John Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO, recently gave a talk at Stanford university about how management works (and happens) in a heavily decentralized organization such as Mozilla. John made the slides from his presentation publicly available on Slideshare - here’s the link and here’s the deck:

Check it out — these are really interesting and entertaining 57 slides. Don’t miss slide 11 and 12 - John proves that you can boast about your achievements without sounding the slightest bit arrogant.

What makes this deck so special though is not the nice way it is layed out, nor is it the fact that John can tell a truly amazing and astonishing story with the whole “rising as phoenix from the ashes” angle around the birth and rise of Firefox; there is actually a tremendous amount of information in the deck which can help any organization in tackling their challenges while growing:

• The innovation and decision making process at Mozilla often happens at the edges of their organization — often by volunteers, not employees. Incorporating this into an organizational model is a massive challenge for an organization. In corporations we see time and time again that employees in the ‘lower ranks’ make very, very valuable suggestions - which don’t make their way up to the decision making levels and thus will never be implemented. I would even go so far and say that Mozilla in this respect is not unlike any large organization - I bet that even an organization such as GE has a ton of innovation happening on their edges, but they don’t excel at the ability to make sure that this innovation actually gets incorporated into the company (not to speak about the fact that decision making certainly doesn’t happen on the edges of an organization).
• The need for communication - I’m sure you heard it times and times again and we all try to live it. But in the end most organizations pretty much fail and we only communicate (internally as well as externally) more or less the bare minimum. Mozilla in contrast is tremendously open with their communication — and pretty much all their communication channels are two-way (Wikis, Blogs, IRC, etc) instead of simple one-way channels (the weekly memo send from the department head to his team).
• On the topic of decision making there is a lot we can learn about the way Mozilla tackles the challenge to have open discourse and participation with the need to actually make decisions (we all know the problem - 10 people discussing from very different points of view: Nothing gets done).

If you don’t have time or the patience to flip through the deck (I guess you then also wouldn’t have read this far anyway), check out slide 54 which summarizes John’s key learnings in 7 simple bullets.

Posted in Analysis, Entrepreneurship, Open Source