This is one of those books I hesitated to pick up because I was under the impression it would be exactly like most books that profile a single successful business. While, sure, there was some of that, I found that the authors maintained an on-the-ground perspective (because they indeed were) which helped me move from the first chapter to the next.

Here’s one particular note that stood out:

“The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part-time job.”

After sitting on this for a few days, I ended up beginning to re-organize my team. At that time, the divisions of labor were State lines. We had folks in Operations managing multiple aspects (customer service, dispatch, accounting, etc) of our marketplace for a single territory, each. While this made it easy to point the finger at someone for any particular transaction, I realized that nobody was able to focus on any single aspect of our marketplace, thus innovation fell flat.

There was another byproduct of our former org structure (territory based) at the time: relationships. With the team managing all aspects of our Operations for a single territory, the one constant for our team were the supply-side stakeholders in their territory. Naturally, with the frequency of communication high, the team began to develop relationships with the technicians and those relationships were leveraged to get positive outcomes for transactions. However, that began to have downsides. Our leveraging-of-relationships began to hide gaps in the platform. Instead of fixing x, we were able to successfully train folks on how to get around x. Not a bad short-term option, but a ticking time bomb that I believed needed to be removed quickly.

Over time, I’ve begun to have the point of view that some combination of vertical/horizontal organizational structure will probably be needed in the long run. Ultimately, I don’t think there’s a fundamental right and wrong for every business, but our decisions about org structure reveal the answer to the question; what kind of business do we want to build?