Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Need for Status

David Rock, author and co-founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, has argued that humans have extremely fine-tuned status detectors, presumably deriving from our descent from social primates and other social animals.31 Since such status typically enables one to eat and mate first, and attempted violation can result in death, it makes sense that we would be deeply aware of status and concerned about maintaining it.

Throughout the existence of societies—animal or human—social rank and alpha status was based largely on physical prowess and perhaps also on age and thus experience and wisdom or royal and noble birth. In the corporate world, title and the size of the organization confer status. This fact is more than a behavioral anomaly; whether fair or not, job evaluation criteria, compensation, and bonuses are often correlated with direct and indirect span of control.32

Unfortunately, although it is easy to count the number of people in an organization, it is much harder to directly correlate an individual with the business results of an organization. The payback for changes and initiatives instituted today may not be felt for years, and those impacts may be masked.

This issue can be a challenge for widespread adoption of the cloud—or use of any service for that matter—overmaintaining a large organization. After all, if status, power, and pay are dependent on organization size, it is a natural for a self-interested executive to maintain a large organization. We ...