90 Days of BzzAgent

While I was away luxuriating, something unusual happened at the Hive: there was an internal battle. Well, maybe not a battle so much as a squabble, a business-related tug of war, a time of friction among colleagues.

Hivesters are used to getting everybody involved in a contentious issue in one room together and talking things out. But this bit of strife had client services and sales locking horns with production and they couldn’t resolve the issue themselves. Management had to be called in to mediate. No one likes that.

There were no harangues. No body slams. And, as far as I can tell, no serious after-effects. There was, however, a sense of unrest and discomfort and slight apprehension. It was difficult not to connect this minor rift with the stresses and strains of rapid growth, cramped space, quarterly sales pressure, and many new faces in the Hive.

In big companies, internal business units and professional disciplines are constantly in conflict with one another. People come to identify with their own little band of brothers and sisters and sometimes demonize the “others” over there in engineering or the southwest region or marketing. (Especially marketing, which usually deserves it.) Managers spend a lot of time trying to get people to venture out of their silos and communicate and collaborate with each other.

78 days ago, when I first came into the Hive and started writing 90 Days, there didn’t seem to be internal factions. There were like-minded subgroups, perhaps, and some departmental loyalties. The Boys in the Cave, for example, and the Gang in Sales, and the Nuts in Analysis, and the Production Team, and Client Services, and Finance. But they didn’t run in packs.

They still don’t. But when the head count hits 80 and the 500 Harrison Hive has discrete cells for different departments, can we expect to see swarms forming a little more often?