238. Conway's Law & Division of Labor
Melvin Conway noticed a curious symmetry between the shape of organizations & the technologies they created, an observation that might be invaluable for avoiding disaster.
Links for the Curious
How Do Committees Invent? (Conway, 1968) - http://www.melconway.com/Home/Committ...
The mirroring hypothesis: theory, evidence, and exceptions (Colfer & Baldwin, 2016) - https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%2...
Architectural Innovation: The Reconfiguration of Existing Product Technologies and the Failure of Established Firms (Henderson & Clark, 1990) - https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...
Modularity-As-Property, Modularization-As-Process, And ‘Modularity’-As-Frame: Lessons From Product Architecture Initiatives In The Global Automotive Industry (Macduffie, 2013) - https://faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-...
Modularity, value and exceptions to the mirroring hypothesis (Burton & Galvin, 2022) - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Patterns of Modularization: The Dynamics of Product Architecture in Complex Systems (Brusoni & Prencipe, 2011)
Where Do Transactions Come From? (Baldwin & Clark, 2002) - https://conference.nber.org/confer/20...
On the Wealth of Nations - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/...
Product and Organizational Modularity: A Contingent View of the Mirroring Hypothesis (Sorkun & Furlan, 2016) - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/a...
Coordination and organizational learning in the firm (Marengo, 1992) - https://yildizoglu.fr/moddyn2/article...
The Modularity Trap: Innovation, Technology Phase Shifts and the Resulting Limits of Virtual Organizations (Chesbrough & Kusunoki, 2001) - http://pustaka.unp.ac.id/file/abstrak...
Adam Smith and the Costs of the Division of Labor (Aragona, 2020) - https://www.adamsmithworks.org/speaki...
The Big Idea: The Age of Hyperspecialization (Malone et al, 2011) - https://hbr.org/2011/07/the-big-idea-...
Marx's View of the Division of Labor - https://fee.org/articles/marxs-view-o...
The influence of organizational structure on software quality: an empirical case study (Nagappan et al, 2008) - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/136808...
Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the “Mirroring” Hypothesis (MacCormack, 2012) - https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/ha...