I have worked in big companies with 500, 1000, 10000+ employees. And I worked at small companies with less than 80 employees. I also founded and co-founded 2 companies from scratch and grew one to 25 employees before selling it, and helped grow the other to 70+ and am still involved in running it.
In all of these companies, company culture dictated how decision are made. As a leading solar equipment distributor for the independent contractors in the US market, we interact with all kinds of entrepreneurial businesses from focused solar installers with 100+ employees to small contractor family businesses to the one man and a truck operation.
No matter what your culture is like, whether it is a cut throat highly structured clear hierarchy, or a more collegial family business, to run an efficient business all teammates need to know who owns which decision.
We see that in our own business, our competitors and our successful customers. Those who have this concept nailed down have happier customers and more profitable businesses. I like the concept of RACI when it comes to clarifying who owns what.
I recently read about RACI in Maynard Webb’s book “Dear Founder”. RACI simply stands for:
- Responsible
- Approves
- Consulted
- Informed
More on RACI, here in this brief section of the book:
I became aware of Maynard Webb recently through a former colleague who works closely with him. Maynard is currently a board member at VISA and Salesforce, and was the former Chairman of Yahoo and COO at Ebay. He is also the co-founder and board member of Everwise, a talent development startup.
After watching a couple of his interviews on Youtube (here and here) and reading his book, I became a fan of Maynard Webb. I highly recommend his book “Dear Founder“.
You can learn more about Maynard Webb here, on his website.