Pmarca (aka Mark Andreessen) has this great post on how things work in a big company:
The behavior of any big company is largely inexplicable when viewed from the outside.
I always laugh when someone says, “Microsoft is going to do X”, or “Google is going to do Y”, or “Yahoo is going to do Z”.
Odds are, nobody inside Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo knows what Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo is going to do in any given circumstance on any given issue.
Sure, maybe the CEO knows, if the issue is really big, but you’re probably not dealing at the CEO level, and so that doesn’t matter.
The inside of any big company is a very, very complex system consisting of many thousands of people, of whom at least hundreds and probably thousands are executives who think they have some level of decision-making authority.
On any given issue, many people inside the company are going to get some kind of vote on what happens — maybe 8 people, maybe 10, 15, 20, sometimes many more.
When I was at IBM in the early 90’s, they had a formal decision making process called “concurrence” — on any given issue, a written list of the 50 or so executives from all over the company who would be affected by the decision in any way, no matter how minor, would be assembled, and any one of those executives could “nonconcur” and veto the decision. That’s an extreme case, but even a non-extreme version of this process — and all big companies have one; they have to — is mind-bendingly complex to try to understand, even from the inside, let alone the outside.
“… and the breath of the whale is frequently attended with such an insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain.”
— Ulloa’s South America
You can count on there being a whole host of impinging forces that will affect the dynamic of decision-making on any issue at a big company.
The consensus building process, trade-offs, quids pro quo, politics, rivalries, arguments, mentorships, revenge for past wrongs, turf-building, engineering groups, product managers, product marketers, sales, corporate marketing, finance, HR, legal, channels, business development, the strategy team, the international divisions, investors, Wall Street analysts, industry analysts, good press, bad press, press articles being written that you don’t know about, customers, prospects, lost sales, prospects on the fence, partners, this quarter’s sales numbers, this quarter’s margins, the bond rating, the planning meeting that happened last week, the planning meeting that got cancelled this week, bonus programs, people joining the company, people leaving the company, people getting fired by the company, people getting promoted, people getting sidelined, people getting demoted, who’s sleeping with whom, which dinner party the CEO went to last night, the guy who prepares the Powerpoint presentation for the staff meeting accidentally putting your startup’s name in too small a font to be read from the back of the conference room…
You can’t possibly even identify all the factors that will come to bear on a big company’s decision, much less try to understand them, much less try to influence them very much at all.
I work at a big company and I agree. In fact, I think there would be a lot less frustration around most big companies if the juniors (e.g. people with 5 years or less experience) understood this fact.
The full article is really about what you need to know about a big company if you are a start-up that is trying to make some sort of a deal with the big company. It is quite insightful and an entertaining read, especially if you are working at a startup.