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

I am old enough to remember plenty of management fads which claimed to be elixirs for all the ills of organizing.

I probably remember “TQM” (Total Quality Management) best of all, because of its vast popularity despite it being total nonsense.  Indeed, within just a few years, “time to market” had relegated “quality” to the back seat.  And if you think quality is still a driving force, take a flight or call a mobile service provider!

I smell a new TQM skunk! In social media as well as academic journals, there is a lot of vibe about the lessening prominence of leadership as well as the need to focus on enhancing self-management for both the sophisticated nerd and the average Joe.

I have worked with many organizations which put a high premium on leaderless and self-management. Without an exception, they all “outgrew” this or died from decision paralysis and astounding mediocrity.

This short post will provide my perspective on this new religion-de-jour!

1) Leaderlessness and self-management have a manipulative basis.

•    Empowered by information technology yet bogged down by ERPs and mistrust, it may be sexy to espouse the value of self – management, but it is cunning to an extreme. It certainly does create someone to blame when the system does not work too well.
•    Power is concentrated in the hands of the ruling class, the tycoons, the powers that be or whatever. A call to “leaderlessness” and self-management sounds to me a general telling his front line troops to “develop the strategy and battle plan”, and then shooting them in the back for being cowards.

2. Self Management in the ERP hell.

In many organizations, ERP has replaced common sense and initiative, and serving the process is so dominant that there is almost no room for either good leadership or self-management. So let’s put the blame where it lies, and not promote the false messiah of self management.

3. Psychology

People need leaders to admire and hate. I see this as a self-obvious truth. Am I too old? Out of touch? Or is someone peddling a new fad?

4-Complexity

As the world of work became so complex and high speed, integration between disciplines and perspectives becomes absolutely critical. This integration does not happen by itself, because of ego, power games and bandwidth issues. Leaders drive integration by choosing the right people and leading/managing them properly.

So yes, I do see leaderlessness, holacracy and over dosing on  self management as a new fad and in many cases, pure crap, misleading, manipulative and/or irrelevant.

But it sure is going to be lucrative.

And an afterthought- Organizations and people need leaders; employees, equipped with an end to end perspective of what’s going on. That does NOT negate the fact that  yeam members must learn to  work with their peers to resolves issues without undue escalation.

There are several major reasons that organizations are not flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstance. In this post I will examine three, and suggest what needs to be done to achieve more flexibility.  (There are of course other reasons, like bad politics. which I will not deal with in this post).

1) Too much chaos

Sam, Lisl and Ethan’s company started in a garage. Sam wrote the key algorithms , Lisl raised money and Ethan looked for a strategic partner. All 3 wrote code. All decisions were made together by consensus.

Their company now has 50  people with 4 major  subcontractors. All decisions go up to Sam Lisl and Ethan who still manage the company like 3 nerds in a garage. Decision making is a nightmare, locked in the free-spirited “we-all-decide-everything” mode. (Last week they had a one day meeting about with which travel agency to work).

In essence, their company has become the very essence of rigidity, with decisions lagging by 4 months.

2) Too much bureaucracy

I will not use a case study to illustrate this type of rigidity in a large  company . We all know it all too well. These organizations have an ERP which has replaced common sense. The work flow  is a nightmare. Every minor issue generates tens to hundreds of emails, as anxious staff make sure that they serve the process and transfer blame backwards or forwards. It is very hard to do very simple things, and impossible to do anything creative. Everything takes much much longer than it should, and the organization (often assisted by internal OD) is obsessed with process improvement.

3) Organizations which have adopted agile methodologies.

Prompted by “best practices”, blind emulation of technology and pure stupidity, there are a plethora of “agile methodologies” available to organizations who want to apply agile coding practices to the art of organization. (In some ways this reminds me of western politicians who want to promote liberal democracy in the Middle East).

An agile methodology is an oxymoron, like thought leadership. In the quest to loosen up from too much or too little order in order to gain more flexibility, organizations embrace yet another cause of rigidity,  a “methodology”.

Summary

Organizations are rigid because they have too much or too little “order”.

An agile methodology is self defeating.

Organizations whose rigidity stems from chaos need order.

Organizations with too much order need less IT driven processes, digital detox and massive injections of common sense. Yes, common sense.  Ni plus ni moins.

Agile organizational methodologies should be replaced with smart hires, lot of room for common sense, and small teams (as geographically consolidated as possible) that meet face to face with their smartphones off.

Often senior managers are highly skilled in the act of manipulation.  As a matter of fact, it  is one of the very reasons that senior people reach the top.

Highly manipulative leaders/manager often commission consultants when manipulation is no longer effective. Most frequently this happens upon being promoted, or when there is a need for rapid change.

Influence and manipulation may look similar but there are major differences-

• lack of intentional functional transparency
• lack of consistency, e.g, measuring X and demanding Y. (Talk quality and measure speed)
• built in need for escalation to get things done (very very common)

I do not want to quibble about what manipulation is because, like pornography, we know it when see it.

In this post I will give 6 guidelines about how to work with highly manipulative managers who commission consulting work.

1. Be open about your own agenda. (I want to make money. I want to build my reputation, I hate failure) Exposing agendas models migrating away from manipulation.
2. Do not be judgmental about manipulation. The client must understand that while manipulation may no longer work, it is not useful to  knock what he/she thinks brought him up through the ranks.
3. Use the here and how to “expose” each and every manipulation that your client uses with you.
4. I have found use of paradoxical interventions most useful with this population
5. Provide useful  alternatives to manipulation, acknowledging that the alternatives to manipulation have unwanted side effects. (Kipnis and Pois are still relevant).
6. Be fully transparent. Transparency is the ultimate mitigation mechanism of manipulation.

Case-

Helmut commissioned me to work with him on implementing an organizational change which is moving too slowly. Helmut has been  CEO for 6 months, and previously he was head of the European Sales Division.

Helmut has succeeded in every role he has had until now. His results have been  impeccable. This is no longer the case.

Helmut plays his various team members against once another. He gives the same task to  5 different people.He is purposely vague so that everyone is always guessing what he means.

In our initial meetings, Helmut was vague about what he wanted. Two other OD consultants were also involved, all with vague overlapping mandates. Helmut blamed me that I was not practical. In a long and heated 2 hour discussion, I called him on his manipulation and resigned. He re-hired me two days later, and he even  oked that I publish this post. Things are moving.  But I watch my back.