'Goofing Off' To Get Ahead?

theodp writes "His old day job at Gawker entailed calling BS on tech's high-and-mighty, but Ryan Tate still found things to like about Silicon Valley. In The 20% Doctrine, Tate explores how tinkering, goofing off, and breaking the rules at work can drive success in business. If you're lucky, your boss may someday find Tate's book in his or her conference schwag bag and be inspired enough by the tales of skunkworks projects at both tech (Google, Flickr, pre-Scott Thompson Yahoo) and non-tech (Bronx Academy of Letters, Huffington Post, Thomas Keller Restaurant Group) organizations to officially condone some form of 20% time at your place of work. In the meantime, how do you manage to find time to goof off to get ahead?"

Comments

Not making money = wasting money

[GeneralTurgidson]

The business owners I've worked with don't have a lot of patience for people who aren't being productive on their dime. In today's business climate, in most professions goofing off means overstaffed. Our current MBAs don't realize the future benefits of personnel enrichment.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[Kneo24]

What if you were paying someone by a set rate to get a project done. Would you want to pay them for that 20% of the time that they would be using to do nothing towards your project? Personnel enrichment is fine as long as its focused. I have experience managing people. You can't trust everyone to do something that would ultimately benefit the company without some supervision.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[grcumb]

The business owners I've worked with don't have a lot of patience for people who aren't being productive on their dime. In today's business climate, in most professions goofing off means overstaffed. Our current MBAs don't realize the future benefits of personnel enrichment.

First off, this problem has existed since forever. It was only formalised into doctrine, though, with the time-and-motion studies of the early 20th Century, and the introduction of business schools in the US. That was the point where people could talk about productivity in pseudo-scientific terms, making it okay to forget all other considerations, and to trust 20-something MBAs instead of experienced managers who'd worked their way up through the ranks and who actually knew the business.

There has always been a minority of bosses and business owners who recognise the limitations of an straight-up efficiency --> profit approach. In my professional life, I've stuck with those who realised that the best way to invest in the company was to invest in me, and not with those to whom I was only a cog in the wheel.

In my current job, I negotiated a 'Google' day. It actually took some explaining to make people realise that this wasn't a day off. It was a day in which nobody got to tell me what to do. In other words, for 4 days of the week, I work to other people's priorities, but on the 5th day, I decide what the priority is. Some of the time, it's work on outside projects (last week, it was an editorial for the local newspaper), but most of the time, it's work stuff that wouldn't otherwise get enough time from me - website refinements, code cleanup, automation scripts and other things that add value to the company, but not in a directly linear way.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[Anonymous Coward]

You also can't expect the company to keep moving forward past the current projects if you're not willing to consistently take risks in letting employees try out something that may not work. That's what R&D is: investing in things that may not pay off, but are also the only way to advance the long-term prospects of the company using in-house resources. Unfortunately, American companies have redefined the research part of R&D to mean "go read up on what you need to do to get this project done."

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[ATMAvatar]

With technical workers, the management's job is to run interference against external distractions and help remove roadblocks. Your team should be largely self-organizing and self-motivating, such that you don't have to watch over them. Deviation from this is generally a failure in hiring, a failure in management, or both.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[Belial6]

Those are the words of incompetent management. Don't feel bad. Middle management in America is massively loaded with incompetent managers. Of course, incompetent middle management is ultimately upper managements fault.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[oatworm]

Short answer: Supervisors, which, contrary to popular belief, is not management.

Long answer: If you're operating within the same time span as your employees, meaning your deadlines are their deadlines and vice-versa, you're not management or, worse yet, you're not managing.

A supervisor has the job you're describing. They usually are a former veteran in the field, someone with sufficient domain knowledge in the industry to know when an employee is doing their job, when an employee that's capable of doing the job is sluffing off, or when an employee is simply incapable of doing the job regardless of how much you incentivize them. A supervisor isn't formally trained on how to supervise - chances are, they've been supervised long enough where they've seen what works from their predecessors, what doesn't, and guide their approach accordingly. In military terms, they'd be an NCO (Corporal, Sergeant, etc.). How much latitude they have, and how they motivate or monitor the employees, is defined by management, depending on business needs and corporate culture.

Management, meanwhile, is a formally defined skill with lots and lots of science behind it. Management's job is to provide differing levels of strategic direction for the company, depending on time span and objectives. The purpose of management is to make sure that each assignment provided to staff is part of a larger goal dictated by business needs and that each assignment is broken down and compartmentalized into appropriate-sized units, as dictated by the capabilities of each staff member or group. So, for example, a software architect might be assigned a multi-year software design project, while a starting coder would receive something fairly simple, like "Implement function X within the parameters Y specified here," with a deadline (implicit or explicit) of at most a week. To accomplish this, systems must be created, maintained, and monitored to ensure that there is consistent, positive output from the start of a project (or set of projects) to the end of one. When management does its job well, predictable, sensible output is the result (see recent iterations of Ubuntu and Windows, at least post-Vista). When management does its job poorly, the systems break down (see Longhorn, Apple in the '90s before Jobs reclaimed the throne, pretty much anything GM has done in the past 40 years). In military terms, management would be your officers (Lieutenants to Generals, depending on branch, of course).

Now, getting to what you were discussing, yes, it's true that Slashdot has more than its fair share of self-entitled 2%ers (or people that wish they were 2%ers and want to be treated accordingly) that think they should be given a six-figure paycheck, a well stocked lab, and a fridge full of caffeine so they can change the world, and view any failure to accommodate that vision as "poor management". In reality, that might be the start of an effective system of production, or it might not - depends on who's working for you and what you're doing. However, as GM learned the hard way in the '60s and '70s (and Toyota learned by studying Deming, who knew better as far back as the '30s), even "unskilled" labor benefits from frequent job reassignments, variety in work, and occasional moments to stop and think about the bigger picture. This doesn't mean letting the employees turn the company into a re-enactment of the "Lord of the Flies" (or whatever you want to call the excesses of the now-legendary Dot Com bubble 'companies'), but it does mean treating them as stakeholders that should be interested in the success of the company and whose opinions should be respected and rewarded when they lead to improvement and growth.

From a management (or even supervisory) standpoint, this means that, if your system calls on lots of yelling, screaming, and berating to get employees to do something they don't want to do, your system is going to only return just enough to avoid further yelling, screaming, and

Goofing off

[girlintraining]

In the meantime, how do you manage to find time to goof off to get ahead?"

By always looking busy, never telling the manager what I'm working on until it's done, and reporting I'm capable of doing less work than I actually am. Then, when I exceed expectations, my manager loves me, and when I deliver shiny new toys, the rest of the department loves me.

That said, in many other countries and corporate environments, tinkering would be encouraged... but in most jobs here in the good ol'US of A... you're supposed to be just smart enough to do your job, and not so smart you realize your manager's a moron, your company is unethical, and your coworkers make more than you.