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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."
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.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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!
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
-- Rolf Lindgren, cand.psychol
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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. =]
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
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.
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.
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.
.com-like. Companys like that grow fast, and vanish fast as well.
:-)
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
I posted Anonymously b/c I don't want to burn bridges either