stanford presentation on mozilla
Post on 25-Dec-2014
11.774 Views
Preview:
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
managing in/with/around/by chaos:a mozilla story
John Lilly, CEOMozilla
Business today is: complex, messy, multi-lingual, continuous (24x7), rapidly changing...
but also: incredibly leveraged, world-impacting, full of learning, empowering, fun...
the main question I consider:
how do we operate most effectively today?
Here’s where I start:
“Nobody knows anything.”William Goldman, Which Lie Did I Tell?
(also the screenwriter for The Princess Bride)
Outline for Today
• Mozilla Background
• How We Work
• How We Communicate
• How We Argue
• How We Compete
• Wrap-up
Mozilla Background
Mozilla’s mission is to promote choice and
innovation on the Internet.
Mozilla is...
A global open source software project with thousands of contributors
Approaching 200 Million users
The maker of the Firefox Web browser
Mozilla Background
• Mozilla Foundation started in July 2003, as a spinoff from AOL
• An open source project started as way to compete with Microsoft’s overwhelming resource advantage
• Firefox launched in November 2004 10 Million downloads in first month
• Mozilla Corporation started in July 2005 as a wholly owned subsidiary
• Revenue from search relationships in the $50M+ range
• Now a collection of companies worldwide supporting the Mozilla Mission
10
853
10
5
5
> 170 people6 offices
~20 total locations6 organizationsWorldwide Employees
Mozilla Organizational Complexity is High
• 170+ people servicing 180M+ users
• Doubled in size each year for last 3 years
• 6 different legal organizations (MoFo, MoCo, MozEU, MZ DK, MozJP, MozChina)
• Products in more than 50 languages
That’s great...but why should you care??
one reason: 100 people can take on Microsoft...
Worldwide Firefox Market Share (as of march 2008)
Mozilla takes participatory production to extremes...
How We Work
Mozilla is a Chaordic System
• Chaord: any self-organizing, adaptive, nonlinear, complex community or system, whether physical, biological or social, the behavior of which exhibits characteristics of both order and chaos.
• Term coined by Dee Hock, creator of Visa
• Chaordic systems exhibit high degrees of chaos, but generally organized into a higher level type of order
• They tend to be robust, failure-tolerant, and creative
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d2/Internet_map_1024.jpg
The Internet: A Chaordic System
The Blogosphere: Another Chaordic System
source: benfry.com
Emergent Examples
Mozilla as Chaord
• Decision making happens at the edges of the organization
• And many times, completely outside the “official” organization
• But we’re structured in the way that we communicate & handle disputes
• The result is a very flexible, highly decentralized organization that’s difficult to compete against
• (Alternative model: Starfish & Spider)
• Thinking like this helps me think about how to get things done...
How We Communicate
Communication
• In a chaordic organization, communication is key to insight & collaboration
• People need to be able to make decisions together based on a common view (understanding?) of underlying data
• The tools need to be useful for whoever is involved in any collaboration, regardless of who they report to, who they’re paid by, or where they live
• People will find ways to communicate, no matter what
• The key is figuring out how to make the broadest possible use of the communications that do occur, whether or not they’re “sanctioned”
Wikis
• Open, editable (tracked) documents everywhere practical (internal & external)
Blogs
• Real time communications with employees, contributors, customers, press, fans
• We use official blogs, personal blogs, community blogs, internal blogs
• Each has different reach, different meaning to audiences (but they sometimes get misinterpreted)
OPBs (Other People’s Blogs)
• Sometimes the best conversations happen on blogs you have nothing to do with
• Empowering others means that you don’t have to do everything
• Means you need to track the whole web more or less all the time (Technorati or Google Blog Search)
Open Newsgroups & IRC
• As much of our real-time discussion as possible is out in the open
• Not just read-only, but also interactive
• Sometimes leads to complicated discussions because not everyone has context & history
Videos, video-conferencing, and lots of phone calls
• Standing phone conferences
• Regular staff meetings videoed and minutes written
• Air Mozilla video blog
But nothing beats face-to-face
• Lots of trips to meet people where they live
• Frequent all-hands meetings (approx 4 times a year)
• Annual gatherings that include contributors who don’t work for Mozilla (Firefox Summit)
• These interactions provide the human relationship foundation for much of our work
And tons of others...
• Google docs & spreadsheets
• IM is used constantly
• Lots of Tweets!
• Skype, iChat AV
• E-mail (of course)
• Bugzilla (our #1 collaboration technique)
Open doesn’t mean democracy!(more on that next...)
How We Argue
Decision-making is messy
• In an open organization, decision making can be incredibly messy
• Conflict can be constructive or destructive(best authority on constructive conflict: Andy Grove)
• Actively managing the way that decisions happen is crucial
• An example: open source coding & design
Embracing the chaos...
“I love tabs!”
“Everyone uses tags,not bookmarks.”
“My mom doesn’tunderstand tabs.”
“OpenID is the future!”
“What’s with thedirty house?”
“Nobody uses the ‘Go’ button.”
“There should bea preference setting.” “Add support for
BitTorrent.”
“Fitts’ says biggerbuttons are better.”
“Add support forOgg Vorbis.”
“That’s great!”
“That’s awful”
“The profile managershould be redesigned.”
“Closebuttons are better atthe end of the tabstrip.”
“The URL bar shouldbe removed.”
ChaosAnyone can propose a change
ChaosAnyone can comment on a proposal for a change
ChaosAnyone can submit a change to the code
Chaos
camps are formed quickly
Chaos
easier to comment than to do
how do we make it work?
Ordereducate
Orderidentify and elevate smart contributors
OrderKey: Not everyone can approve a change
Provide a path of least resistanceto channel the input to where you want it
Create a clear path for contributors
Create small teams with responsibilityto specific areas of interest
Elevate discussions with dataand research whenever possible
Always bias towards openness in decision-making...
...but remember that it is not a democracy!
The Gorilla in the Room
The Situation 5 Years Ago
IE6: 95%+
The Situation Today (300% more circular icons!)
72%
7%
20%
1%?
choice & innovation FTW!
How can Mozilla compete?
• Under-capitalized
• Under-resourced
• Under-branded (?)
Mozilla must be Mozilla
communitycontinue to allow leadership & decision-making from 1000s of contributors
missionwe’re just here to make the web betterno other agendabut must be broader than just the browser
participation & customizationstrength of Firefox is that even end users can participate & customize
Wrap-up
Things I’ve Learned from Mozilla
• Ignore the chain of command (mostly)
• Get agreement in basic operating principles and values
• Over-rotate towards communication so that everyone has the same data
• Encourage transparency of decision making
• But avoid democracy/consensus expectation setting
• Lead, but don’t command
• Take unexpected efficiencies where you find them
More things to read...
Dee Hock on chaordic systems: http://web.archive.org/web/20010405020550/http://www.cascadepolicy.org/dee_hock.htm
Inc. Magazine profile on Mitchell & our management stylehttp://www.inc.com/magazine/20070201/features-firefox.html
Great for thinking about distributed organizations
Great for thinking about leading with soft & hard power
My recent thinking:organizationsare miscellaneous
questions, comments, discussion
Thank you
lilly@mozilla.com
thanks & apologies to:Mike Beltzner
Paul KimChris Beard
top related