When I arrived at VERITAS Software in 2004, two of my peer VP positions were setup as a two-in-a-box. Before the year was out both those positions had unwound. What went wrong? Was it the people, the concept or the company culture?
It wasn’t the people. In each position, the two of them had complementary skills and were pretty mature. However, it so happens, in both cases, the two people filling the position were not co-located. Maybe that had something to do with it.
More likely, I suppose, it was to do with company culture. It seems to me that two-in-a-box needs a culture that supports constructive criticism. After all when you put two senior leaders to work together on key aspect of the business, they are constantly criticizing, arguing, talking through where their models could be wrong. Think of it as institutionalized criticism. Whether this institutionalized criticism plays out for the good or the bad depends largely on organizational culture.
The companies that use two-in-a-box - Intel, Goldman Sachs, Dell and Cisco - swear by it (see the article on this in Wall Street Journal). Now it appears that the practice is spreading to India. Yesterday’s Economic Times in India carried a story, “When two managers are better than one”, about how fund houses in India have embraced this practice with gusto. Apparently there are now over 19 equity funds that have two-in-a-box fund managers.
Given that two-in-a-box is good for grooming new talent and succession planning, and is a hedge against attrition, should we expect to see this practice become more widespread? I may be proved wrong but I don’t think this will happen. The first challenge is getting a cultural-fitment in the organization. The second challenge is finding established jobs to which it can be applied. Unless a job has been around in the company for some time and has well-defined norms, it becomes very difficult to make this work. Jobs with poor outcome metrics are not amenable to this practice. So, in effect, sales managers can be setup as two-in-a-box but product architects can’t be.
The only place where two-in-a-box has been actively promoted is, believe it or not, by the Agile and XP (Extreme Programming) community. They have long advocated “pairs programming” where two people share a keyboard and work on the same item. Despite the merits of this approach the practice hasn’t taken off.
Maybe I shouldn’t minimize this practice so readily but I believe that two-in-a-box will only have a niche following.
Hi Sharad, I believe 2-in-a-box will work only if the two people have complimentary capabilities. Or their roles are made complementary (in spite of overlapping capabilities). Pair programming (XP) is a very good example of roles that are made complimentary. The complimentary capabilities can come from various factors such are their core competencies, their geographical location advantage, etc.