I received this email (shortened and edited) 3 weeks ago.

“Allon,

I found out about you from your irritating but hilarious Gloria satire.

I manage a team of 12 HR people in (name withheld), an Anglo-Dutch-Spanish company with operations in Europe and Japan.

I really want my team to development partnership with their managers, yet several of my staff remind me too much of your Gloria: control, sloganeering and fear of confronting poor managers.

Can you give a talk to my staff (one hour) on what you as an OD consultant consider to be the guiding principles for partnering with management that HR should embrace.

Kindly suggest a time we can talk.

Name withheld”

I gave the talk last evening and in this post, I would like to share my main points .

• The achievements of “homo sapiens at work” stem from our ability to consciously cooperate, “imagining” a future state to which all work in a degree of unison.
• Powerful factors drive people to poor cooperation, due to flaws in the present economic model, the impact of IT technology on the art of communication and the superficiality caused by the high speed of business.
• The essence of mighty challenge all of us in the “people professions” face is the need to foster far more cooperation and lessen the growing alienation (anomie) in the workplace.
• HR seems to have several tools at its disposal: rewards, recruitment, development processes, guardian of the culture, business partnership.
• Cooperation however is evasive. Too much use of culture-as-a religion promotes rebellion against religious organizational doctrine. Using rewards may work up till a point, only to become a bargaining process of paying for performance. Recruitment is a crap shoot;  all processes have a human “work around”.
• Thus, there is no “protocol” to enhance cooperation, only trial, error, common sense, pragmatism, luck, and massive investment in mitigating trust issues between with people, within projects and between teams.
• One needs to focus solely on the cooperation to the exclusion of almost everything else. If what you do does not build cooperation, you are not being effective.
• You cannot cook an omelet without breaking eggs. Afraid of confrontation? You chose the wrong career.
• Be very careful not to overdose on measurement. Data can be used to provide an indication; I suggest  not obsessing about measurement. When we start measuring, we like to be accurate, which leads the measurer to change what we are measuring. The act of measuring often negatively impacts he/she who measures to ignore the all too important abstract.
• Don’t be afraid to sound irrelevant if you believe you are in the right direction. Don’t cave in and “please”. Persevere.

John Scherer will receive ODN’s Lifeline Achievement Award for 2015.

This blog and my Gloria satiric blog exist because John Scherer pressured me to write. Thank you John.

The most useful critique of my global OD work and my style has come from John. His comments have had context, depth and John’s  intent is to help and support. When he speaks, I listen.

John has boundless energy. He inspires, he innovates and he learns, all the time. John has a heart of gold, a heart bigger than he is. John is a giver.His clients are very lucky.

I am a better consultant for having John as a colleague. I am enriched for having him as a friend.

And he truly deserves the recognition he is getting.

Bravo, Johnny boy, from Gloria and me.

Doing Organizational Development (OD) in Startups (revised 2026)

This post discusses how to do organizational development (OD) work with startups and their founders. Don’t get too excited—it’s not easy.

At first glance, there seems to be a strong match between the value proposition of OD and the needs of startups.

Startups usually have talented people, flexibility, and a high level of engagement. They also do not yet suffer from the chronic problems that affect older organizations.

OD can provide a development platform—mindsets, concepts, and skills—to support the new technologies and products that startups are creating. In addition, teamwork is a critical success factor in startups.

It sounds like a perfect fit.

However, founders are often not receptive to OD. Ironically, the very qualities that allow someone to become a founder can also prevent them from making proper use of OD.

Founders are driven to break barriers and create innovation. Because of this, they often view “organizational issues” in one of two ways:

1. Organizational issues are trivial—just “common sense” (usually meaning the founder’s own common sense).

2. Organizational issues are an opportunity to reinvent human nature: “I will create an organization that changes the way people organize.”

Startups may have great ideas, advanced technologies, and talented people. Founders often develop detailed roadmaps for building their technological solutions. Yet they rarely ask a critical question:

“What kind of organization do we need in order to support these great ideas?”

As a result, the factors that eventually limit a startup’s growth are often organizational—and they are frequently reinforced by the behavior of an overly confident founder.

Founders also tend to react poorly to OD consultants. Not only are some founders arrogant, but many OD practitioners lack the technical understanding needed to gain the founders’ respect.

There is also a generational gap. OD consultants are often much older than startup founders, which can create a “parent–child” dynamic. (For example, I am 76, and many of my clients are in their twenties.)

In the early stages, founders typically appoint an administrative assistant as the first HR manager—along with responsibility for facilities and car rentals. This effectively closes the HR channel for serious organizational work, because the newly empowered administrator often blocks access to the CEO.

Sometimes investors try to solve this problem by placing an OD consultant on the board or attaching OD support as a condition of their investment. This approach can undermine trust between the founder and the consultant—although I have seen a few cases where it worked.

In most startups, OD work truly begins only when the founder steps aside to become CTO and a professional CEO is brought in. The tension between the founder and the new CEO is often the ideal entry point for an OD project.

In fact, about 98% of the work I do with startups begins this way.

Once a project begins, I suggest focusing on several key areas:

1. Align organizational development with future growth. Build the organization that will be needed six months from now, not just the one that fits today.

2. Create a dialogue and action plan around scalability. The organization must be able to grow without breaking.

3. Manage the evolution of the early employees. The company should neither become enslaved to the founding team nor simply push them aside. There are constructive ways to handle this transition.

4. Develop an ongoing life-cycle dialogue about people, skills, norms, and organizational structure.

Follow me: @AllonShevat