Awesome Business Organizations
I gave a talk(slides) at the local hackerspace in Sofia about how other companies like github, valve, gore, 37signals are running their business (principles, methods, hierarchy, structure, organization etc.).
This turned out to be often neglected in nowadays startup culture. Every founder/CEO/director or manager is focused entirely on exit/building/marketing activities and it’s not considering how to organize the “engine” behind all of the revenue.
I missed one thing in my talk: why should we care about having awesome organization?
Keep in mind that awesome people don’t work in cool places :)
You ever heard the methodology of bringing AAA people to the team? If you want you can share your process how you’re doing it? But most of the times in order to recruit A+ person you need to add value to your organization in order to stand out. There are a lot of startups/companies/organizations with a lot of awesome projects and just cool organizations… So if people are the backbone of the projects then we should focus on building sustainable, scalable work environment in order to thrive together.
Clearing the motivation behind having an awesome organization I should point out what I consider as main techniques to build one. This framework is the result of my research of awesome business organizations around the world.
Be transparent in your intentions. Don’t hide something that’s valuable for the organization. That’s the only way you can build up trust. If you have plans for Q3 — share them. If you have plans to shutdown a project — share them too. Speak your mind and you’ll be amazed how this transparent culture can help stabilize the information flow withing the organization.
Just like the leaves on a tree — be distributed.The tree can gather more light just because of this principle — don’t consider staying on one branch to be a successful strategy in the long run. Nowadays using the internet and other webapps can help you with that. If you manage to foster a good distributed culture you will lower the barriers that countries are building. Don’t focus only on hiring team members in USA when you can work with amazing people around the globe.
Decentralize your work environment. It’s okay to have an office space but don’t force people to visit it. Most of the time work happens out of the office. Make internet your office space. There are a lot of tools that can help you in your way of organizing stuff and keeping everything up to day. This way company wide team buildings are more meaningful.
Be flat. Yeah, you probably heard all those bullshit sayings that having a boss, manager, CEO, CFO, CTO, FOO or other useful things in front of person name is a good thing. They’re just a corporate slang — words with no meaning. Capital case alphabet that’s only purpose is to indicate responsibilities, not true work. You’re a CTO? Okay CTO-guy, try to remember your last 4 hours at work. You did what? Fixing bugs? So maybe you’re a bug fixer then. Congratulations — I’m trello archiver and mail responder. Great I’ll take your business card that isn’t indicating what you actually do, but rather what you call your ego :) There’s a lot to talk about flat structures but they seem essential for awesome organizations.
Be open.Not just open source. Embracing the mindset is what matters. Don’t fool yourself that with time surveillance apps people will work more.
Open source projects have a interesting community building process around them. Tinker with it a bit and you’ll be amazed of the organically evolving community around your own awesome organization.
The culmination of everything awesome is freedom. I pity people who love being slaves :) That’s why in awesome organizations you often collaborate rather than delegate. If you want something done you’ll have to be the leader. There are different types of leadership though.
Giving freedom can create chaos but often is for the greater good. People are not familiar with ‘freedom’ at work (no, I’m not kidding) but once they get used to it it makes fiscal reason to have such flexible culture.
So in general you have to value trust, collaboration, egoless individuals and leadership in order to forget the “old” corporate thinking and make an awesome culture that’s building something awesome along the way. Be generous and share your inspiring stories or thoughts. Will be happy to hear of more awesome organizations except the ones mentioned in the slides of my talk. :D
The bad sides of being awesome will be part of different read though :)
