When watching this video about The Origins of Hewlett-Packard, one of the statements that really struck me (at time code 16:25) was “Decisions should be made at the lowest possible level”.

I have had the privilege to work for Hewlett-Packard as my first job after graduating from university. It was a turbulent time then in 2001, when the dot-com hype was just “exploding”. But it was also a period, when many colleagues were still around, who had been with the company for a very long time. So the HP way was still alive and kicking, at least in my personal environment. Sadly though, ever since, my personal opinion has been that the company is in a downward spiral. It was certainly not a good sign, when under Carly Fiorina as CEO the founders’ names were officially removed from the company name and the latter reduced to their initials. I have left HP in 2005 but still feel connected. Therefore it really hurts to see what has happened to the company. And I always look back at those early years of my career with a lot of fondness!

But I should come back to the subject of this post. Having read, experienced, executed, and thought quite a bit about management, I really do think this is one of the (!!!) core aspects: Where should decisions happen? And especially in today’s times, when everybody is talking about “the quick eating the big”, it should be a no-brainer that the right level for decisions is one of the most critical components for success in business. Why is it then that we still see so many organizations where mid- to high-level executives lead with a micro-management style?

One fundamental question here is how people act in their professional environment. Do they try to avoid mistakes? Or do they work to achieve a common goal? I daresay the former behavior breeds micro-management as a strategy to mitigate risk. Of course, the result is local optimization, at best. But overall the organization will fall back in the market, perhaps live from its past for a while, and eventually disappear.

My hypothesis is that trust, or lack thereof, is the major driving force behind this. And it is usually the top management that sets the example here. The good thing, though, is that they can also change it. In his famous book “Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders” L. David Marquet does this on a nuclear submarine. And if it works for what is probably one of the most dangerous working environments on earth, it works everywhere. (The book is a must-read in my opinion for everybody who has only the slightest interest in things like management, corporate culture etc.)

I do expect that we will see many traditional organizations moving away gradually from a pure top-down management style. Partly because of market pressure for agility, and partly because employees simply demand it. So we have interesting times ahead of us!