Lessons from the corporate world
By: Felix Geilert
Tags: Startup, Reflections, 2020, Business, Work

What a hell of a year, in the most literal sense of the word! I guess (almost) nobody expected at the beginning of the year how it would turn out, and all the challenges that all of us would have to face. And I guess most of us are looking forward to 2021 to reboot and leave all of this behind.

But let us stop here for a second. Take a minute to reflect. The challenges we faced forced us to find solutions to new problems and we have grown along the way. In these articles I want to take the time and reflect on what I have learned in the past year, and why it might be interesting for you as well. And, who knows, maybe reflecting on what we have achieved will also bring a bit of positivity back into this year. I certainly hope it will inspire others to share their reflection of 2020, and I am open (and thankful) for any feedback!

This series is split into multiple articles:

Lessons from the corporate world

The last few years I have spent working in the startup world and building technology from scratch. However, from time to time a change is due and so this year also marked my departure from the startup sphere into the corporate world.

This has been an interesting journey so far. There are obvious differences between the two, but also some surprising similarities. In this article, I would like to explain to you what I learned and outline some of the things that corporations could copy from startups (and vice versa). Some of the learnings might be specific to Microsoft, but I assume most of them will apply to any larger organization.

Culture Shock

The first thing I noticed were processes. There are a lot of them. Almost every default interaction has a predefined process to follow. This can be a blessing as well as a curse.

On the one hand it can standardize interactions, and everybody knows what is required and how to help. On the other hand, it can drastically reduce agility. The main point here is that startups are built to develop new ideas and therefore need to quickly iterate through many prototypes. This allows them to figure out the core value that can be delivered to the customer. And while corporations also iterate over their products, they do so from a different vantage point. The core values is already known and potential changes need to be shipped to millions of customers. The focus is therefore on stability (through processes) and marginal improvements.

You might say that this is not a new discovery, but I found the implications interesting as it explains the phases through which many startups run. As they find their core market and their product scales, they need to gradually shift into a more constraint development environment (through processes). Otherwise they risk breaking the experiences for their existing customers.

The other big difference that I noticed comes in terms of resources and learning interactions. In a startup you have to be conscious of all your resources, including money and time. Accordingly, you do not necessarily take explicit time to learn something new, but rather learn along the way (which can be a beautiful and powerful thing).

In contrast, in the corporate world, you have a lot more leeway. At least for me there are numerous learning opportunities that go beyond my daily tasks (which are more focused around my existing skills compared to the broader range of tasks of a founder). This includes sessions for knowledge sharing, conferences or access to company internal learning resources.

I do not think that one way is better, but it is a difference and one that requires a certain degree of adaptation in the beginning.

One Family

In a startup (at least in the first years) there is always a sense of familiarity. Everybody is working on the same product and has high stakes in the company itself. I did not expect to find something similar in the corporate world.

Contrary to my expectations, I found a surprising degree of closeness in the entire organization. Sure, there are still organizational boundaries and time zone differences, but most of the time you have the ability to ping everyone inside the organization. (And most of the time you will actually get an answer).

This opens a new opportunity for learning. The more areas a company is active in, the more opportunities one gets. For Microsoft this includes research in various areas (such as Reinforcement Learning or Quantum Computers), scaling out of infrastructure or operating system hacks. There hasn’t been a day where I haven’t learned about something or someone new.

The virtues of both Worlds

This is not to say that I think everything is perfect. There are certainly things that can be improved and looking back at the startup world, some lessons can be learned.

As mentioned before, in terms of experimentation and testing new ideas, startups have a lot more agility. By decoupling teams that are working on new technologies from the org-chart, larger companies can create a similar effect. (A potential downside can be that failed endeavors might have a negative impact on the brand).

Additionally, processes at big companies might reduce agility, but allow things to be a lot more scalable. There can be unified legal agreements and nearly everybody knows how the process works, which allows for easier trouble shooting. On the downside, these processes can be tedious and take time, which reduces the iteration cycles. At some points they might even be outdated.

Microsoft bridges that gap partly through regular, company-wide Hackathons. They usually last about a week and allow us to pursue new ideas or improvements into any direction, leading to many interesting prototypes. There are very little restraints applied, giving a lot of freedom on how to tackle different problems. Good solutions or management tactics from the Hackathon might then be extracted into the “mainstream” (i.e. daily operations).

Looking back at my experiences from the past year, my impression is that the agility of bigger companies stands or falls with the leeway the company provides and the restraint employees exercise (similar to the way described in the book “How Democracies die”). Larger companies are most efficient, when they give their employees clear processes, to scale things, but enough leeway to go around them if necessary. In turn, employees need to have enough restraint not to circumvent the processes all the time (e.g. leading to broken products), but only when necessary for the benefit of the customer.