Steven Sinofsky

I think there's four things I suggest you consider.

1. Writing is thinking [1][2][3]

There are a number of articles that explain this concept better than I can here, but assuming you understand the idea, I'll continue.

The next time you're thinking about some problem, try to write your thoughts and reasoning down as notes. Your writing should be an extension of reasoning, and help formulate and refine your ideas. Whether your notes are on paper or by pixel shouldn't matter, but just get your ideas down. Next, order these ideas by logical progression: maybe one concept leads you to the next, so order them in that progression. Finally, make sure the links between each idea are not leaps in thought but rather fluid and clear progressions. Fill in the gaps as necessary.

Now you should have an outline for your article. At this point, I've found it's more or less a matter of expanding on and explaining each idea more thoroughly. Of course, the hook and conclusion are less well-defined.

For me, if it's really something I care about writing a post about, I've found I've already done the note-taking part at least. After that, the post seems to write itself.

If you don't already take notes or use writing to help you think, I recommend taking this as a first step to helping you write your blog posts. I personally prefer pen and paper, since I can still keep the mistakes around!

2. Write for yourself

Assume no one is going to read your article, at first. Write the article that…

Initially inspired by this Stratechery post (which also has a bunch of historical references):

https://stratechery.com/2016/apples-organizational-crossroads/

Also by personal experience at Google, which reorganized from functional lines to product lines when Larry took over as CEO in 2011.

There've also been a bunch of other articles about this. Selected reading material:

https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/functional-versus-unit-organizations-6b82bfbaa57

http://thetechnalyzer.com/apples-functional-organization/

https://hbr.org/1968/11/organizational-choice-product-vs-function

https://a16z.com/2010/08/02/taking-the-mystery-out-of-scaling-a-company/

I'm perhaps overselling product organization as having "won" - the choice remains controversial, and the a16z article even explicitly says that it's basically a "pick your poison" situation where whichever choice you make will have drawbacks. But the general principle remains that product organization leads to more nimble products, while functional organization leads to more efficient functions. Perhaps the military's functional organization is a function (no pun intended) of it being peacetime, and the primary goal of Congress being to control costs.

Yes! Well, sort of, but a little backstory... Yesterday, I believe, there was an article posted here called, “Perhaps it is simpler to say that Intel…was disrupted”. It was written by Steven Sinofsky (who I wasn't familiar with) but had a look at his Medium posts. There was an interesting article there titled, "Design for an “Audience of One” (https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/audience-of-one-107baddbe38f)

Funny enough, there is a quote in there, "Did you know that a spreadsheet is a much better word processor than a word processor? After all, a word processor is just a spreadsheet with one cell."

That design for an audience of one was a great read. It may not answer all your questions but I think it will at least point you in the right direction of what he is talking about.

Btw, Steven Sinofsky is the former president of the windows division at M$.

I think Sinofsky is the best thing I've read on the "office" subject:

https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/creating-the-future-of-work-449c66707e35

This really resonated with me:

"It will be tempting for some to continue to believe we will return to the old normal and operate as we once did.

It will be tempting for others to search for a few changes and make those permanent and hope the rest will go back to normal.

Still others will firmly believe that some approach that picks the best changes and just adds them to what was going on will be the path to the future.

If these patterns sound familiar it is because they are the patterns of a failed response to a disruptive change. The idea that everything stays the same except for a few changes around the edges caused every incumbent to lose in the face of step-function change."

If you're not very close to the money, that's very hard. You can measure the team's productivity, but going down to the individual level is difficult. The process is also fundamentally political in the sense that it is a zero-sum game: there is almost always a certain budget available, independently of how individual people perform. The best short description I know about the constraints of performance reviews was written by Sinofsky: https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/performance-of-performance-reviews-cd7494eeaef8

This is something that has to be done, but I know very few managers who enjoy the formal evaluation periods. That's certainly the part I myself enjoy the least.

You should feel the opposite, see it as a new tool in your pocket.

Industrialisation and computers/automation took away massive amount of jobs while globally improving people lives, this may possibly (maybe not) do the same.

If in the future, anybody can write the book, create a photograph or a motion picture or an music album with just few words describing what they have in mind, this will be a tremendous productivity improvement and will unleash an overflow of human creativity.

I like to compare it to what Jobs said about computer, they are the "bicycle of the mind" [1].

[1] https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/bicycle-121262546097