John gave a great presentation today at Stanford about Mozilla.  He’s graciously shared it on Slideshare, so I’m sharing it here as well.

A few bullets to think about:

• How distributed is the decision making in your organization, really?  How much do you empower small, cross-functional teams to execute?
• How much does your organization really encourage active discussion, debate, and communication?  Does that discussion, debate and communication end within your company walls, or does it extend to your broader community?
• How dependent is your organization on the “chain of command” vs. recognized experts and groups both within and outside your organization?
• Does your organization understand the difference between inclusive discussion and democratic decision making?

In the final slides, there are a couple bullets I’m going to have to ask John about tomorrow:

• Encourage transparency of decision making
• Avoid democracy/consensus expectation setting
• Lead, but don’t command

I’m not sure I fully understand the interplay between these in all cases.

The presentation is definitely worth reading if you are interested in Mozilla or distributed organizations.  It’s also worth reading if you want to be able to use the word “chaordic” in a sentence.