John’s Blog

mozilla talk at stanford

I gave a talk yesterday morning at Stanford to a set of folks — slides below. Much inspiration and actual material taken from Mike Beltzner’s earlier talks. Sometime when I have time I’ll do a voice-over in order to include my lame jokes.

Mostly it’s about how Mozilla is organized, and how we push decision-making to the edges of any organization we have — it’s really an organizational design & behavior talk. It’s been fun to do diferent flavors of this over the last few months — people get really engaged.

Stanford Presentation on Mozilla

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: organization mozilla)

Viewing 9 Comments

Edwin Khodabakchian 2 months ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

Thanks for sharing the slides! Looking forward to the book version!

reply edit reblog flag

thetruthaboutmozilla 2 months ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

Was it easy to give this talk?

I mean, you had to know you were lying through your teeth when you claimed that decision-making is pushed "to the edges" of Mozilla.

Everyone even mildly associated with anything-Mozilla knows that 5-10 people at Mozilla.COM make the relevant decisions... and if there's a decision that affects any one of your guys' resumes, you'll make sure it goes the "right" way. Which, of course, has nothing to do with what's best for the Mozilla community, or for the Web.

I suppose none of us should be surprised; it's not about reality as much as it's about perception. Right?

Keep up the great work, John!

(Which mostly has nothing to do with what Mozilla really should be about!)

P.S. I know how much you detest dissent within your own organization--we all know your "open door" policy is so you can ferret out those who disagree with you--I'll be interested to see if this comment even appears.

Two to one: it won't.

reply edit reblog flag

johnolilly 2 months ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

hi; i don't mind questions or dissent at all -- it's actually the only way that anything really good happens, as people need to push on things & challenge the status quo. it's how i *like* to work, and anyone who's worked with me for any period of time knows that.

if you've got real issues, send me mail to talk about them -- if you're the same person who's written before, i understand you must have specific things you want to talk about -- but to my knowledge none of these comments are grounded in any way. if you're mad about specific things, let me know and we can talk through them. i'm easy to find -- lastName @ mozilla dot com. short of that, it's hard to understand what you're unhappy about and address it.

for whatever it's worth, we do indeed push decisions as far out as possible -- we do it for routine things, we do it for significant things. we have many decision makers, in all functions.

reply edit reblog flag

1 /people/johnolilly/ /people/johnolilly/following/

skierpage 2 months ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

FYI, if you block cookies, you never see the slides at www.slideshare.net.

reply edit reblog flag

Rafael 2 months ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

Excellent.

reply edit reblog flag

http://rebron.org

Mark Surman 2 months ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

Great deck, John. Would love to hear the voice over if you get around to it. Can you replace the PDF on slideshare with the original slides? I'd like to borrow some.

reply edit reblog flag

http://commonspace.typepad.com

Will 3 weeks ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

This talk must have been great

reply edit reblog flag

Ali 2 weeks ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

Just one word: fabulous

reply edit reblog flag

Alex 2 weeks ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

WOW Superb!

reply edit reblog flag

Trackbacks

(Trackback URL)

finette.co.uk » blog » Mozilla’s CEO John Lilly on Management
September 12, 2008 at 10:43 am

[...] Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO, recently gave a talk at Stanford university about how management works (and happens) in a heavily ...