Ribbonfarm

Read http://www.ribbonfarm.com/, http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/, and anything else you get your hands on about strategy. Seriously, the things that are holding you back are corporate, office and national politics. These aren't insurmountable obstacles, just impressions of them. It's a bank for goodness sake, it's not meant to be interesting.

Suits and a sterile office are not the problem. They are the symptom; and more than that, they are the signal and the filter for the type of people that work there (so I can see you having just as much problem getting your comrades-in-arms to agree to "collaboration, idea generation and non-corporatism" as your managers.)

(I've written this assuming you're not a manager. If you are, great, it'll be easier to do either of these options and you can probably shave a couple of years of the timeline!)

The best advice I can think of (other than give up, obviously) is to first prove technical competence, in the form a high-level executive understands (I saved us X million dollars on Y different occasions) and then get them to support you in setting up a team (which you will lead and will almost certainly need to recruit from outside to fill — quick, who's the first person you phone?) that will do the projects you want to do (quick, what can you do that might add a billion the bank's bottom line?) and provide the political cover to do what you want. It'll take 5-10 years, it's risky and it requires political skill.

An alternative tactic…

See also Venkatesh Rao's blog post on The Locust Economy[1]:

> "To take coffee shops as an example, an unending supply of idealistic wannabe cafe owners enters the sector every year, operates at a loss for a few years, and exits. The result is that even under normal business conditions, without swarming locust consumers, this is a loss-making business with an extinction rate of around 90% at the 5 year point in the US. Starbucks has the scale to be profitable and resilient. Locust coffee drinkers happily drink the excellent, loss-making coffee from small, local Jeffersonian coffee shops and callously retreat to Starbucks or DIY homebrew if the prices go up. Starbucks survives, coffee drinking grasshoppers survive, small coffee shops go in and out of business."

("Locust coffee drinkers" is analogy not insult).

[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/

For me, it's definitely Ribbonfarm:http://www.ribbonfarm.com/

I stumbled into Venkat's blog about two and half years ago and I'm still trying to find my way out. The rabbit hole gets even deeper when you look at his list of recommended reading. The material on John Boyd and OODA loops in particular has been bouncing around my head for about a year. Ribbonfarm quickly turns into a choose-your-own-adventure type of experience as it's very easy to bounce between articles and start looking everything that you don't know.

If you're interested in getting below the surface level of how organizations, teams, and business cultures work Ribbonfarm is the best place I know of that really digs into the details. If you're expecting the typical "be a leader, not a manager" platitudes, then you'll be disappointed.

Read “The Gervais Principle” https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/

I think it explains everything, most companies are optimizing for “confused” - a class within the framework of people who work hard for no reason.

Not saying it’s the best but it’s certainly a way to do it, and probably becomes inevitable once the company is big enough.

I also think it closely parallels the practice of companies being actively hostile to their customers (or Pareto optimal as they might see it). Big companies would rather provide an offering that suits them, actively mistreating their customers, and just target customers that will go along with it rather than wasting time on customers that want some less profitable version of the offering.

Books are going to be better than articles because you can dive deep into topics and you know it isn't written for SEO, clickbait, selling some silver bullet process or ad revenue. I'll recommend two to learn good practices from and then two that will help learn to recognize horrible practices. You're likely to run into horrible management at some point and its good to recognize dog shit before you step in it.

* Peopleware, Demarco & Lister

* Rands - anything/everything he has written. Start with Managing Humans.

* The 5 dysfunctions of a team, Lencioni

* Gervais Principle (broke my rule, its a set of articles about The Office) https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/

Aha! Finally, a perfect spiritual complement to the Gervais principle:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/

According to Rao, every company survives by blending some combination of the following populations, varying by stage of lifecycle:

- Sociopath = people who know the game and play it to win

- Clueless = people who buy and spread the story the company is selling

- Loser = people who accept the wage bargain, generally exchanging low devotion for minimal advancement

This maps nicely to OP's quadrants:

- Sociopath = grinder-grifter

- Clueless = grinder-believer

- Loser = coaster-grifter

- (Coaster-believers get fired.)