On Sep 21, 2009, at 2:10 PM, Ovid wrote:
----- Original Message ----
From: Roger Burton West <ro...@firedrake..org>
Frustrating, really. There's plenty of evidence (there's a William
Whyte study
that I can't find a link to right now) that large-scale moves like
this fail
dramatically.
Unless the objective is to sack everyone and hire cheaper people in
the
new place, of course. (Which it probably isn't in this case, but it
certainly has been with other companies.)
The existing literature I've read on the topic make it clear that
this generally isn't the plan, but is what winds up happening as
people either refuse to move or leave the company after they move
once they realize they don't like how things are going/where they've
moved to. As a result, these companies repeatedly lose tons of
business knowledge which is locked away in the employee's heads.
And I've found a reference to one of the sources of this
information: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/OfficeNewYork.html
Other articles I've read deal extensively with large companies in
the US relocating to other environments and failing dramatically
because they *can't* effectively deal with the loss of business
knowledge.
In Peopleware (a favourite read of mine...) Tom DeMarco comments about
the AT&T move of the ESS1 project in the late 1960s:
Years after the ESS cutover, I arranged to interview Ray Ketchledge
who had run the project. I was writing some essays on management of
large efforts, and ESS certainly qualified. I asked him what he saw as
his main successes and failures as boss. "Forget the successes," he
said. "The failure was that move. You can't believe what it cost us in
turnover." He went on to give some figures. The immediately calculable
cost of the move was the number of people who quit before relocation
day. Expressed as a percentage of those moved, this initial turnover
was greater than the French losses in the trenches of World War I.
—TDM
Deliberately firing employees and moving is such a stupid idea that
it borders on willful negligence.
True.
Mike
--
Mike Stok <m...@stok.ca>
http://www.stok.ca/~mike/
The "`Stok' disclaimers" apply.
