Manufacturing guy-at-large.

What should we all do

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Steven Sinofsky, talking on the a16z podcast about how real-time metrics tracking has changed the nature of management (edited for readability):

If you think about the average large company meeting, the vast majority today start off with somebody showing up and passing out a printed version of a work product. You just don't see that in a company of less that a thousand people. And the interesting thing about it is that it's not just that everybody got emailed the attachment for the meeting. It's that [managers] are looking at things like live data. So when managers at a small company look at their current telemetry of their app, their site, their service, they're all looking at the actual tools that are used by the marketing team to manage that information. They're not looking at a snapshot from even a few hours earlier. So you cut out all of this "well, those numbers aren't ready, let me go do them." You don't have presentations where a picture of the numbers are embedded in the presentation. 

These are these huge cultural shifts in how you manage an organization. What a manager's role is in a meeting is not to be reported to, because if you wanted to know, you should just go visit the place that everybody on the team is using to keep track of their information. 

Then when you get everybody together, it shouldn't be to argue the pros and cons of how the information was gathered or is it the right number... It should be: We all agree, this is the number. What should we all do to change that number?