A friend of mine, Managing Director of an european firm, called me a couple of years ago. He used to have a problem with his team: no one was taking care of responsibilities. The team was pretty focused but everyone was working his own “‘piece’ and putting the pieces together was not giving a good result.

So he called a senior manager and put him in charge of the product: no questions, he was responsible of the good and the bad of everything on that product.

Things were going better … till after some months he started suffering the same problem that his Managing Director used to have. And so he applied the same solution: took a couple of his top managers, splitted the product in two, and gave them full responsibility.

Things were going better … till after some more months they started suffering the problem the Senior Manager and the Managing Director used to have. And so the two Top managers applied the same strategy splitting the product and giving each of them some well defined responsibilities to some of their directs.

And so on through several layers of the organization.

My friend the Managing Director called my few weeks ago: he is happy the company is still open 🙂 but he has the same problem. Everybody is now responsible … so nobody is responsible.

He need a new recipe: any suggestion?

PierG