Ray Morgan

(The following post first appeared on Talentism as "Strategic Step 4", but since it is about someone I think you should all know about, I thought I would post it over here too.)

Ray Morgan is a remarkable person. The teams he has lead have created amazing examples of engineering excellence and creativity, including the solar plane which holds the altitude record to this day. I once asked him how he did it. He replied simply “I made my company a massively parallel computer.”

It took me a while, but I finally got his point.

Think of your organization like a computer. Like a computer there are inputs, outputs, translators, memory and processors. Most organizations are set up to ensure that one or two key individuals are the processors: they take the information from the various input devices (their advisors), call upon memory (in the form of regulations, financial information, etc.) and then process the information into a decision (output) that they then expect executed by the rest of the organization.

In a small organization this “computing architecture” may be optimal. In fact, you see the “one main processor” design in many early-stage start-ups. But the larger your organization becomes the more inefficient this design becomes. Think of your computer at home: the more data you put on the disk, the more programs you have open, the greater the load you put on your processor. This causes your computer to slow down and eventually crash. It’s the same thing for an organization: put any one processor in the critical path, no matter how advanced, and your computer eventually stops working.

Ray went on to explain that he felt his job as a leader was to help everyone possible who worked with him to become better processors. As long as there was some ordering mechanism for outputs (i.e. more processors didn’t just create more confusion) having as many processors as possible helped his organization be more creative, solve problems faster and reduce turnover. No matter how big it got and no matter how complex the tasks before them, his division seemed to be able to work through it.

What Ray didn’t say (probably due to his inherent humility) was that he is a world-class system architect. He didn’t spend his time being the biggest, the fastest or the best processor in the organization. He understood that as one person he could never be as efficient or effective as many people aligned around working a problem. Instead, he spent his time setting up information channels, processes and systems to ensure that each team member (processor) could add as much value as possible to any problem they tackled.

Being a system architect is probably the most difficult work that an individual or team can undertake. This explains why so few managers do it well. As individualists and capitalists we are raised to be the best possible egocentric mega-processors rote education can produce. We are told that if you want to be a leader you have to be assertive and controlling. This means that when things go wrong most managers feel the undeniable urge to take control of the situation. And since there is always something going wrong, it is easy to feel that we are delivering the most value for the organization when we are the biggest and best processor of risk and cost information, parsing information and making decisions that send other people marching to put out the myriad fires.

This is most likely why most organizations lack for a coherent approach to resource allocation, process design and business model realization. This is also a key reason that people don’t usually reach the top when they play the role of the thoughtful background players. We are not programmed for architecture, especially when processing is so much more viscerally and socially appealing.

And yet it is lack of architectural competence that is the single most important reason for business disruption. It is not the failure to make grand strategic pronouncements that imperil us, nor is it a lack of people to take the lead and “make it happen.” It is the translators in the middle, the people who look at where the organization wants to go and what it has to work with and create the systems and processes and culture that enable that vision to become reality.

If HR wants to be a “strategic player” it needs to be doing two things well (aside from the day-to-day transactions): making as many people in the organization into processors and creating a system architecture that can harness the increase in organizational power that follows.

Thanks for the lesson Ray (the best father-in-law a guy could hope for). And welcome!