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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."
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
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.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
> 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.
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