Managing for Creativity

theodp writes "After seeing some of the ideas management comes up with as a result of reading the Harvard Business Review, you may be tempted to hide their copies. But make sure they see this month's Managing for Creativity by Dr. Jim Goodnight, the still code-cranking CEO of SAS, the world's largest privately held software company." From the article: "Many academics and businesses have made inroads into this field. Management guru Peter Drucker identified the role of knowledge workers and, long before the dot-com era, warned of the perils of trying to "bribe" them with stock options and other crude financial incentives. This view is supported by the research of Harvard Business School's Teresa Amabile and Yale University's Robert Sternberg, which shows that creative people are motivated from within and respond much better to intrinsic rewards than to extrinsic ones."

Comments

Dream on, sucker!

[Seumas]

Then along came "global resourcing" and the concept of "bribing" knowledge workers at all became unnecessary and said knowledge workers learned to be grateful that they still had a position at all.

Seriously, in a world where any and every position has, is or will eventually be outsourced, the entire concept of "bribing" an employee is anachronistic. Maybe if you have the name recognition of a Shawn Fanning and someone wants your name to bootstrap their venture capital process, but not if you're Joe-Average-Buying-Four-Dollar-Milk guy.

Today's "crude financial incentive" is "not being downsized".

And to continue harping on the ridiculousness of such an article in an outsourcing world, I have to ask - when you're outsourcing for one tenth the salary, do you really expect any of the outsourced people you're managing to be "creative"? I've worked with a number of them and however they may be in their personal life, when it comes to the job they're paid for, they are anything BUT creative.

This guy is one of those idealistic dreamers who has the misguided notion that you can employee people, treat them well, encourage them to be creative and non-comformist and original and not ditch them for the lowest bidder and somehow run a successful company in the long term. Learn a thing or two from today's top public-CEOs and start laying people off. Be a man! Send out some reduction notices! Cut some salaries! Freeze hiring and raises across the board! Freeze available training and education! Put the fear of outsourcing into your subordinates or you're going to end up on the garbage heap. In fact, it is downright un-patriotic to treat his employees like he is doing and promote those communist labor-friendly, creativity-inspiring warm-fuzzy propaganda ideas.

Completely off topic - what a name...Jim Goodnight! I can see the Abbot and Costello sketch for it, now...

Re:Dream on, sucker!

[John Seminal]

Seriously, in a world where any and every position has, is or will eventually be outsourced, the entire concept of "bribing" an employee is anachronistic.

Actually, if all employees were given stock options, and not just 1 share or some token, I bet there would be less outsourcing, or if there was, it would be less painful.

If I had 4000 shares of Walmart stock, and I worked for them as a programmer, I would feel much more incentive to work harder, because the better my company does, the better the stock does, and the more I make.

And if the day came where I could make more in the stock, if I was outsourced, than having the stock price fall and keeping the job, I would probably say outsource away. I would still have something to show for the sucess of the company.

Plus, if the workers are shareholders in a company, they have a say in how the company is managed. They can stop large lay offs, like what HP did today. Imagine if every employee of GM was a shareholder, and the total workforce had 30% of the stock. They could have stopped the 25,000 lay offs, they could have stopped factories from moving to mexico.

This article is asking how to have a productive employee. But all the mindfuck tricks a corporation can do, as soon as the employee believes they are expendible, and they have no security, no amount of any tricks can make a person work.

I'll give one example. There was a company I worked for 10 years ago. They went out of their way to provide very good free lunches in the cafeteria. They figured, people who ate at work would not go out, maybe they would work through lunch in their cubicles, and that a good nutritious lunch will inspire more afternoon productivity than an unhealthy lunch from mcdonalds. They were right. People grabbed lunch from the cafeteria and went back to the cubicles and worked during their lunch time.

But then the company laid off a few people.

People still ate the cafeteria food, but this time stopped working during lunch and started talking to each other. Everyone was worried, would they be laid off next.

Then the company said they did not have enough for a free lunch, but would offer it at a low price- $5. This is about the same time they said they were changing the health insurance, and that employees would have to contribute more. People said fuck it, and started going out. Now, you had people comming back from lunch 5-10 minutes late, and management was pissed off. Finding parking is a bitch.

Everything deteriorated.

One day, my manager came into my cublicle and introduced me to a consultant. He told me not to worry, my job was secure, but the consultant needed to learn what I was doing. 2 weeks later I got laid off.

And the only thing I showed the consultant is where the cafeteria is. I left him there as I went out to lunch with my other co-workers. I hope my ex-managers felt good paying the consultant $300 an hour to learn where the cafe was.

Re:Dream on, sucker!

[Seumas]

Yeah, but employees know that options are worthless until they are fully vested. And if your dipshit of a CEO fuckwaggled the stock price down 95% sot hat what was a good million in options when you were hired was now worth less than the one-ply you wipe your ass on in the company bathroom, why would you even care about options?

Plus, while options from WalMart might not be so bad, you'd be insane to take options as any manner of compensation in the tech industry these days.

Re:Dream on, sucker!

[asr_man]

Put the fear ... into your subordinates or you're going to end up on the garbage heap.

If the kind of organization you want to run is one where the employees do what they do out of fear, you're welcome to it.

The rest of us will just do our best work, enjoy it, and placidly take the next step with our carreers when management starts serving that flavor of Kool-Aid.

Re:Dream on, sucker!

[cduffy]

Not all options take time to vest. I've got retention options, which take time to vest and go away 30 days after my employment terminates -- but then I've got compensation options, which are vested the moment I get them and stick around even if I leave the company.

And yes, I'm one of those people who's doing the insane thing and taking options in lieu of compensation at a tech company. There's a pretty decent chance I'll come out of it well, though -- and if not, the existant-though-small paycheck was enough to see me through the local economy's rough patch, and give me time to find contacts so that my next job search will be shorter than my last one.

Back towards topic, briefly -- the options are motivating, certainly: At their current rate I have enough to pay off more than half my mortgage, though selling the shares while we're privately held is difficult. If we do well... well, that'll be good, very good. The other part of my motivation, though, is ego: Having a chance to be in an organization where I, personally, can and do make a difference is what makes the difference to me (yaaay startups!) -- and this is the point where management's actions (and the respect or lack thereof implicit in said actions) comes into play. If we don't have money for perks, I understand -- it's a startup, after all, and we don't even have money for equipment or new personnel or proper paychecks for the folks currently on staff -- but its people (and the product we've developed) are what the company does have, and that needs to be understood.

At this point, then, it's not really about the immediate income, or extras, or such: It's about the pontential upside later, and the fun and respect inherent in the job now. And that works for me. (That said, we do have a company-stocked break room -- though two buildings ago, I and the other employees bought food out of our personal funds. Now, when something along those lines is done it's departmental-level -- we've grown to the point where instead of being one tribe we're split into groups, but there's still a reasonable level of comeraderie).

Oh, and that "dipshit CEO" issue you mention is the other nice thing about startups: We're small enough that we know where the CEO lives -- the folks who were around a month or so longer than me remember when the company was based in his house. We know where his office is (and his door's open), we know his wife, we know his kids, we go to his parties. We aren't nameless, faceless employees to him -- and if he were to screw us over, he'd hear about it.

Re:Dream on, sucker!

[hax4bux]

blah, blah, blah. My life is great, don't you wish you were me. blah, blah, blah.

My name is "hax4bux" and I've been contracting for 13 years. I want the money and I want it now. I hope you get rich, but I bet you don't.

I've had this conversation over multiple contracts, how I should share the vision and work for less because "we're all gonna be zillionaires". Golly, such a generous offer. I'll stick to invoicing you each week, and you don't have to worry about sharing your precious stock pool.

Oh, ya. I've contracted to a few startups (the ones w/funding) and that "dipshit CEO" is routinely a sociopath who doesn't give two hoots about you as long as he gets his way. If you do well, he will be moving and if you do poorly, he might be moving as well. But whatever gives you comfort.

Re:Dream on, sucker!

[Anonymous Coward]

REAL Joes-Average-Buying-Four-Dollar-Milk pay $2.68 for their milk. Unless you live in one of those fancy-schmancy cities like New York or Duluth. Those Duluthians think the sun shines out their rectums, stupid gits.

Re:Dream on, sucker!

[cduffy]

My life is great, don't you wish you were me

Hey -- I'm making lousy money and being paid mostly in lottery tickets, and I didn't make any attempt to hide that. Thing is, I'm happy/motivated -- and getting employees into that mental state without excessive outlay is kind of the whole point of this article, no?

Oh, ya. I've contracted to a few startups (the ones w/funding) and that "dipshit CEO" is routinely a sociopath who doesn't give two hoots about you as long as he gets his way.

Yah, my last startup was like that, though I didn't find out 'till well after I left. (They're still in business over 3 years later, btw, and it was an exceedingly kickass place to work in the engineering department -- and our engineering manager did a great job of insulating us from the politics, so we didn't find out how messed up things were 'till the various ex-employees compared notes on representations made to us by the mgmt).

On this one, though, I've got coworkers who actually came back to this CEO's second startup after his first one went bust. If the CEO were the sort to piss everyone off and disappear, such would presumably not be the case.

Re:Dream on, sucker!

[anopres]

Right on. The only company worth working for and "sharing the vision" is the one you own. Other than that, cash works just fine.

Re:Dream on, sucker!

[Seumas]

Yeah, if you live in bumfuck Egypt, milk might cost $2.68, but any place up and down the west coast will run you at least $3.00 if you're lucky and god only knows what it is on the east coast.

You know.. On the coasts. Where most of the population lives.

Re:Dream on, sucker!

[covertbadger]

And the only thing I showed the consultant is where the cafeteria is. I left him there as I went out to lunch with my other co-workers. I hope my ex-managers felt good paying the consultant $300 an hour to learn where the cafe was.

Maybe they would have kept you around a bit longer if you weren't so uncooperative and unhelpful? We get consultants in all the time where I work, and it never cost me my job. My manager would be none too pleased if I just snubbed them and left them to rot, though.

Re:Dream on, sucker!

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus, if the workers are shareholders in a company, they have a say in how the company is managed. They can stop large lay offs, like what HP did today.

I'm all in favour of having employees also own stock. But I wouldn't be so confident that this will have a big impact on how a company is run. HP itself has (or used to have) a very generous stock purchase plan, and a sizeable percentage of HP employees are also shareholders. Doesn't seem to have made much difference.

Your comments about the first few layoffs being the start of the "slippery slope" are right on, though. In this respect HP used to be very paternalistic, in a good way, going to great lengths to avoid layoffs. But once they started, in the late '90s, the damage was done...

Re:Dream on, sucker!

[beowulfy]

This guy is one of those idealistic dreamers who has the misguided notion that you can employee people, treat them well, encourage them to be creative and non-comformist and original and not ditch them for the lowest bidder and somehow run a successful company in the long term. "Somehow run a successful company"??? Did you not read the article? "And in 2004, the company enjoyed its 28th straight year of revenue growth, with revenues topping $1.5 billion" This is not just a theory obviously, this is working. I bet they are sure glad your not running their company. "when you're outsourcing for one tenth the salary, do you really expect any of the outsourced people you're managing to be "creative"?" It seems that you missed the whole point of the article. The article is about how to create and maintain creative capital. Jobs that are being outsourced are far and away mostly industrial labor jobs and service sector like call centers. Your idea of "Put{ing} the fear of outsourcing into your subordinates or you're going to end up on the garbage heap" only works if the customers of this kind of software would rather pay overseas companies for a lower level product with lower levels of innovation. Look at the numbers: "The governments and global corporations that rely on SAS's sophisticated business-intelligence software are overwhelmingly satisfied: The subscription renewal rate is an astounding 98%." The reason the United States still has the edge is that this is where almost all of the innovation takes place that creates the industries we are seeing go overseas. The worst thing that could happen to our economy would be for us to lose this creative capital, because no matter how smart the kids are in China, they will not be able to compete with us on an innovative level so long as our society provides the best environment for creative types to excell in. Also, salary is all relative. One tenth of your salary in India may be very motivating when most other people in the economy are surviving off of much less than that. The reason that companies like Dell have moved all of their call center operations overseas, is because you can either: 1)Pay tech support or sales people here in the USA $15 an hour (low wage) for a job that is considered by our society undesirable, resulting in un-motivated employees with a high turnover rate. or you can 2) Pay tech support or sales people in India 2 dollars an hour (high wage for them) in a society that highly values these jobs resulting in motivated, happy workers.

Re:Dream on, sucker!

[cduffy]

The only company worth working for and "sharing the vision" is the one you own.

Well, that's what stock-based compensation does. I own (or have options to buy at negligible cost) a sufficiently large chunk of my employer as to give me a quite substantial interest in its success.

Re:Dream on, sucker!

[falconwolf]

And if the day came where I could make more in the stock, if I was outsourced, than having the stock price fall and keeping the job, I would probably say outsource away. I would still have something to show for the sucess of the company.

And what would you feed your family and yourself with, those stocks? Bet dividents wouldn't cover the loss of salary, so what then flipping burgers? Perhaps a new career in medicine as a doctor or nurse perhaps, with all those baby boomers reaching retirement someone will have to take care of them.

Plus, if the workers are shareholders in a company, they have a say in how the company is managed. They can stop large lay offs, like what HP did today. Imagine if every employee of GM was a shareholder, and the total workforce had 30% of the stock. They could have stopped the 25,000 lay offs, they could have stopped factories from moving to mexico.

Now this I totally agree with.

Falcon

Re:Dream on, sucker!

[falconwolf]

Maybe they would have kept you around a bit longer if you weren't so uncooperative and unhelpful? We get consultants in all the time where I work, and it never cost me my job. My manager would be none too pleased if I just snubbed them and left them to rot, though.

This may be true and you may have a point however while it hasn't happened to me I've heard too many tymes about how a person was told to train someone else only to be replaced by that person once they were trained.

Falcon

Re:Dream on, sucker!

[anopres]

Stock-based compensation is just a way for a company to hold something over you. You are encouraged to continue working for the company because you can't actually get the money you've already earned. If you could change your compensation to cash, you would be better off (less risk). Your interest is not so much in your company's success as it is your future ability to get your money. All of this is compensation related anyway, which generally doesn't do much to increase employee motivation (although it does work to prevent decreases in motivation).

Re:Dream on, sucker!

[cduffy]

Stock-based compensation is just a way for a company to hold something over you.

Take out the "just", and that's true.

You are encouraged to continue working for the company because you can't actually get the money you've already earned.

I'm every bit as able to access my lieu-of-pay options now as I would be if I went elsewhere; they're good for a 8 years or so from the paycheck where they're earned. On the other hand, my departure could have an impact on the future value of those options -- so I stay, and put in effort to build the infrastructure we need to fill our contracts, such that the future value of those options is maximized.

If you could change your compensation to cash, you would be better off (less risk).

Less potential upside, too. Risk isn't the only factor to be considered in determining whether to take a given course of action, no?

Article not really about stock options

[robla]

The article is really a reasonably interesting puff piece for SAS. While SAS seems like a very cool company (I'm guessing Google modeled themselves partly after SAS), the article stresses the reasons why you should offer lots of intrinsic perks (such as a ton of onsite services, such as medical staff, massages, dry cleaning, haircuts, and auto detailing), and doesn't talk much at all about avoiding extrinsic perks. So, if you are hoping to find the juicy bits about why stock options aren't very effective, well, don't look here.

Incidently, if you saw the 60 Minutes story about SAS, you can probably save yourself the time of reading this article. There doesn't appear to be much that wasn't covered on 60 Minutes. However, if you haven't heard of SAS, it is a very interesting summary. Perhaps this is a more accurate teaser, quoted straight from the article:

Based in Cary, North Carolina, SAS has been in the top 20 of Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list every year it's been published. The employee turnover rate hovers between 3% and 5%, compared with the industry average of nearly 20%. The governments and global corporations that rely on SAS's sophisticated business-intelligence software are overwhelmingly satisfied: The subscription renewal rate is an astounding 98%.

Rob

Re:Article not really about stock options

[Seumas]

I'm constantly amazed at the crappy "perks" corporations pay for that their employees couldn't care less about. For isntance, my company offers a concierge service. This service arranges for other companies and businesses to come in and try to sell the employees shit that they don't want. And they arrange for employees to have free access to very important online resources, like an article about writing a proper "thank you" note.

I have a better idea. Have someone who gets my lunch so I don't have to leave the office for an hour and can have less stress dealing with traffic and lines and waiters. How often do I need to get my car fucking detailed for christ's sake? Instead, how about having someone who can help me find a quality babysitter or refer me to a great place to take the girl out for a romantic dinner and maybe throw in a corporate discount to boot. How about handling my personal mail and courier packages for me so I can just drop them off at a kiosk on my way into the office? How about offering career guidance or more education options instead of just paying lipservice to how important those things are and then putting a freeze on them to save money?

I have never used any of the corporate services (mental health experts? medical phone number? car detailing? dry cleaning? thank-you-letter tutorial? discount on granola bars from a local vending machine supplier at a special sell-shit-to-our-capitive-employees-day?) and I don't know anyone who has. How about stop stuffing your offering full of shit just to say you offer a lot and start ovffering fewer, MORE VALUABLE services that actually make a difference.

And you know, sometimes it's the small things. It's amazing what your workforce can do when they feel important and feel like they matter rather than constantly under the thumb of layoffs. Morale is important. Something as cheap as giving your employees free bagels and cream cheese once a week or donuts once or twice a week will make them feel like someone gives a fuck and like their contributions are valued. Otherwise they're likely to feel like they're just an unwanted burden and as soon as they can arrange to have you replaced by a cheaper drone, you're gone. Even if that's true, get the proper work you can out of the employee by installing loyalty... by treating them with little perks that make their work life enjoyable. After all, they probably will be spending at least 35% of their entire lifetime in your office...

Re:Article not really about stock options

[techmuse]

The reason that stock options don't work is that if you underpay someone, they will be unhappy. But if you pay someone enough, then increasing their pay has diminishing returns. Example. I pay a CEO $400,000 per year. They can afford just about anything they want. Now I pay them $5 million per year. Do they work harder or more intelligently? Nope. Same thing applies to other workers.

On the other hand, if you make your workers *happy*, they will work for *less* money. See university profs for an example. So many people want to be a prof that universities can afford to pay less - but only because lots of people WANT those jobs.

Happiness motivates. Too much money doesn't do much. Too little money demotivates.

Re:Article not really about stock options

[Anonymous Coward]

The employee turnover rate hovers between 3% and 5%, compared with the industry average of nearly 20%. The governments and global corporations that rely on SAS's sophisticated business-intelligence software are overwhelmingly satisfied: The subscription renewal rate is an astounding 98%.

Uhm, I don't believe anything a privately-held company tells me about their internal affairs. How are they defining those numbers? Who knows.

Re:Article not really about stock options

[bladesjester]

I could point you to a certain company in Ohio that I interviewed at if you want. The work seemed interesting, they had daycare (and were getting certified to have kindergarten onsite), free cafeteria, free drinks, and some other things (dry cleaning, barber, massage).

However, the interview process left me completely unimpressed with the *people* and the way that they acted.

They contacted me for an interview (I'd never heard of them before that) and gave me a day to come up. I got there a few minutes early, but was then kept waiting for half an hour. I was then given the tour with some other people (who it turns out were all there for co-op positions, and that I was the only one they called up for a real position. This, according to one of the people I ran into randomly in the hallway was normal for there).

After that, they took us into a room in order to take a few programming tests and have lunch. While taking the tests, they had random developers come in and talk about the company while we were trying to work. In the midst of all of this, they came in and took you out to each of 3 other segments (HR interview, computer skills test -don't ask me why, and an interview with one of the development managers). When they came to take you, you were expected to immediately stop what you were doing and go with them. Add to this the fact that one of them "got sidetracked" with some things so I was left waiting for an hour in order to finish the interviews and was well past the time that they said the process would last.

To top it all off, they were in the middle of construction in order to expand the building, so there were jackhammers and all sorts of other things being used.

The coolest people that I met there were the HR person who contacted me initially (she was a fellow alum, rather supportive, and extremely nice. We even chatted via email after everything was over) and the one person who brought in the lunch, though she was nice for moderately selfish reasons *smirk*

The thing that really got me was that their VP that spoke harped on how his people "stayed until the job was done" and could sometimes be seen in the same clothes that they wore the day before if they were alerted to a bug. This translated to me that "we encourage our employees to work insane, unhealthy hours in order to keep up our bottom line" instead of the "we have dedicated people" that he wanted to make it sound like.

This suspicion was basically confirmed by a few of the people I talked to outside of the ones that were sent to see us. They all mentioned how busy they were, the hours they worked, and that they were always looking for "qualified developers".

Aparently they didn't think I was a qualified developer. May have been because I mentioned that I have a healthy work-life balance preference and that the consistant 70-80 hour weeks weren't accptable when I had to do them in college either (lots of work and a very full class load) but I did them out of necessity. All of this out of a company that claims to advocate such a balance. Go figure.

If nothing else, I did meet a couple of cool people that day. Shame I'm three hours away, though. The one who was interested for reasons other than being a fellow alum was rather cute. =]

Re:Article not really about stock options

[Anonymous Coward]

By any chance, are you talking about Hyland software?

Re:Article not really about stock options

[bladesjester]

As a general rule, I don't respond to that sort of a question unless the answer is in the negative since I don't like to potentially burn bridges. In this case, however, I'll make an exception.

Yes, it was. Like I said, the work actually seemed really interesting, but the practiced work philosophy left a whole lot to be desired (even though I did meet a few cool people there).

I'm impressed that you got it without my even mentioning the industry they're in. My guess is that you either have experience with them or that you have a heck of a lot of mad google skills.

Now, it's my turn to ask: How did you guess so quickly and why do you ask?

Re:Article not really about stock options

[chiph]

The employee turnover rate hovers between 3% and 5%, compared with the industry average of nearly 20%.

I work in the RTP area myself, and those numbers are more or less correct.

The governments and global corporations that rely on SAS's sophisticated business-intelligence software are overwhelmingly satisfied: The subscription renewal rate is an astounding 98%.

It's because the SAS software stops working when the license expires (or at least it used to, I'm not 100% sure about today). After a year, the statistical software has become indespensible to the customer and extremely important for their competitive advantage, so they almost always renew. The ones that don't are usually because of deteriorating financial health.

SAS's products are good quality -- Dr. Goodnight wasn't kidding when he said they they do extensive development and pre-release testing. They supposedly have the largest continuous integration build farm in the world, and I'd love to find out more about their development process some day.

Chip H.

Re:Article not really about stock options

[Otter]

It's because the SAS software stops working when the license expires (or at least it used to, I'm not 100% sure about today). After a year, the statistical software has become indespensible to the customer and extremely important for their competitive advantage, so they almost always renew.

The lock-in goes beyond that -- it's pretty much essential for FDA submissions and I'd imagine there are other regulators who regard it similarly. And for a lot of experienced statisticians, that's almost all they know. (It seems like it's impossible to have a good grasp of both SAS and a programming language in the same brain.)

SAS's products are good quality...

Yes and no. The statistical quality is excellent (which is obviously the most important issue). But the UI, even on the Windows version, is absolutely horrid. And the Unix version doesn't (at least in the version we have) even have the "Advanced Editor" -- the one where the text isn't deleted when you run it! SAS certainly isn't the company from which I'd take lessons on encouraging fresh ideas and creativity.

Re:Article not really about stock options

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in the Cleveland area, so I've heard of the company before. One of my former co-workers accepted a job there recently, so I started looking into the company to see if I was interested in working there.

It was the only company I've seen where the job ads state that you *must* attain a slew of Microsoft certifications within a certain time frame to remain employed there. Between the newspaper articles I've read and the required certs for the job, I guessed that working there was not for me. I've been working in startups since I graduated 4 years ago, and I don't want to do it again.

Their product looks interesting, but it seems very .com-like. Companys like that grow fast, and vanish fast as well.

I posted Anonymously b/c I don't want to burn bridges either :-)

Re:Article not really about stock options

[bladesjester]

I can completely understand not wanting to burn bridges. I figure that it's been long enough that the only ones who remember me are the ones I still talk to, so it's not a big risk.

Yes, they do require umpteen certs while you're there. I thought that was rather silly as well. I could understand the need for some of them for certain of their employees (they're largely a C# shop)

That reminds me of something else. I was given their test in C++. At least they said it was going to be C++. It was really all in C. The truly amusing thing is that they'd just remade that exam. It was doubly ironic because they were in the process of phasing out their C++ development.

I'd love to be able to speak to you in a less public medium. Feel free to email me. the address is james at jameshollingshead dot com (or you can just go to my website and click the contact me link if you're lazy)

Re:Article not really about stock options

[LWATCDR]

"The statistical quality is excellent (which is obviously the most important issue). But the UI, even on the Windows version, is absolutely horrid. And the Unix version doesn't (at least in the version we have) even have the "Advanced Editor" -- the one where the text isn't deleted when you run it!"
Sounds like software that that is written for people that know what they are doing. Wonder how many support people they need :)

Re:Article not really about stock options

[jarich]

They supposedly have the largest continuous integration build farm in the world

We do. :)

http://www.jaredrichardson.net/blog/2005/06/23/

Re:Article not really about stock options

[hobuddy]

While SAS seems like a very cool company...

Looks that way to me too. They support open source, for example.

Re:Article not really about stock options

[LoztInSpace]

Dupe!
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155172&cid=130 10210

Re:Article not really about stock options

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead, how about having someone who can help me find a quality babysitter or refer me to a great place to take the girl out for a romantic dinner and maybe throw in a corporate discount to boot.

Oh, dude. Dating the babysitter? And getting the company mixed up in it?!

OK, you've got balls; but you are asking for trouble on so many different levels...

Re:Article not really about stock options

[the_womble]

such as a ton of onsite services, such as medical staff, massages, dry cleaning, haircuts, and auto detailing

Those are not intrinsic. Intrinsic motivators are those that are intrinsic to the job - i.e. what the article is saying is that people work hard because their job is fulfilling or interesting.

Of course making jobs interesting is difficult, which is why bad managers tend to be overly reliant on extrinsic perks and threats.

However extrinsic factors (the most important of which is money) are essential, research shows (I think going back to Herzberg, though its a while since I studied this stuff) that people paid more than the necessary level do not become more motivated, but those paid less become demotivated.

What SAS do is spot on, they encourage developers to do things that make them feel good about their jobs: write, go to conferences, train.

Re:Article not really about stock options

[chiph]

Can I get a tour?
:-)

Chip H.
my first name, underscore, holland, at hotmail.com

Re:Article not really about stock options

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at SAS, so I'm always interested when SAS is profiled on 60 Minutes or Oprah or Fortune or wherever. My advice is: Don't believe the hype. Of course, YMMV.

SAS treats its people to some nice benefits and most people stay forever. But the downside is that people get so comfortable that they lose interest in actually achieving anything. Well, except for sales people, those people actually have to produce.

I know plenty of people in development that come in at 9 or 10, read email, hit the gym, have lunch with their kids (who are in the on-site day care program) at the Cafe, get back to the office around 2 or 3, read email, surf the web, and go home. Dead weight is a real problem here.

I get frustrated about never getting anything done. Dates slip, requirements drop, and no one even cares. As long as the M&M's aren't late on Wednesdays, there are no complaints. (BTW, you've got to get to the peanut M&Ms ASAP - they're gone by Thursday morning.)

If you don't care about ever accomplishing anything, SAS is a great place to work. If you've got kids or like working out a lot or just want to be comfortable, c'mon over. But if you want a challenging job where you can produce something to be proud of, move along.

BTW, with all of the benefits, they don't have any sort of tuition reimbursement program. They don't want you to learn something new and then leave, I've heard. Goodnight ain't a saint, he's a businessman, and he's making business decisions about what benefits to offer to keep people around. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Now, I'm off to the gym (conveniently located in Building G). BTW, the main Cafe is in Building F. Cute, huh?

Go to Google maps and enter SAS Campus Drive, Cary NC to see the campus.

Re:Article not really about stock options

[chris_mahan]

But when the cost of living is high enough that the money in the bank does not increase while you're not going out to eat but once a week and not going to the movies at all and not taking the occasional day off to go up the coast, then I tell you that there's not enough money. The money is the only reason I work at the company. If I had $20M in the bank, I would not step foot in the place or even return the phone calls. Let's not forget that.

I don't care about the perks. I'll pay for lunch. I'll pay for a massage, for my car detailing, for my ice cream. I'll pay for that, because you will pay me to do your computer work.

That's the way it goes: Cash in my pocket, or I'm gone. My phone company, the government, and the mortgage company all want cash only. I gotta have it to give to them.

Creativity may come from within

[autopr0n]

But creative types would much rather work for a company that tried to 'bribe' them with expensive stock options then simply paid them a sallary and kept all the profits from their work for themselves.

Re:Creativity may come from within

[Seumas]

Creative types probably aren't working in the tech field of your average corporation, either.

Most positions within a tech company have nothing to do with creativity. Your job is to write something to spec, debug stuff or fix stuff. Outside of that, everyone is a secretary, security guard, janitor, human resources drone or middle manager. Outside of one or two guys who lead each product and the guys in your R&D departments, the amount of creativity that is expected or even desired is very minimal. To this day, doing what you're told and doing it the way you're told is more important for 99.9% of the people in a company than "creative thinking" is.

Re:Creativity may come from within

[FlameboyC11]

Programming isn't creative? Writing code is all about thinking outside the box, how can you solve x problem?

Re:Creativity may come from within

[Seumas]

It's no more creative than being a caprenter, mechanic or any other number of standard professions. Sure, they all have to employ creative thinking (or, rather, problem solving) - but it's still within very rigid contstructs. And even when it comes to programming, most of the decisions are made by a small group and the grunt work is carried out by the rest of the crew.

Creative problem solving is not the same as being creative. Almost everyone in the tech profession is paid to have creative problem solving skills. Very few are employed to be creative.

Re:Creativity may come from within

[mabinogi]

> And even when it comes to programming, most of the decisions are made by a small group and the grunt work is carried out by the rest of the crew.
Only if you work for a faceless mega corporation...

For the rest of us in medium sized organizations (1000 or so employees) - and particularly in the case of a non software company - there _is_ no rest of the crew.
The few programming staff they have cover pretty much all the bases, and are therefore frequently responsible for all parts of the design and implementation.

Re:Creativity may come from within

[Anonymous Coward]

Programming isn't creative? Writing code is all about thinking outside the box, how can you solve x problem?

Yes, you're right. Programming a solution for x problem is a creative act -- the first time.

But the vast majority of "business problems" are the same damn thing over and over again. Over the course of a career, the first couple of years are interesting. You're learning new things, both about whatever business you're in and thing about programming most of your college professors simply didn't know. It's cool.

Then around the fifth or so year, you start to realize that you're starting to "solve" the same problems again. Perhaps you have already or start to switch to other companies, to learn a different business. Then you learn that the new business is doing the same basic things as the old business. Well, at least your experience makes you look good...

Ten years? If you haven't moved up to management (and most programmers never do), you're either ready to switch careers or simply go mad, because you're doing the same thing over and over and over and over. No creativity needed. Hell, no creativity allowed. It's also unlikely that you can switch to some other part of the programming world, as you've been pigeonholed after your first year of working as being whatever type of programmer you started out as.

Fifteen years plus? Your soul is dead, and you're a drone, awaiting the layoffs with a sense of relief now, since dying in a gutter is starting to look attractive compared to coding up yet another goddamn employee time keeping system or whatever you've already done a hundred times before.

Remember, old programmers never retire... they kill themselves, screaming.

I want you to..

[tomocoo]

SHOW ME THE MONEY!!

Most important part of the article

[John Seminal]

Creativity can't be shoehorned between the hours of nine and five. The Muses don't always show up on time for appointments.

How true this is. I know, for myself, if you want me to work at 9am, you will not get the same productivity as if you let me work at 9pm. I was a night owl in highschool, a night owl in college, and I still am one today.

I have had some jobs, where I did nothing more than veg out at 9am, waiting for the coffee to kick in. It was a waste of time. The company paid me for those hours of morning work, and got very little back in return.

But just after lunch, I would have much more energy. The brain would start working. I was very productive. And what sucked about it was, by the time 4:30pm came, quitting time, I was deep in thought and work, and I did not want to leave. I was pumping out great results. If I was working on a database, it would be around this time that everything was comming together in my head, that I was able to play with lots of ideas at one time, to visualize what I was doing. Those hours from noon to 4:30pm flew by too fast! Contrast to the hours of 9am, which every second felt like an hour.

If only the managment would have asked me, when is work the best for you. I would have told them, let me start at noon and stay late. But they did not want to pay overtime, they had fucked up rules about who could stay on company property after a certain hour, so everyone had to go home.

Re:Most important part of the article

[nathanh]

How true this is. I know, for myself, if you want me to work at 9am, you will not get the same productivity as if you let me work at 9pm. I was a night owl in highschool, a night owl in college, and I still am one today.

Nobody is naturally a "night owl". You are a human, you are supposed to be awake during the day and asleep at night. The fact that you your brain wasn't active until after lunch suggests that there is something very wrong with you. Here are some suggestions:

• Eat breakfast. A big breakfast, full of carbs and frucrose. That means toast, cereal, juice, fruit, yoghurt. Your body has just come out of 8+ hours of torpor and is literally STARVING. If you're not eating until lunchtime then your body will remain in torpor.
• Stop drinking coffee. Your body is not able to cope with daily doses of caffeine. Have coffee once a week, around lunchtime, as a special treat. Don't have it every single day. Especially don't have it in the morning; it's hiding real problems with your sleep patterns.
• Start going to sleep at a reasonable time. 9pm is the right time to go to sleep. That gives you nine hours sleep and you're up at 6am, ready for a new day. You've got a PVR, right? So there's no reason to stay up late. As a bonus, you'll save on electricity for lighting.
• You might be suffering sleep apnoea. Get yourself tested. You should NOT be feeling sleepy when you wakeup. You should be feeling refreshed. If you have bags under your eyes then SOMETHING IS WRONG. You are not getting the proper amount of REM sleep.

For years I used to kid myself that I was a "night owl". Then one day I realised I was being stupid - human physiology isn't designed to work at night, and no amount of bullshit can override genetics - so I started sleeping proper hours. It has made a huge difference. I'm up at 6am, at work by 8am, and home by 4pm. I don't feel tired during the day. I don't drink coffee. I'm full of energy and mentally active at all hours.

Re:Most important part of the article

[Superfarstucker]

What kind of pipe land do you live in? 9 hours of sleep? That's for weekends!, FFS if I had nine hours of sleep every day i'd be a fucking firecracker. MMM glycerin high gets you every time!

Re:Most important part of the article

[LoztInSpace]

I don't think you can put everyone in the same category. I wake up at around 8.30 am, shower, walk 20 mins to work. I have no breakfast, no lunch, no coffee just water & a couple of smokes during the day. Perhaps I'll have a bit of fruit a couple of times a week. Only on Friday afternoons do I go out for lunch - to the pub for a couple of pints. I get back home around 6:40 and either eat out (good food) or cook (properly) and stuff myself. This is washed down by 3 or 4 beers or a bottle of wine. I'll go to bed anywhere between 11:30 and 1:30am. I am not over or underweight nor do I suffer from any mental inactivity. I think people are just different or at least have trained themselves to be so.

Re:Most important part of the article

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody is naturally a "night owl". You are a human, you are supposed to be awake during the day and asleep at night. The fact that you your brain wasn't active until after lunch suggests that there is something very wrong with you. Here are some suggestions:

Stop telling people how to live, and stop assuming that everyone who isn't YOU is somehow abnormal.

Who says his ancestors were diurnal? If you've lived anywhere vaguely North, you know that you can't live by the sun, because it gets dark for half the year, and bright for half the year. You need to be most active during the dark winter months, because it's colder, and you burn more energy just to stay warm. So, for anyone evolved from a northern environment (say, just about anyone with viking blood), being up in the dark should be a natural part of life.

Trying to expect everyone to sleep to the same cycle is stupid; every single sleep study done (plus centuries of informal observations) conclude that different people have different sleep cycles, and benefit from being awake at different times.

In fact, a diverse set of sleep schedules is an advantage even in southern climates. That way, there's always someone awake to tend the fires, and to keep watch for enemies and predators. If no one's awake to sound the alarm, the whole tribe can be slaughtered in their sleep.

Each human is a unique ecosystem; what makes one person feel good doesn't always work for another.

For me, eating a "big healthy breakfast" makes me feel sick to my stomach for three hours; it's much worse than eating nothing at all. Eating a light breakfast, and a slightly heavier lunch works better for me. For someone else, it may be exactly the wrong thing.

Similarly, when I had to be at work at 7:00 am, I "lost" an extra hour of time, because it took me two hours to wake up enough to feel stable, and then I was groggy until 9:00. If I had to get to work at 9:00, I only need an hour of wakeup time, because it's closer to the middle of the day.

I'm up at 6am, at work by 8am, and home by 4pm.

Yes, I hear the local night life is great at 4 pm.

I'm full of energy and mentally active at all hours.

Except, of course, at night. You know, when life happens for many people: dances, sports events, parties, hobbies, classes, activities? Unless they're the run by the senior's society, they generally don't wrap up by 9:00 pm.

Then one day I realised I was being stupid - human physiology isn't designed to work at night

Human physiology wasn't designed at all; it evolved to match evironmental living conditions, include prolonged periods of darkness known as "night".
--
AC

Re:Most important part of the article

[nathanh]

Each human is a unique ecosystem; what makes one person feel good doesn't always work for another.

Uh huh... you're one of those unique snowflakes I guess.

For me, eating a "big healthy breakfast" makes me feel sick to my stomach for three hours;

Similarly, when I had to be at work at 7:00 am, I "lost" an extra hour of time, because it took me two hours to wake up enough to feel stable, and then I was groggy until 9:00.

You feel sick when you eat food, and you take 2 hours to wakeup, and you think that's NORMAL?!?

Keep fooling yourself kid. Eventually your body will catch up with you.

Facts to back up the slander?

[ThreeE]

After seeing some of the ideas management comes up with as a result of reading the Harvard Business Review, you may be tempted to hide their copies.

A statement like this should be backed up with some facts. Otherwise it's just slander. HBR is a quality publication.

Re:Facts to back up the slander?

[Anonymous Coward]

After seeing some of the ideas management comes up with as a result of reading the Harvard Business Review, you may be tempted to hide their copies.

Its saying that managers come up with porely thought-out ways of implementing good management theory.

Re:Facts to back up the slander?

[Anonymous Coward]

A statement like this should be backed up with some facts. Otherwise it's just slander. HBR is a quality publication.

Calm the fuck down. You were so excited about making accusations of slander that you missed the fact that *THIS FUCKING ARTICLE* was in the HBR.

Also, it's not even remotely close to the legal definition of slander.

Re:Facts to back up the slander?

[ThreeE]

After seeing some of the ideas management comes up with as a result of reading the Harvard Business Review, you may be tempted to hide their copies.

Pound sand. This statement was not in the freaking article -- it was made by the poster about the article. My point stands and you're and idiot.

Re:Facts to back up the slander?

[patio11]

Well, technically, its written communication, which would make it libel, and its written communication of an opinion, which would make it not-a-crime. You have to make a false statement of a material fact which is also damaging to reputation for it to be libel or slander.

Re:Facts to back up the slander?

[Anonymous Coward]

The best thing that could happen to the United States of America is for the Harvard Business School to be destroyed, leaving no stone atop another. All graduates of the school should be hunted down and killed. All instructors who ever taught at the school should be publically beheaded, and their heads stuck on pikes as a warning to the others.

And if anyone else ever tries to start a business school where students are taught to fuck the employees, the society, and the country the way the Harvard Business pukes have -- nuke it.

Re:Facts to back up the slander?

[An Onerous Coward]

Yawn. It's not slander. It's not even directed against HBR. Its saying that the PHBs who read it often do stupid things afterwards. People read stuff like this, and somehow manage to find justification in them for doing whatever it was they intended to do in the first place.

Re:Facts to back up the slander?

[Anonymous Coward]

> My point stands and you're and idiot.

"and idiot". Oh-h-h Ka-ay ...

Most productive hours of the day can differ

[Nonesuch]

I have had some jobs, where I did nothing more than veg out at 9am, waiting for the coffee to kick in. It was a waste of time. The company paid me for those hours of morning work, and got very little back in return.

But just after lunch, I would have much more energy. The brain would start working. I was very productive. And what sucked about it was, by the time 4:30pm came, quitting time, I was deep in thought and work, and I did not want to leave.

When I came back to my current job, I accepted the position on the condition that I could shift my schedule several hours forward from the usual "9-5". This not only makes me more productive when I am in the office, but let's me shave a couple of hours off my commute because I avoid rush hour. Win-Win for everybody.

I was pumping out great results. If I was working on a database, it would be around this time that everything was comming together in my head, that I was able to play with lots of ideas at one time, to visualize what I was doing. Those hours from noon to 4:30pm flew by too fast!

I know the feeling. Have you thought about getting a no-brainer job that you can work in the morning, so you can use your most productive hours for something that either benefits you personally, or benefits the community (Open Source community, or your local neighborhood, or whatever)?

Re:Most productive hours of the day can differ

[Seumas]

No-brainer jobs don't pay the bills.

If you don't pay the bills, you don't have the time or resources to pursue those more interesting things in your "productive" hours.

Creativity needs no management

[Andrew Tanenbaum]

Management sucks the creativity right out of you

Re:Creativity needs no management

[stygianguest]

ok folks, you can manage without management just fine, so let's manage the management out of the building... 'no management' would still be management, in a way...

I agree. I want green USD bills.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can keep it "intrinsic", if you want. Just go around with security, and take it from managers' wallets. That's totally cool with me. Get it on film if you have to beat someone's ass, and I'll show it at my company-parties in distant cities while I'm attending a "conference".

If the company starts to succeed, we'll talk about "intrinsic" royalities.

If it fails, I'll just take my $4 million severance package, and go about my way.

Thanks.

TypeTalk.

[Anonymous Coward]

"This view is supported by the research of Harvard Business School's Teresa Amabile and Yale University's Robert Sternberg, which shows that creative people are motivated from within and respond much better to intrinsic rewards than to extrinsic ones.""

That's because most creative people are introverts.

Lots of people are finally getting it

[Anonymous Coward]

We made the decision to go with a knowledge based economy a long time ago. It was forced on us by the realization that trying to protect the existing manuufacturing based economy would be impossible.

Finally, the news is filtering down to those who make the day to day decisions. Recent best sellers have included: "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Christensen and "The Rise of the Creative Class" by Florida. (Our local city council has discussed the principles outlined in the latter work with regard to the preservation of old buildings. Since many of them are neanderthals, I take this to indicate that the knowledge is filtering down.) There are many institutes studying innovation. Society as a whole is starting to 'get it'.

Now we need a study about how much money a phb loses his/her company every year. It's easy to measure the cost of postage and long distance phone calls and PHBs like doing that. What we need is a way to measure the cost of PHB induced inefficiencies. Once we figure out how to do that, things will really start to improve.

ugh

[sbma44]

Shorter version:

- pensions cost most than an on-site masseuse

- the amount of salable intellectual property generated by your employees remains constant regardless of compensation. Just make sure you lock it up in their contracts!

I know businesses exist to make money, but when I was last interviewing I viewed lots of in-office perks as a big strike against prospective employers. It's great if there's a foosball table in the break room, but not if the payments on it come out of my salary.

Even worse is the likelihood that companies who pay a lot of lipservice to maximizing employee creativity aren't looking for innovations within their area of business expertise, but rather new revenue streams. All too frequently contracts at these places give the firm rights to all of your projects and ideas, even if they're not developed at the job.

Re:ugh

[vidarh]

This may be the case for many companies, but SAS must be doing something right as they've consistently throughout their history been ranked by various different sources worldwide as one of the best companies to work in, and it seems to be something they are genuinely proud of and working hard to achieve judging from their website and from other public presentations.

Re:ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

SAS must be doing something right as they've consistently throughout their history been ranked by various different sources worldwide as one of the best companies to work in

Congratulations to SAS on successfully bribing so many various different sources worldwide.

it seems to be something they are genuinely proud of and working hard to achieve judging from their website and from other public presentations.

Oh, I'm sure they'd never lie on their website or in their public presentations.

You're either incredibly naive or you work for SAS.

Re:ugh

[Shaper_pmp]

"Congratulations to SAS on successfully bribing so many various different sources worldwide."

Riiiight. I suspect every "company employee satisfaction survey" is, in fact, filled out only by the staff of the magazine it appears in, right? And not, you know, by the company's actual employees?

Oh, wait, I suppose they could still "bribe" the employees with perks like relaxed working hours, well-equipped break-rooms and timesaving on-campus facilities, right?

So how is that different to actually "being a fun place to work"?

But, of course, that doesn't matter because SAS is clearly a 3v1l c0Rpor4tion - tehy are teh suXX0rz, right?

Intrinsic rewards

[prp]

*Instrinsic* rewards are simply doing the job for the love of it, anything else, whether financial based or massages, free drinks, etc are *extrinisic* rewards.

The goal to high creativity, they say, is to try and de-emphasise extrinsic rewards linked to performance and instead create a culture of individual and group co-operation and autonomy (incl. slack time).

There must be equity in the workplace for this to occur as well, otherwise workers will feel exploited.

How To Bribe A Developer

[nate nice]

Sure, stock options and bonuses are great and all but I've found I'm more motivated with the promise of free pizza for lunch.

Re:How To Bribe A Developer

[Seumas]

Plus, you're more likely to die of bad health early, so they wont' have to pay out on the pension/401k front. And since you're a geek/developer, there's clearly no spouse or significant other to benefit from payments. They're scott free. :D

Re:How To Bribe A Developer

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you'd probably really like it where I work.

Not only is there plenty of pizza, but there are lots of powerpoint presentations too!

Well, can you at least mod me up?

[MikeyTheK]

Whatever. Right. We creative people have no need of food, or bling, or wheels. Look. While creative people might be insulted (uh, they might say they're insulted), what we're really looking for is CREATIVE bribery. If the wife just drops her clothes, all she's getting is a sick look on my face. However, if she walks up to me, hands me a pint while wearing that cute red number she bought for this sort of thing, drops the dress, and has something kinky on underneath, then turns to show some tail and gently bends over, placing her hands on the kitchen table, I might just have that same sick look on my face, but she might also just get what she was originally looking for, especially if she laced dinner with some ED medication (for recreational experimentation only, of course), and waits until I'm done with my brew. Insulted? Sure. I'll get over it, though.

Re:Well, can you at least mod me up?

[Seumas]

If the wife just drops her clothes, all she's getting is a sick look on my face.

I dunno. It usually does it for me when your wife does that.

Re:Well, can you at least mod me up?

[mrs dogbreath]

My wife is currently holding my pint

A better read: Hare brained, tortoise minded

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Creativity does come from within, but most corporations build an environment that is not condusive to creativity/innovation.

Task-oriented activities are suited to a typical corporate management model. You can monitor their progress set effective deadlines, describe them on papaer and outsource them.

Creativity (including intuative thinking) does not respond well to any of these. Intuition happens on its own schedule and attemptng to drive it harder kills it. It has been often demonstrated that people under stress/pressure are less likely to find innovative solutions. Threats, direct (fix it this week or you're fired) or implied (downsizing/outsourcing) work against innovation.

I know that from my own experience I very rarely make breakthroughs while doing what management would consider "work". I have figured out many things while doing something else: having a crap or a shower (no, not simultaneously), fishing, shooting hoops... perhaps they should pay me to do more of these.

I don't know much about SAS, but from what I understand they are a privately owned orgainsation that really does take care of their employees. This must be a far lower-stress environment that a corp with a quarter-by-quarter driven approach that treats their employees as expenses/resources.

Intrinsic rewards

[Charles Jo]

I like intrisic rewards that can be direct-deposited .

For you creative classes!

[phorest]

Let us massage and reward your impressive creativity and self-importance with these magic "creative reward carrots", that stick that used to be in your ass is now called an intrinsic reward,. No those carrots won't pay for the sports-car and hairplugs or the summer house for sale next to ours (just listed for 1.5 million), just have the satisfaction that you are appreciated (as we are off to the summer house in the hamptons for the summer.)

P.S. Carrots are good for your creative eyesight & our bottom line!

Lip-sinking.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Management sucks the creativity right out of you"

With a guy. How would you know?

A place for managers to start...

[OSXCPA]

Ok, you are my manager. Here's where you can start...
1. Judge me by my work, not be how many hours I put in. You wrote the job description - if I can do the work you need in X hours, why should I hang around my cubicle for X+n hours, especially when I use 'extra' time to try and figure out better ways to do our job, which you ignore?
2. Substance trumps form. This applies to not only work, but policy enforcement. Telling me that we use XX product, and because XX cost $YY and took KK consultants ZZ years to implement, it can't suck simply tells me the management team didn't know what kind of pit they were digging. My advice, to get out of the hole - stop digging first!
3. I'll dress the way you want me to and conduct myself by your standards of 'professionalism', as long as you don't treat me like a three-year-old until I give you a reason. Then, just fire me - don't fsck with me.
4. Don't fire people for exchanging their own information - i.e., if we want to talk about salary at lunch, that is our business, period, especially if we aren't on company property.
5. Recognize the utter stupidity of office politics, and no, that jerk from Finance will not become less of a jerk if I learn to golf so I can make nice-nice with him. In fact, it will get you sued and me fired when I put a five-iron through his thorax.
6. Keep the HR group away from me. I do NOT WANT another flier about the suicide hotline, nor do I care about our new marketing effort in Outer Namibia, and as far as Frank Jones, the new VP of Operations, New York, is concerned, re: promotion, well, good for him - I'll never meet him, and I don't think he wants to hear about my promotion either. Nor do I want to know about the class offered for "all professionals" held in San Francisco, that I can't go to because I am either not high up enough, or I don't sell for a living. You expect my work to be relevant to what we do. I expect the same sense of appropriateness and relevance as you do.
7. I realize we have a fiduciary duty to our clients. If you are really worried about my taking advantage of proprietary information, by all means, call the feds. In the meantime, my wife's 401K is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS - we have no say in how it is invested, the trustee handles that. You should know that, being a large international bank.
8. Before you give me any static about how overworked any/everyone is, and how short on resources we are, how about firing that useless sack of cr@p you complain about so loudly at after-hours work functions? I know he's been here 15 years, and it would make upper management wonder "how did this bag of cr@p last so long?" when you have to justify canning the id10t, but trust me, it will be worth it.
9. Offering benefits and then implementing workplace policies that make it impossible to use them is the same as not offering them, except a whole lot more annoying. ("Gee, we would pay for your night-school classes, but we'll need you to work overtime for the next few months, then as needed after that - you're a professional, so I know you'll get the job done. What? No, we don't pay overtime or comp time, are you kidding?") Odd, how this sudden overtime need hit after I applied for tuition reimbursement...
10. Mandatory fun isn't.
Please note: The above have been aggregated from several different employers, so if you happen to know who I work for, and are a member of management, read #11...
11. Respect my privacy outside of work. Unless I slander you, flaming me at work over what you think I may have implied is unprofessional - yes, that word can apply to management too!

Re:A place for managers to start...

[bladesjester]

I have to agree on pretty much all of what you wrote. I've seen it far too many times.

One of the differences in my case would not be a suicide prevention hotline, but a homocide prevention hotline =]

I am generally a calm and amicable individual. Heck, I even end up being a mentor and older brother to the team I'm on (which is amusing when you are younger than some of them), but once I hit my bullshit threshold (largely from certain managers I've worked with), I need to go to the lake in order to work off some frustration before I have to hide bodies.

Re:A place for managers to start...

[sunwukong]

once I hit my bullshit threshold (largely from certain managers I've worked with), I need to go to the lake in order to work off some frustration before I have to hide bodies.
--
Why is everyone so interested in my fishtank? And why is a German porn site linking to me? lol

Um, is your fishtank at "the lake", by any chance?

Re:A place for managers to start...

[bladesjester]

lol no, my fishtank isn't at the lake.

The lake is where I like to train. Just me, my blade, and an open, sandy beach.

The fishtake referenced in my sig is a program that I worked on in college. It's a distributed simulation of a fishtank with a variety of fish. There's a more detailed explaination of it on my homepage under the Programs section.

I get a lot of email about it, from people asking questions.

Re:A place for managers to start...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm more interested in the German porn site.

Creative = coddled?

[Anonymous Coward]

The really valuable people create whatever happens, their work is produced despite whatever conditions are imposed not in response to positive ones. There is little or no need to court them with stock options or anything other than that. At best what they want is for people to stay out of their way but even then, they'll work around that if the spark is there. Anyone who feels otherwise, "fair weather" innovators, doesn't come into the band of particularly valuable and can be easily replaced. Simple.

Alfie Kohn

[Anonymous Coward]

A classic book on this topic: "Punished by Rewards" by Alfie Kohn. Broadens the scope to discuss parenting by carrot & stick as well as corporate management.

A little bit more about creativity

[roffe]

Robert Epstein (last to receive a Ph.D. from B.F. Skinner) lists four strategies for generating creative output. These are

• Capturing: The main thing that distinguishes "creative" people from the rest of us is that the creative ones have learned ways to pay attention to and then to preserve some of the new ideas that occur to them. They have capturing skills. In other words, get a PDA and learn how to use it.
• Challenging One way to accelerate the flow of new ideas is by challenging yourself--that is, by putting yourself in difficult situations in which you're likely to fail to some extent. A challenging situation is like an "extinction" procedure in the behavioral laboratory. We extinguish behavior when we withdraw the reinforcers that usually maintain that behavior. In challenging situations, a great deal of behavior goes unreinforced; it just doesn't work.
• BroadeningIf you want to enhance your own creativity, take courses in subjects you know nothing about. Once a year, at least, take a course at a local college in the last thing you'd ever want to know about. Land's own breakthrough invention came about because of training he had in crystallography, chemistry, and other fields. The invention of Velcro, the modern theory of electron spin, and countless other advances were made possible because their creators had training in diverse fields. Steve Jobs recently made a point of how his training in caligraphy contributed to the intitial success of the Macintosh.
• Surrounding Finally, you can enhance your creativity by surrounding yourself with diverse stimuli--and, even more important, by changing those stimuli regularly. Diverse and changing stimuli promote creativity because, like resurgence, they get multiple behaviors competing with each other. If you put a Mickey Mouse hat and pliers on your desk in the morning, your thinking will move in odd directions during the day. Call these items distractions, if you like; they are great reservoirs of creativity

Sometimes, though, I wonder about the opposite--how can I learn to quit being "creatve" and just get the damn job done? It's not that I ever get any original brilliant ideas anyway--all really great ideas I have had, I've found out were conceived by somebody else before me.

Anyway, here goes:

Capturing creativity

Re:A little bit more about creativity

[OSXCPA]

A possible answer - if you are a singularly creative, producing person, hire a 'do-er' or team thereof who can take what you set up and explain and grind it out. Assuming you have the means to do that... Otherwise, try setting self-imposed limits, e.g., "I am not allowed to do (X very nice, imaginitive thing) until I implement (Y grindingly dull job done).

Works for me, but YMMV.

BTW - you may repeat great ides of the past, but hey - your timing might be better than the earlier implementation was. Think about all the stories of Steve Jobs seeing GUI, email and OO programming at Xerox PARC - he has even said, he didn't originate them, he implemented them and got them out for use when the time was right. (OK, many of the concepts were implemented by others along the way, but you get the point)

Cheers!

Re:A little bit more about creativity

[roffe]

Thanks for the advice!

As you hint at, the story about Jobs being originally inspred by Xerox is in fact a myth. Jef Raskin, then at Apple, had worked with the ideas both as a professor and as an employee at Apple. The purpose of the legendary visit at Xerox was to see what Raskin had talked about in action. You can read all about it at Raskin's Site

Re:A little bit more about creativity

[OSXCPA]

I stand corrected. I had seen an interview with Jobs where he talked about the visit and the "6 things he saw there" that he took, and he went to pains to say he only understood 2-3 of them at the time. I don't recall him mentioning Raskin, but that was probably my memory gone bad. Thanks for the reply and correction - and the Raskin link. Good reading!

SAS creativity vs. Open Source creativity

[kgruscho]

Having spent the day looking at the R project and all its package, I think the Open Source R mops the floor with SAS products in terms of creativity.

I just find it odd to hear SAS management talk about creativity vs. says Google, which at the moment seems to be a very creative company.

Re:SAS creativity vs. Open Source creativity

[Otter]

R is an open-source knockoff of the S language. It's hardly a beacon of creativity, any more than Evolution, Mono or Rhythmbox is.

That said, I agree about SAS. SAS is solid, certainly, but I doubt the word its users associate with it is "creativity".

Re:SAS creativity vs. Open Source creativity

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it is an *implementation* of S, now greatly extended by the hard work of a team of volunteers.

The more things change

[mjr1007]

Creativity is the engine that drives progress. Greed is the engine that drives business. Is it any wonder that the greedy are trying to exploit the creative. Of course there is no need to give stock options to those who actually create the products, doing that would only encourage them to move on at some point. Make them chose between a decent work enviroment or money. They will chose the enviroment most of the time. Is there really any reason a person can't be creative and own a piece of what they create? Capitalism without everyone owning capital is like democracy without everyone having the vote.

Re:The more things change

[OSXCPA]

I disagree. "Business" is merely a mechanism by which a provider of a good or service works out how to sustainably provide same to the market in such a way that he/she/they can skim some value out of the process to survive. Like a catalyst. Creativity without such a mechanism cannot provide value to the market in a survivable way - the artists needs a studio to sell, or must create his/her own studio. What you call exploitation is one of the following:
1. Bad negotiating skills on the creative side.
2. Unwillingness of the creative to acknowledge that their skills and creativity are not so special that someone else won't provide them for the ask price.
3. Unwillingness of the creative to market his/her product themselves, and so uses a third party to market the good/service, and then gripes about the cost of their own laziness/inability to sell.
If you don't like the deal, don't make it. Your employer cannot take advantage of you or your creativity unless you let them.

Re:The more things change

[mjr1007]

I can only assume you actually aren't in business for yourself. Maybe you've read an article or two in some B school publication about how academics view business.

I disagree. "Business" is merely a mechanism by which a provider of a good or service works out how to sustainably provide same to the market in such a way that he/she/they can skim some value out of the process to survive.

Business is all about dominating markets and extracting maximum profits. To do that you must raise prices and reduce cost. Look at the recording labels that bitch about illegal file copying and forget to pay the artist.

the artists needs a studio to sell, or must create his/her own studio.

If you are talking about music I think you meant to say label. Studio time is cheap these days. Some of my friends rent it for less then 50 USD/hr. There would be no reason to build your own studio. Of course most would say that while performing is hard work the real creative part is in the composing. Performers usually interpret the music, unless you do a lot of improvosation.

1. Bad negotiating skills on the creative side.

It doesn't really matter how good your negotiating skills are if you have a weak hand and they know it. I've negotiated contracts from both stregnth and weakness. I always do much better from a position of stregnth.

2. Unwillingness of the creative to acknowledge that their skills and creativity are not so special that someone else won't provide them for the ask price.

A lot of people believe that creativity is probably not even needed in mature industries, which software is supposed to becoming. So then the goal would simply be to reduce cost. But creative people can also significantly reduce cost even in mature industries, so I don't buy this argument. Or the argument that there are lots of creative people out there. PHBs think that everyone else is interchangable but my experience says it's just not so.

Unwillingness of the creative to market his/her product themselves, and so uses a third party to market the good/service, and then gripes about the cost of their own laziness/inability to sell.

You have no idea how difficult it is to wear all of those different hats, and I suspect you never will.

If you don't like the deal, don't make it. Your employer cannot take advantage of you or your creativity unless you let them.

You can't eat creativity or sleep under a product. It would make sense if we were all self sufficient and didn't need to work but only did so for our own ammusment.

You ought to read the story of Robert Kearns and the intermittent windshield wiper patent. This guy spent the rest of his life suing the automakers who stole his IP. Think of all the great ideas this guy never had because he spent all of his time trying to collect on his previous invention. Sales, marketing, even managment is overhead and should be reduced as much as possible.

Capitalism without everyone having capital is like democracy without everyone having the vote.

Re:The more things change

[pehrs]

> Creativity is the engine that drives progress. Greed is the engine that drives business. Is it any wonder that the greedy are trying to exploit the creative.

And creative greed is the engine that makes people rich?

Re:The more things change

[OSXCPA]

First, how "academics" view anything is not my concern.
Second, I have been in business for myself, and worked for others. I made money in both modes.
Third, I am a little confused - you seem to argue that creatives drive the economy (I agree) but that "you can't eat creativity or sleep under a product" and go on to talk about reducing overhead - meaning, essentially, you need businesspeople to efficiently bring a product to market. So, do we like businesspeople for helping up get our products and services to market, or do we dislike them because they exploit us?

As far as reducing sales, marketing and management as far as possible, BFOTO - why do you think companies lay off pretty much anyone they can? This is patently obvious.
As for the Kearns example, how representative is his case? How good were his patents/contracts? I'll stipulate your interpretation - he got screwed. But, I suggest that his example is not typical - if creators were commonly screwed out of their work, the incentives to create would basically disappear, and I see little widespread evidence of that. One extreme case hardly makes a trend.

Re:The more things change

[mjr1007]

"Second, I have been in business for myself, and worked for others. I made money in both modes."

So you had time to do sales & marketing, negotiate contracts and development. If you did then you must be one of the few. Most of the owner/operators that I know, including me, have a tough time doing all that at the same time.

"Third, I am a little confused - you seem to argue that creatives drive the economy (I agree) but that "you can't eat creativity or sleep under a product" and go on to talk about reducing overhead - meaning, essentially, you need businesspeople to efficiently bring a product to market. So, do we like businesspeople for helping up get our products and services to market, or do we dislike them because they exploit us?"

Businesspeople spend all of their time controlling the market, and they are good at it. They are a gatekeeper between development and customers. The middleman as it were. If they actively prevent new competitors from coming in then you may have the best product in the world but if you can't sell it then you are screwed.

Businesspeople's goal is to extract maximume money for minimum effort. So they maximize profits by controlling both ends of the market. Look at M$. How many times do they have to be convicted of either monoplistic practices or theft of IP before people get it. They are not providing a useful service they are just extracting as much as they can. I'm not sure if you can't see it or if you won't.

"As far as reducing sales, marketing and management as far as possible, BFOTO - why do you think companies lay off pretty much anyone they can? This is patently obvious."

Laying off people is not the same as reducing cost. Particularly when the CEO lays off people and then awards himself a bonus which is more then the victim's compensation was. That was just more corporate double speak.

Kearns was just the most visible example. How many people didn't fight or were forced to settle for pennies on the dollar. Havign done boardroom consulting I can tell you they are not sitting around saying how can we add value to our developers and customers. The bottom line isn't everything, it's the only thing.

As far as creativity is easy to find, it's demonstratably not true. If it were then software would just work. Instead the PHBs look for the lowest cost engineers and get the lowest quality product that barely runs and is very late. Longhorn comes to mind.

Are you a developer who struck out on his own or did you do some other function? Have you worked in sales & marketing in companies. Have you done boardroom work? Having done these things, among others, I find it hard to believe that you have such a high regard for these people if you've actually worked with them on a day to day basis. This whole value add proposition sounds like B school stuff and is nothing like the real world people I've dealt with.

Just my $0.02 worth.

Key point, almost missed

[OSXCPA]

When I RTFA, I noticed something that struck home - the author discusses the difference between a company being held 'accountable' by customers vs. shareholders. I've frequently seen good managers make decisions they knew were bad, because the stock market is fundamentally concerned with the lowest common denominator - it doesn't matter if you can make more money for the year by taking an action that will cause earnings to miss expectations this quarter, but the markets will punish you. Your customers, however, only care about how good your product is - you have to make the best decisions you can at every step, or your product will fail. Look at large software firms who cling depserately to a shipping deadline... and ship buggy product. Before you mod this offtopic - creatives are about doing a good job. There is a conflict doing such a job in a public vs. private firm. The article points this up, and I emphasize it. Go redundant!

Flexitime rules

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

When I came back to my current job, I accepted the position on the condition that I could shift my schedule several hours forward from the usual "9-5". This not only makes me more productive when I am in the office, but let's me shave a couple of hours off my commute because I avoid rush hour. Win-Win for everybody.

It's interesting that one of the most highly regarded "perks" in every survey of geek staff I've seen for years has been flexible working hours.

At my current employer, we have quite a clever policy: the rule is you have to be in the office for at least 5 hours between 9am and 6pm every day, but other than that, you can work your 37.5 as you see fit, with common sense applying when it comes to organising meetings and the like. What this means is that you're guaranteed to be in the office for at least an hour of overlap with any of your colleagues in a given day, so you never miss someone completely. However, you can effectively take a half-day off without using leave, or go in before the morning rush and then leave mid-afternoon to pick the kids up from school, etc.

I'd say most of the guys' typical hours are somewhere between 9:30-5:30 and 10:30-6:30. We also have quite a few habitual early starters and a few habitual come-in-at-lunchtime guys. There are even some guys who change quite radically from week to week or even day to day, such as the guy next to me whose fiancee works shifts at a hospital, or one of the girls who finishes early-late-early-late to alternative picking her son up from school with her husband.

This is a great arrangement, and it was interesting that when we were bought out by a US corp a few months back, this was one of the Big Things everyone was adamant we would keep in the new contract. (We collectively made them rewrite it so we could.) Of all the other "perks" brought in by the corp, none has anything like the value of this one, and I'm not sure I actually use any of the others.

Re:Flexitime rules

[TheRaven64]

I worked at QinetiQ for a little while, and they had the policy that everyone had to be in between 12 and 2 (I think - something like that) if they were not claiming the day off (which you could do a small number of times a month if you had worked overtime, or if you wanted to use up some holiday time). This had the advantage that there was a time you could guarantee someone would be around if you needed to see them.

Apart from that, you could turn up whenever you wanted as long as you kept track of how many hours you spent on each project for billing purposes - easy for me, since I was only working on a single project.

It was quite a fun place to work, although they still have a civil service attitude to paperwork, so it's not the kind of place where I would like to be management-track.

I would say that flexible working hours are far more important in a global economy. I now do a lot of work with/for people in the US who are 5-8 time zones away. I can get an email with something to do in the morning and have it done by the time they wake up, but if I were working 9-5 then there would only be a very small window in which we could have real-time communication.

HANZOSAN, IS THAT YOU??!!

[Anonymous Coward]

HanzoSan, the annoying dipshit, I know that's you coming back with a new name. The signs are all there: nonstop posting of inane, idiotic nonsense, the left wing Bush bashing, the whining about everything in life.

I'm going to expose you for the douchebag you are.

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

What an insult to Google to compare SAS to it!

SAS is a piece of shit. It's the Microsoft of the statistical world -- they have lots of money to throw around to get their name in journals and sponsor conferences but at the end of the day, the only reason it's still used is companies don't want to migrate from their existing database software. Ask any PhD in statistics, if they were given the choice, their company would use S-PLUS or R.

Still Works for some...

[dew4au]

I think this can work in some environments. Take me, for instance, who works for a non-profit DoD contractor. I get paid a decent salary and I am encouraged to be creative in my free time. Since the extra money from our contracts is rolled over into lab investments we have a significant pool of resources to draw from to be creative. I am allowed to use that money to buy things to experiment with. If I get an idea, I can try it out. That, for me, is fun. Not all of ideas work, but it sure is nice to have the freedom to express them.

I do, however, recognize that this is a fairly isolated case where "profit-whoring" is nonexistent.

Oh well...

Re:Still Works for some...

[Anonymous Coward]

While creativity may be a good thing, where it is applied and what problems you are trying to solve is what matters.

I have no idea what you do, but the people who pull the strings on the DoD do not seem to have the best interest of the world in mind. It would suck to look back and realise you spent your free time coming up with creative new ways to kill people.

9-5 Creativity

[Regnard]

Creativity can't be shoehorned between the hours of nine and five. The Muses don't always show up on time for appointments.

I can't agree with this more. In my job where I actually use both sides of my brain, creativity just doesn't have a schedule. The best thing I could do is set myself up for a "creative spark" -- surfing the web for things I like, or look at what the latest, although surfing can only do so much.

Off topic...

[xENoLocO]

... but damn, I would kill for his name at any party I've ever been to.

Her: Hi, I'm Stacy...

Me: Hi Stacy, I'm Mr. Good Night

**slap**

Ok, maybe not.... but the thought of it is cool.

Open Source R is made by academics

[mbkennel]

meaning that they get paid by tax money.

That definitely has to be a job where the rewards are intrinsic to the creation of knoweldge, because the external rewards sucketh and getting grants and jobs is even harder.

$Money$

[militiaMan]

Time and Money which are the same thing are also obviously the most important thing to any employee. This guy does not understand human nature. I make 50K as a software developer, and after taxes I only keep 30K. I have no home, I have no car, I have no stock options. GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK. I will soon have the money for a RV, and I will leave the U.S. I will run my business from Mexico in the next year or two from my RV so I won't have to work 60+ hours a week. I am tired of working for a bunch of Fascist, Socialist, and Communist that want to spend my money and print even more. I will build a weapon system to fight back against the World Nazi Police state and then you can all Nazi/Fascist can kiss my freedom loving ass.

Re: $Money$

[chawly]

Go to it ! You've the idea that rocks !

State of mind

[OSUBeav]

People still want and need bonuses and rewards, but I've found if the management thinks of money as a bribe then they think they are entitled to intrude on their people. Consider money the reward for success, not the price for someone's life-hours.

SAS sounds like it has the idea for sustainability in knowledge based work. Respect the people with 16-20 years schooling and years of experience, the ones you worked so hard to recruit and interview. Require results and give them responsibility and authority. And the icing on the cake - realize that smart people have intellectual needs as well as personal and family needs.

^Mod the man up, please!

[FuturePastNow]

Creative genius, I tell ya.

Agile Work - People are Creators

[under_score]

Managing for creativity requires deep recognition of the fact that people are creators. Not only that, but the constant change of circumstances should be embraced as a fertile ground for creativity. And finally, it is very important to realize that the way people perceive reality is critical to them being empowered to be creative... and for their contributions to be valued. I write about this kinda stuff all the time - hopefully in a predominantly practical way - on my blog: Agile Advice.

Another idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's another tip: Stop trying to own your creative people. The most creative people are the ones who will be working for themselves in five years, and thus aren't willing to sign non-compete agreements, overly-broad NDAs, and contracts that say "we own everything you create whether you're being paid for it or not".

Re:Another idea

[Regnard]

I agree with you. Non-compete agreements are really lame. An example: The web industry isn't really the biggest of fields of expertise but I've encountered an Non-compete agreement that really would make you change careers after the job to avoid potential litigation.

I'm actually currently in trouble because of this

[5n3ak3rp1mp]

Your post rings hugely true. 9am-noon is "dead time". Been at a company for 1.5 yrs now. Despite a stack of great feedback from clients for the work I've done, I am currently dealing with a less-than-stellar feedback rating because my boss is hell-bent (at this point) at getting me in as much before 9am as possible. Man, I was swing-shift in the USAF, I was a night owl in college, and now Corporate America with all its kissass head-down follow-the-leaders is on my ass. I got dinged big-time for the 9:30 arrivals I was starting to get into- even though I REGULARLY work till 7/8- ESPECIALLY if I'm working on something interesting or am on a roll/"in flow". They just didn't have me working on anything, well, interesting, for a couple of months, and eventually it showed. And I get blamed for this shit. Hell, even my initials are P.M.!

I'm a builder. I was always pegged as a creative/technical guy, I love to build, and in the line of work I feel I have taken up, that means coding and designing db-driven websites and mastering all related technologies. But they spec it all out for me until there is no "fun interesting part" left. My neat ideas get vetoed for "probably taking too much time to implement." That's right, I work in a Big 4 consulting firm, where every hour not billed directly to a client is a potential waste that shows up in your "utilization". Where you can't even start building a feature until you get at least one client lined up ready to share the cost of developing it. Heck, I guess it reeks of capitalist efficiency, but what a frickin creative buzzkill... This literally cuts out everything that, well, that the client doesn't know they want! ;)

It's Wednesday, it's gorgeous out, and it's supposed to rain this weekend. Why can't I ditch the cube and go sailing today, and catch up on some of the work on the rainy weekend, maximizing the time available?? Is the idea here that a person doesn't have enough discipline to do shit unless there is a boss breathing down his/her neck every so often??

I may quit soon and start an LLC due to the lack of flexibility/creativity and the negative tensions that are erupting on both sides due to this. I'm tired of starting at the bottom of the totem pole and being held back all over again. The shit that the managers and senior managers get to do is not rocket science. (This is my second job but first consulting job, so I started at the bottom.)

Not to mention, I hate working on all-Microsoft technologies.

I have some great ideas for work, one possibly very profitable. I don't even care if my pay drops (hey, that rings true with this article, too!) as long as I'm reasonably comfortable. Anyone want to join my flex-time LLC if I start one up? Here's the idea:

1) Monday morning, we try to determine the tasks we're going to try to get done that week, and divide them up into days.
2) When you are done with your tasks for the day, you can go home.
3) When you are done with your tasks for the week, you can take the rest of the week off. Or work on your own stuff.
4) Some XP methodologies used.

The way I'd see this working is a combination of Microsoft-esque flextime and Google-esque work-on-pet-project time.

Thoughts?

A Clean Code base!

[moultano]

If you are developing software in any capacity, personally I think nothing helps creativity more than a clean code base. When the biggest thing you associate with implementing a new interesting feature is the crap you have to go through to get it interacting with everything else, you aren't very likely to come up with good ideas and act on them often.

Harvard in a different universe

[heroine]

Most of the time it feels like HBS is in a different universe from the way things are done in u.s.. Theoretically they teach these principles to managers who then manage us they way they're taught but it's never shown.

Maybe HBS graduates go into fields other than technology and those fields are run like HBS teaches. Maybe technology leaders only come from Stanford and they have an opposite philosophy.

Globally, Harvard seems more in line with the way things are done in India.

Quite the Opposite, Actually

[nikster]

The day the big faceless outsourcing companies in India figure out how to nurture employees for creativity, that's the day we have to fear.

As of now, they seem to be blissfully unaware, and so we can compete easily on creativity. They produce crap in large numbers, and for whom it's ok, it's OK. We make the interesting and innovative things.

And before you start flaming about how good the outsourced software really is, please give an example, and explain why it's good. All I have seen was useless crap, just like the stuff produced by big faceless corporations over here - unsurprisingly.

Re:Quite the Opposite, Actually

[Seumas]

And before you start flaming about how good the outsourced software really is, please give an example, and explain why it's good. All I have seen was useless crap, just like the stuff produced by big faceless corporations over here - unsurprisingly.

I think you might have missed the tongue in my cheek. ;)

Get a hobby

[cscalfani]

Don't waste time looking for creativity at work. If you have it great, but expecting it and being frustrated because it's not there is just a waste of time and energy. Companies don't care about your creative needs. They barely care about your work environment needs.

After about 20 years in this business, I finally got a hobby. One that fulfils my creative needs. Now I control it on my own terms, one hundred percent.

Sounds like Paul Graham

[slapout]

That sounds a lot like what Paul Graham says in his "Great Hackers" essay. Although I think you could also sub other words for Hacker. (Programmer, Artist, etc)

Essay
http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

Audio version read by the author:
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail188.htm l