Work and Life in Education and Research. 2014 report.

Here's just few key highlight of what I've been busy in 2014.

Work

After stepping out from GameChangers management team I've started to look for less entrepreneureal type of jobs. I've got four roles:

Researcher
January - May. I've studied how companies like Google, Valve and Yandex are organized internally. This project was requested and funded by JetBrains (deliverables were an internal set of reports). Further I've continued the project as seminars about organizational design.

Moderator and story-teller 
July - August. As a guest at Ladoga lake's shore festival named as 'Otkrytie' (in Russian it meams 'discovery' and 'opening') I moderated informal experience sharing on topics related to education and healthcare. My own content I've delivered in form of workshops about future of education, professional orientation and strategic planning in agile organizations (mainly based on OKRs). All this job was done for food and housing and it was probably the best work in 2014.

Writer
August - September. In the summer I thouth what if to write for money? In 2013 I was very delighted to to work with Anton Shirikov as an editor to publish an artcile 'Tutors and Colliders' in Slon.ru (for English edition see Medium's post). So our collaboration continued with this two texts:

• “How Google Works with OKRs: Unachievable Goals and Fair Grades“
• “How IT Companies Share News with their Employees“.

Then Anton has quited Slon to join RBC and I gaved up writing. But yep, that was nice experience. I've got positive feedback and > 10 000 views for each article.

Manager (University Relations Specialist)
September - December. After the research my interest in joining Google has grown, while my Googler-friends reffered me to a position in Moscow office (in the Summer there were more then 20 open positions). All the expectations about Google itself were met, while it terms of the position (context, job resposibilites and mode of operation) - we've seen it completely different with my manager. We've stopped to work together after 3 month. My conclusions:

• it's mandatory to get far more information about the position before accepting the offer 
• it's complicated for me to work as a manager (especially within very distributed team) 

The key impression: Google really has one of the most strongest corporate culture of our times. It's potential is still in it's beginning.

Education Ecosystem Events to highlight

 

• Already mentioned 'Opening' Festival
• yCamp by Andrei Afanasiev and Co (contributed, but didn't attend due to relocation to Moscow)
• EdCrunch (attended, but I've rejected to contribute due to being busy with Google)

People of 2014

Ekaterina Peskova. Moved from microbiology to study and teach body-mind practices. We've met at Google's corporate yoga classes in Moscow. With her strong background in natural sciences and psychology Ekaterina examines and merges different approaches from East and West. It was most mindful practices I've ever attend before.

Victor Udoewa. Moved form Washigton to London to join Google. We've e-met even before my first day in a company - he wrote so warm welcome email, so I've searched for Victor's profiles in the Internet and have been impressed with his talents and activites. It was a wonder looking at how he conducts wokshops and training for students in Dublin's Google Campus Ambassador Summit.  

What about GameChangers?

I've put my head and hands out of it. These activities were done by alumni:

• Product Management track and Enterprise Architecture track
• NerdCamp and IT Table Tennis Cup

Personal Experience

Reconnection with parents and digging my roots out. Exploring family trees and stories are also about discovering culture of Christianity in Russia. 

Readings

• Overview with book covers
• Interview of the year: Yason Badridze about his life with wolves by Alexander Burtin and Mikhail Ioshpa 

Travel

• St. Peterburg and Moscow neighbourhouds (inculding Sergievka, Kolomna and Pereslavl Zalessky)
• Dublin (yep, it's a city of Joyce's Ulysses)

What's next?

It's my fifth month in Moscow (I've moved here to join Google) and I don't feel comfortable with idea to come back to St. Petersburg (but other cities and countries). Areas and roles to work in still are to decide: media, research, consulting, healthcare or something completely different, e.g. art or juggling classes for office workrers. I do exercises with balls for about half of the year - it's not about how many balls you can manage it's about how do you fell a single one.

Dream job is about these features:

• strong teams (or a strong partner for small projects)
• location in mild climat or any comfortable environment (e.g. Europe/US or less obvious but fresh choices like Lebanon, Armenia, Georgia or Azerbaijan)
• related to 
• asking questions
• organizational design
• combination of media, education, research, art and business
• social/technology ecosystems and foresights
• healthcare and body-mind studies 
• working with dolphins

Organizational Design. Research and Findings.

Few month ago I've posted a link to a brief note about 'Fractal Organizations' where Salim Ismail from Singularity University writes for WIRED 'Death of the Corporation – Rise of Exponential Organizations'. Fractal effect for organization's growth we've discovered in GameChangers Program - our top students and alumni start their own research&education programs (including User Experience Track and Data Mining Labs). The mechanics behind is that our participants like approach, values and formats that are GameChangers's core and take them in their own ventures in areas and topics that they are intersted in to learn and get real world expereince.

That small re-post and comments attracted Oleg Stepanov, CEO at JetBrains. He asked what if I do a reasearch about organizational design in fast growing companies known for their advanced culture like Google, GitHub and Yandex. I accepted Oleg's request as for the last 7 years I acted mostly as manager and entrepreneur and switch to a researcher role for a couple of weeks was a delicious opportunity. We've described the research as follows and I've started interviews and Quora/GlassDoor investigations.

Here are just few findings:
1. There are companies that work a lot to oureach their org design and culture. Valve is known for thier New Employee Handbook and open allocattion combined with flat organizational structure, Zappos supports dedicated web site, GitHub gain attention to its open-source collaboration nature. Google tells stories about its culture via own events and media (e.g. ZeitGeist Partners Conference, Think With Google) as well top US magazine and newspapers (Forbes, New York Times).

2. Google has plenty of traditional tools from multi-nationals' best practices but implements them with more concious attitude. While its belief in fast decisions and strong core values supported with tools such as OKRs (Objectives and Key Results - planning aproach invented in Intel, for the Russian text about OKRs see my article at Slon.ru)

and groups such as People and Innovation Lab makes Google significantly ahead of any other high tech mammoth.

Google's Teams and Roles (see also the older version of 2008)

3. Yandex looks very unmature comparing with any international IT/Internet company, meanwhile they have powerful tools and practices (e.g. sort of ant's colony trophallaxis mentioned in the Yandex.book) that are worth to learn from and keep the company as an employee with outstanding culture (at least within the Russian scene).

4. There's a consulting company that does org design/culture transfer from hightech agile organizations to the rest of the World - Undercurrent. They developed a model that summarizes a common features for such agile and values driven organizations.

5. Hiring is one of the most important is such companies. E.g. Valve is hiring only mature people and people from its community. Google develops and continuously updates their hiring approach and Googles's profile. One of the most strong examples in hiring is Palantir co-founded by Peter Thiel - just look at their culture & hiring page.

6. Flat and/or no-manager companies is more about buzzwords then real essence. Valve hires people who in other organizations will be team/department leads. Valve is infact leaders only organization. Picture and quotation from its 'Handbook for New Employees':

Any time you interview a potential hire, you need to ask yourself ... if they’re capable of literally running this company, because they will be.

It's also becomes visible if we compare it's revenue per employee with other IT companies. E.g. Yandex has 1 Bln and ~6000 employees, Valve - about 2 Bln and ~500 employees (estimations for 2013 year).

Tom Preston-Warner, CEO at Github says:

I don’t think about [GitHub’s structure] as being “flat.” I think about it is as being highly networked. And that means that instead of everyone being the same, you embrace that everyone is different, and you look at the strength of connections between people, the communication channels, and how information travels amongst them, and then you can draw a diagram. Instead of saying “Okay, everybody’s the same, here’s the org-chart, it’s just a flat line,” you say the org-chart really looks like a neural network, where you have nodes in a graph and then connections between them, and they go everywhere

Google also tryed to be flat, and in terms of information flows and decision making they achieved a lot while internal research showed that managers are really important for the company - if managers behave like this (click the picture to zoom in).

7. Corporate Coach is a profession that becomes more spread and valuable. See e.g. Spotify's job posting (back-up copy).  

8. All-hands meetings are powerful tools if an initiative starts with founders and key decision makers. Here's my article: “How IT Companies Share News with their Employees“, Slon.ru Magazine, in Russian.

9. To discover corporate insideouts there are excellent tools beyound 'just search'. Qoura helps to find answers for 'What makes someone a great product manager at Google?' or even official statements like "What do economists do at Google (their responsibilities as Google's employees)?", Yandex guys are also there and answer a lot. Wolfram Alpha shows correlations between company's revenue and e.g. a number of employees http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=google+revenue+number+of+employees 

10. Ogranizational design tools can be very usefull not only for companies - startups, universities, governments, cities will signifantly benefit if they learn from these organiztions.

For the Russian page about the research and corresponging seminars please see the tbd2 site.