Refactoring organizations to increase your impact: “So we changed the meetings to focus on proposals instead of problems. Stating and identifying problems is fine, and sometimes it’s all we can do when the solution eludes us. But proposals are the heavy artillery in meetings. They force us to focus on possibilities, and they force us to do our homework and weigh the alternatives.”
Things I love about this post:
- Proposals as the management equivalent of “pull requests” or “patches welcome”
- It’s a more sophisticated version of the old management trope “Bring me solutions, not problems”
- It’s another post about management from folks in the technology industry, something I wish there was more of
Chris Heisel 
I recently noticed a talk relating management to software development.
Pieter Hintjens, an author of zeromq, advocates a pretty extreme version of “patches welcome”:
The ideas are geared toward an open source project with many contributors, and his recommendations go beyond my comfort zone, but it was an interesting talk.
He centers the talk on Conway’s law, which states that artifacts created by an organization are bound to reflect the structure of that organization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law