Craziness without culture is just crazy
On my drive to work this morning, I was thinking about the company where I used to work and how they tried to instil a sense of craziness by painting the office crazy colours, having crazy events (like laying turf on the carpark) and using "fun" fonts for memos among other things.
They were clearly trying to bring a sense of fun to the company because they had seen big web companies like Google etc do these things and if it worked for Google, it must work for them right?
The problem was - it didn't work for them, whereas Google and their ilk have a culture of embracing fun and exciting things, beneath the madness, this company had a deeply ingrained culture of excessive numbers of middle managers, meetings and strict rules about what staff can and can't do.
In the end, it very much felt like they were trying to polish a turd - on the outside it might have appeared to be zany and fun but on the inside the environment was toxic - ideas were quashed without consideration, meetings were held to plan meetings (really!) and rumours and gossip were running rife about the future of the organisation.
I guess what I'm trying to do here is just offer a little bit of advice to my fellow hackers to save your companies from ending up like this.
If you want to make your company appear to be crazy, you have to take the craziness and make it part of your culture, be prepared to take risks, listen to your staff and do your best to eradicate the toxic elements that make a place hell to work in.
I've now left this company and I'm working for a great little start-up that doesn't try to hide behind a false culture. I couldn't be happier.