspot as some sort of digital roughneck.)

Every day, Microsoft has an opportunity to change for the future, but only if the leaders lead us there. Instead, it seems as if we are on the same well-trod path, being asked again and again to put our trust in our wonderful leaders, but without an explanation of how long or how far until we reach our destination or even what that destination is.

I, and many others at Microsoft that I've talked to, feel we often work at cross-purposes and that we're left in the dark about where we're really going. We receive randomizing and conflicting directions and teams appear pitted against each other due to conflicting priorities. And no one is stepping forward to sort this out.

So, here's my first request of management and leadership at Microsoft: provide more transparency into the big vision, so the rest of us can get behind it, instead of wonder what it is.