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Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

inc.com

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Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#41

Post by splatcollision »

jasonfried wrote: post #24
rishi wrote: post #16

"And because we don't have a marketing department, we don't have a chief marketing officer." 37 signals is amazing at marketing. Their blogs. Their books. Video Lectures. Mission statements. Guest posts.

To clarify, we think everything we do is marketing. From how the error messages are written, to customer service, to copywriting in our emails, to the cancellation process, to clarity of message, to how every single thing in each product works, it's all marketing. Marketing is everyone's responsibility. It's the sum total of everything we do.

This sums it up in my mind - this is just smart business. Having such a core need of a business being wrapped up in a "Marketing Department" contributes to a lot of corporate BS in many corporations.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#42

Post by michaelchisari »

kwis wrote: post #38
michaelchisari wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mondragon worker cooperative federation has 85,000 employees. If you look at how it's structured, it's not hard to imagine how Google could operate similarly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Mondragon has annual revenues of €174/employee. I have trouble viewing that as a proven model.

I'm pretty sure the revenues on Wikipedia are off, and I can't find what reference they're using to get that number.

This study from around 2002/2003 puts their revenues at $8 billion annually with 60,000 employees. That puts their per-employee revenues at around $133k.

http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/conferences/bilbao/p...

This puts their revenues at $24.2 billion in 2008, which is almost $300k per employee, if you use the ~85,000 employees figure.

http://willblogforfood.typepad.com/will_blog_for_food/2011/0...

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#43

Post by marcomonteiro »

jasonfried wrote: post #31
mhp wrote: post #12

Fog Creek and 37Signals are probably more alike than either of us would care to admit (ha!) and I could see Joel writing a very similar article a few years ago when we had 20some people at the company. But what works there, or at FC, is not a one size fits all answer. Having managers when there are 10 people are at your company makes no sense. The hierarchy starts out flat, you add a few more people and you're at 20,…

"But what works there, or at FC, is not a one size fits all answer." Absolutely. I'm simply sharing our experiences with how we run things - that's what my Inc. articles are about. I wouldn't expect anyone else to do what we do because we do it. Find your own comfort zone. There are plenty of ways to do plenty of things.

I for one appreciate the insight into how you run things. I especially liked the point you made about encouraging mastery (horizontal) instead of managerial (vertical) promotion. So, thank you for sharing.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#44

Post by wtn »

michaelchisari wrote: post #23
pmjordan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Google's scale? Successfully? I find that rather unlikely. If you have any examples of this, please do share. Otherwise, all I can imagine is reducing the depth of the tree, and in some cases not to make it a strict tree, but a somewhat interconnected graph. (that said, throwing people into distinct "manager" and "engineer" bins is disingenuous anyway, a manager managing engineers had better have some kind of engi…

The Mondragon worker cooperative federation has 85,000 employees. If you look at how it's structured, it's not hard to imagine how Google could operate similarly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Semco SA, the Brazilian conglomerate, would probably be a more relevant example of corporate re-engineering.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#45

Post by dailyrorschach »

tomlin wrote: post #33

What Jason Fried is expressing is something I've been pondering for a while. And I think we'll (hopefully) see more of it (sorry, manager-types). In my experience, managers in most departments have essentially taken the role of sheep-herders. So, I started to ask myself: why do I need a manager when I work well on my own, making smart, educated decisions that are based upon the ideals and successes of other smart, ed…

Though I am a dreaded project manager, I agree mostly to what you are saying. But in the field I work in, advertising, I do think that its necessary and that my value is additive.

My responsibility is mainly to be a shit umbrella, so my creative and developers can do work, especially when we're all working on multiple clients. I'm not doing my job when I have to have them in meetings, in fact we don't meet save for face-to-face discussions.

That and of course dealing with the rowdiness of clients, hammering out scope, keeping things to scope, and being the bad guy when necessary with the client. (This is actually harder then people realize, our default human reaction is to help people, and it requires taking abuse in the extremes that is simply part of your job)

This article sums up my views nicely: http://weblog.muledesign.com/2010/10/project_managers_not_ca...

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#46

Post by mhp »

calibraxis wrote: post #34
mhp wrote: post #12

Fog Creek and 37Signals are probably more alike than either of us would care to admit (ha!) and I could see Joel writing a very similar article a few years ago when we had 20some people at the company. But what works there, or at FC, is not a one size fits all answer. Having managers when there are 10 people are at your company makes no sense. The hierarchy starts out flat, you add a few more people and you're at 20,…

The article mentioned rotating managerial duties, and alternative methods of adding structure. Was your comment taking that into account?

Rotating roles is great for a small company when the amount of managerial activity is very small. But creative work and manager work don't mix well. Being a manager requires responding to things that are happening at that moment (interruptive), which essentially destroys 'the zone' required for getting things done as a creative (developer, designer, etc). The other problem is that most people aren't cut out to be good managers, and learning to be a good manager is a skill - the more you practice the better you get. You start to see patterns and figure out how to deal with them. But rotating roles could help when you are first starting out to figure out who has the manager chops, and who sees it as a burden. Ideally the less time your company spends managing, the more time you can spend making cool stuff, so if the workload is small - go for it.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#47

Post by michaelchisari »

wtn wrote: post #44
michaelchisari wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mondragon worker cooperative federation has 85,000 employees. If you look at how it's structured, it's not hard to imagine how Google could operate similarly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Semco SA, the Brazilian conglomerate, would probably be a more relevant example of corporate re-engineering.

I mention Semco elsewhere in the thread, but Mondragon is 30x bigger than Semco, and yet still operates effectively as a horizontal organization.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#48

Post by MrMan »

The only way to solve management issues with a high degreee of confidence is to stay small enough to avoid management. The NASA analogies are problematic, however, because large organizations do indeed manage to manage themselves while completing critical projects. Which is more interesting? Large-scale management, or head-in-the-sand? I could personally never work in a large-scale organization, but how can we all avoid these issues and still create a highly functioning economy, which produces both critical and lifestyle goods and services?

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#49

Post by mikeryan »

tom_b wrote: post #2

Love the idea of rotating "managerial" or "lead" person in a small group. I'm on a small team within a larger organization that we support (in dev and tool usage). A challenge for us is that people in the larger org are used to having a manager to route their requests to. I may give a rotational approach a whirl. But right now, one of my primary roles is as s&!t umbrella and I don't want to overly burden my real prod…

This fits nicely with the study which shows that organizations are more efficient if people are promoted at random ;-)

http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#50

Post by lukifer »

mcdowall wrote: post #20

I find it outstanding that they have 5m users and only 5 support staff!. I would love to know how they manage that.

I would presume they use the same technique that Brent Simmons suggests: treat customer support as an engineering constraint, and design solutions to minimize common support problems. The quick feedback loop of the web makes it much more possible than in other industries.
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