Building The Perfect Company

I’m not sure that I would agree with all the ideas you’ve suggested, although in some cases I can see where the ideas have come from.

I don’t think the office can be done away with. I don’t like working from home (which may seem strange), mostly because it doesn’t feel like work and I don’t feel motivated at all. The physical transition between home and work seems to be important to get me into the right mindset. Being at home, or in distributed small groups I think people will miss out on the psychological benefits of face-to-face interaction with people in other parts of the company.

Similarly, meetings have existed since the dawn of time for a purpose – they are a very efficient means of agreeing on ideas (if done properly and not involving people who just BS their way through things). One-to-one communication and small group communication can be done over IM/telepresence for brief or otherwise impractical (think distance) meetings, but as with teleworking I think there’s great value to be had from physical presence.

I work in a small company, and so the heirarchy is fairly compact. There’s the MD, Operations Director and Technical Director above me. There is also a Creative Director in parallel to the Technical Director. That’s pretty much it. In general this works well for us, but I haven’t got any experience of larger organisations.

The heirarchy guides communication on important business issues. For example, if there was a serious problem discovered by someone low down, they report it up the tree until someone makes a decision. Without a heirarchy, such things could become lost in confusion over what peoples responsibilities are.

In essence, provided you’ve got the right people in the right positions with just the right amount of tree-ness, I think titles and heirarchy are a very constructive thing. However, for people in larger organisations where incompent people inevetibly creep in further up the chain, I suspect that their experiences might give them reason to disagree.

Democratic decision making has some merits, however it’s vulnerable to being abused by idiots (I think Scott Adams raised this point too). Essentially, I think if you have a good group of competent people, a degree of democracy will work because you’ll all understand each others points. However if there are exremes of competents and incompetents, then when people don’t fully understand what they are voting on the benefits are lost and would probably be worse than the traditional leader-makes-the-decision method. So it comes down to people.

I must agree that formalities and buzzwords should die though, especially if they come from the mouth of an MBA. Apart from when visiting clients, we dress informally in whatever we feel comfortable. If people are comfortable, they are generally happy. Happy people think better and work more efficiently, in my opinion.

The very communist-sounding way of splitting earnings would completely destroy the good people and cause the others to be apathetic about improving themselves, especially in large organisations where the general mentality is that no one person can make any significant change (and therefore not alter their earnings). Would you honestly be happy that you were being paid the same as the part-time cleaner, or even the top executive?

Then again, some salaries are completely unjust considering what people actually do and how good they are at doing it – again this tends to be a problem in big organisations (like banks, for example). In smaller companies there tends not to be the room to have widely varying salaries, because there isn’t such a huge (non-existant in the case of banks) surplus of cash.

Processes should be based on common sense and experience. No bleeding-obvious process construction frameworks required. No jargon. Just keep it simple, and modify as and when needed.

By the sounds of it, I think you’ve been in a corporate culture for too long 😛 Time to work for a smaller company, David, with a great bunch of bright people.

I have a vague idea of how I would like my company to be, but so far that idea has focussed on the building. I think that the architecture of the workplace is also hugely important for the wellbeing and productiveness of employees. People might not mind meetings so much if they were held in a well-designed light and airy room. Employees might choose to work in the office rather than at home if they had a choice of the type of working environment they want – single office, shared office, large open-plan group, cosy open-plan group.

However I think the most important step towards the perfect company is involving and acknowledging the contributions of all staff. If someone has an idea that even has a spark of merit, it should at least be heard out.

If the idea isn’t completely unthinkable, then make that member of staff responsible for investigating it further, putting together a business case, and seeing it through to the end – even if the end is rejection of the idea. That person should feel worthwhile, knowing that their idea has been considered and accepted or rejected based on consideration of the business case.

Having felt the glow of being taken seriously, they might then be inclined to come up with more, increasingly brilliant ideas.

Stagnation is what kills a company. Ideas are what make a company grow.