Is Position or Department Necessary in Company?
By: Warpspace Inc.
Tags: Startup, High Tech, Team Building, Space Business, New Space

Position, Department means,,,,

This is Satoru in charge of CEO in WARPSPACE. In our company, we don’t set positions or departments excepting CEO, CTO, and GM(General Manager).

Even Officers, we regard it as just function in organization.

On the other hand, we have occupations, which are engineers and business development at present. But it’d be segmentalized into a bit small units, e.g. satellite engineers or ground engineers.

At not only startup companies, but large enterprises, “Position inflation” is likely to happen as part of treatment or promotion. But from point of my view, such settings are not reasonable at all and even harm for organizations.

Especially for a small team like startup, it’s just nothing but harm.

For instance, variety of CxO are created without considering delegation based on MECE, and variety of executive are assigned despite the team members are about 20 or 30, I guess that you could imagine if you have network with startup companies.

In WARPSPACE, there is no departments as well, even we don’t divide into engineer teams and business team. Adequate members are assigned for each meetings. Furthermore, we don’t separate full time members, service contract, and part-time members. We eliminate the employee benefits limited to full time members. We have a workation support system called “resort work”. This can be applied for members who work over 45hours/m not limited to full time members.

Why we do what we do?

Key points are;

①Delegation on the basis of MECE and authority distribution

②Flexibility of division of roles

Let me explain below.

①Delegation on the basis of MECE

What I mean here by “Authority” is not about power, but responsibility for making decision in organization. In the company, as shown in following figure, the responsibility is delegated from stockholders into director, then the responsibility of management decision is delegated from directors into officers. Officers have been given the authority to execute on operations.

For instance, if there are CRO （Chief Revenue Officer） and CBO （Chief Business Officer） in one organization, which officer is responsible for the sales activities to the CEO and board directors? Conflict is likely to happen in such case and it’ll bring confusion inside of the company. In addition, it is difficult to dismiss the person in charge once assigned. I understand that perfect delegation on the basis of MECE, but it is necessary to design and assign the functions and positions, otherwise the organization and personnel can’t fully perform and loss of flexibility will be caused.

Flexibility of the division of roles

The direction of project or plan are often changed in startup. This is the meaning to exist as startup and we need to adapt in such drastic change of circumstances flexibly and resiliently. If positions and departments are fixed in details, it needs to redesign the organization map scale to adapt and it means death for startup.

In a small team like startup, one personnel is often responsible for several functions. If that happens though division of roles are set in detail, how valuable is it to make such organization map? Even engineers, they might be good at playing role like as HR, one engineer might take responsibility for company’s system and service. If it seems an optimized team design from one point of view, it might not work at all from view of different perspective.

Even if we separate into engineer team and BizDev team, harmful effects can’t be removed. No matter what the granularity is, the way of thinking and actions which are not based on “One team” will spread in the team such as, “This task should be engineer team’s!!” or “From point of BizDev’s view,,,”, something like that. On top of that, is “Engineering” not included the scope of “BizDev”? Or opposite way? I think they can’t be separated at all. Therefore, in WARPSPACE, required members are assigned for meeting according to the purpose and theme. If “Engineer team meeting” is held in WARPSPACE, I’d stop it with my full power.

To close

If there is classification of members in company, it is just delegated function.

It might not be necessary to give it each name. But human being don’t have such capability to distinguish, we need bare minimum “positions” and “occupation”. If we could eliminate such incomprehensible “positions” and “department”, the productivity of this country will go up significantly. I’ve been feeling that way recently.