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Steve Marshall's avatar

I should warn you it's not an organization book per se. He talks about various things like organizing at the personal level, work level etc. That brief section in the middle of the book covered organizational structure and thinking about it from a mathematical/statistical angle intrigued me.

I also think it might be quite interesting to look at messaging apps like slack/temas to identify some of that org structure that may not be written down in a HR web page or document

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Jesse Johnson's avatar

That's ok - the book looks overall interesting, and the perspective of looking at org charts in terms of cognitive load should be interesting, even if it's only a chapter or two.

Yeah, the informal structure of communication is really important too. Whether you get it from email/slack logs or just from asking people who they talk to, that may be more important than the formal structure.

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Steve Marshall's avatar

Funny I've been reading this book called Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin and there's a chapter on organizational structure and how more complex organizations are harder to maintain, manage etc. You can measure this via things like information theory and Kolmogorov Complexity

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Jesse Johnson's avatar

Oooh, I'll have to check that out. I've been looking for books on org structures, but I don't really know where to start. That one's now on my reading list. Thanks!

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