the elephant and the flea

Another of Charles Handy's best sellers sprung to mind over the last few weeks as I work through the inevitable pain of disengagement from one of my longest projects. There is a structural issue, symptomatic of which is cashflow. Big organisations, especially when nested in a context of other big organisations do not move quickly. And small independent people like me end up trying to carry the highs and lows of the inevitable cash flow roller coaster. The same problem can crop up for any small business working in bigger environments, to the extent that in the UK the government has recognised it in the right to charge interest on late payments. I'd be interested to know what effect this has had on the number of small businesses going to the wall.

The worst offenders are apparently in the public sector, and this is the case in my current experience, although I have other far better behaved public sector clients, (THANK YOU!) In France, I am assured that things are even worse. Why doesn't that suprise me? Public sector contracts are frequently known to take up to two years from invoice to payment.

For my part, I pay bills as quickly as possible, especially to other small contractors like myself. On a more general note, I wonder about the sustainability of large established inflexible organisations in either the public or the private sector, and the tendency of third sector organisations or entrepreneurial business start-ups to emulate them after a certain period. My theory is that there are ways to maintain flexibility based on understanding project dynamics. There are ways of making start-up, delivery and wind-down, new start-up, delivery etc. etc. into a way of professional life across the sectors, rather than some kind of bizarre exceptional 'change management' project, or 'IT roll-out'. Well, I'm thinking I may need to team up with some like-minded people, (if there is such a thing) to do it and see.

I think it was Kathy Sierra that recently refered to a piece on dignity is deadly by Paul Graham, about how this early energy gets lost as an organisation somehow chooses to become a 'proper, dignified, professional' place, instead of the dynamic, can-do place it used to be. It's worth a read.