Why Jason Fried gave his company a month off
inc.com
inc.com
For me personally, I wouldn't enjoy that month. The main reason would be purely selfish. I know that my idea and implementation could make money and instead of releasing it on my own and profiting, it would become property of the company. I would also feel pigeon-holed into working on stuff that the company already does or in the same realm (which in my case is Business Intelligence tools to work with Cognos) which, while interesting, is not where my interests lie which would also limit my creativity.
It should be interesting to see what comes out of 37Signals in the next 6 months to a year.
People also implemented their own ideas. When the sprint was over, if they wanted to keep working on it, all we had to do was fill out a form that our CTO would sign saying that the company didn't want the project.
I miss that part of the job.
I think you mean pigeon holed.
I can speak from experience that there is a lot that the team I work on would like to get done that gets trumped by management. Our first foray into this is an overnight hack-a-thon scheduled for next month. Not quite as creatively inspiring as a month long hack-a-thon.
On the second part, I'd say you were not sure it would make money. If you were sure your idea would make money why didn't you do it. The exercise that 37Signals did was to provide a safety net for their team to experiment with wild ideas at the company's expense, the monthly paycheck. I'd take that deal any day.
As an employee, I think it would be hard to get back into the rhythm of the day to day after a month like this. Similar to being on a really nice vacation.
Also, if I had a company and were to do this, I would implement a bonus system so that employees could receive additional compensation for putting forward their best ideas and efforts.
That's not a good idea. Look into extrinsic versus intrinsic rewards. You want people to put forward ideas and efforts because they actually address pain points, not because of a bonus they could get.
Yeah, like a lot of other people, my expectation was that everyone got a month of paid, mandatory vacation. A month-long hackathon is a lot less interesting.
In one sense, they built a business that allows them to do crazy/fun/oddball things. Great.
In another, their model is not the model of a typical HN style start up, and following their advice without tempering it to your own set of realities is likely a bad idea.
I'd say that the majority of their customers could not care less what they write about on blogs and magazines. They just use their services because they work for them.
That is, their business model is not "promotion through doing various stunts and writing/having others write about it" as you maybe imply. It's mostly to use, fellow developers, HN/Rails crowd etc that this writing gets known, and we constitute a tiny minority of their customer base, judging from the customer stories they post.
However if you're a young company learning the ropes and looking to emulate 37s' success, you have to first understand that 37s is a company that is built on PR. They were around for years doing consulting work before they ever built a single product. They were one of the early noteworthy web design blogs, and they built a significant audience right around the time people were figuring out how to go beyond brochure websites. So when Basecamp launched in 2004 they had the most valuable possible audience in the palm of their hands. It didn't hurt that true web applications were in their infancy, and they were essentially competing with bloated desktop software like MS Project, but it's important not dismiss their reach in the web design blogosphere. Without that, there's no telling if the product would have had the uptake to become their sole focus or whether they would have gone back to more consulting work.
However, I don't think their next 10,000 customers will be made up of majority rails/ruby/coder people. I think it'll be from the "Fortune 5,000,000" they are always writing about. To reach them, they must get ink in inc. Oh yeah...pun intended. :)
Taking advice from today's 37Signals on how to build your company is like taking advice from Michael Phelps on how to become a competitive swimmer.
They are both FREAKS of nature: a perfect combination of natural talent, decades of hard work, expert coaching, and unlimited resources.
I love being an observer to their dominance, but you have to look hard at these "lessons" to take away what's the signal vs. what's the noise for your average start-up!
37signals is NOT a startup and yet much of the advice / information that they produce is disseminated in that spirit.
In other words I see an article like that and I believe if a young 37signals had taken that advice they would have had trouble becoming 37signals!
I don't know swimming, but I do know powerlifting.
I had hip mobility issues when I started. Which meant I put in ages getting my form right and improving my flexibility to be able to safely progress on the back squat. My lightest warmup weight now - a measly 60kg - was a sticking point for me for months where it'd leave me in pain, until I got the flexibility down. Once I did, it took me just 6 months to reach 150kg, and I've improved steadily since.
Someone with the same flexibility problem that were to copy my current training regime, would "just" end up in pain for however long it'd take them to figure out the same flexibility issues that I dealt with if they were lucky. But if they were not, it'd take very little to end up in hospital, e.g. if they started with too heavy weights.
Similarly, I push myself a lot closer to my failure point than you want a beginning lifter to do, because I've had years to learn how I feel when I reach failure and how to manage it without harming myself. If I put too much on the bench when doing bench presses, I know how to put the bar safely down on my chest and roll it off. Meanwhile many beginners will panic and try to put the bar off at a risk of dropping it on their heads or neck. 50kg dropped on your head is way worse than, say, 120kg slowly put down on your chest and rolled down - the latter at worst gives me a slight bruise for a few hours.
What I'd say if I were to instruct a beginner vs. someone near my level would be vastly different. E.g. for someone near my level I'd talk about how essential a belt is, while for a beginner it is counter-productive. I'd talk about alternative grips and using chalk for the deadlift to prevent the grip from failing - something that is utterly pointless for a beginner. For a beginner I'd be stressing form, form, more form and flexibility.
Copying me, or listening to what I would recommend - that works and is safe enough - for someone near my level would either put a beginner at severe risk of hurting themselves or waste their time (I'm far closer to my natural limit - I progress at about 1/10th of the speed I did when I started, yet the effort involved is vastly higher).
(This isn't unique to corporations. Even progressive nonprofits seem to dislike working with outspoken, truly horizontal organizations where self-management is the norm. Because they ironically have bosses and other trappings of corporate hierarchy. Their employees often observe that the new boss is like the old.)
37signals have taken pains to explain that, of course, any company has to think for themselves and not ape some blogpost they read.
I had the benefit of exposure to members of the 37signals team in their early days when they did contract work, built their remarkable "redesigns", etc.
It was crystal clear to me instantly that they were ABSURDLY talented, their design work looked like nothing else at the time and influenced an entire generation of not only web designers, but entrepreneurs, etc.
So while I agree that "anybody can do anything", 37signals started the race with an incredible lead in just raw, unfiltered talent.
They're just trying to come up with solutions to intractable management problems:
1. Studies show that people aren't 100% productive.
2. Studies show that company cultures and the company environment tends to discourage (or at least not nurture) people from being creative at work.
So instead of accepting the status quo, they're experimenting with different ways to achieve these goals...
If you learn from what they did when they were facing the same challenges you are, rather than what they do when facing challenges at an entirely different level.
Chances are you're solving different problems.
Now if a McDonalds franchise said our employees are going to spend this month figuring out ways to improve or innovate in the fast food space, nobody could buy food for a month.
Since this feature is relatively new, its not commonly thought of as an option. To be fair though in professional practices like Law Firms, this has been implemented in the more 'we are getting out of the office' kind of thing. In that case it seems to counteract burnout from the insane hours that people put in during litigation.
Is there an app to auto-rewrite misleading headlines?
Who did they offload the work to then?
Love the nonsensical barbecue photo.