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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

#81

Post by kwis »

michaelchisari wrote: post #42
kwis wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It looks like I got confused because whoever edited the wikipedia article came from a country that uses '.' as a thousands separator.

Looking more closely, they're a strange sort of conglomerate. At a glance, I see two banks, two insurance companies, roughly two hundred industrial companies, a dozen retail shops, a dozen food-related businesses, a dozen research firms, and ten education companies.

In a way, it reminds me of Idealab, in that each new company is a new pool of equity (with the associated incentives that result from ownership), and that failures are not punished, but rather result in retraining or placement in a different firm. (for full co-op members).

It's also interesting to see that the founder was a priest who started off with a co-operative polytechnic school and bootstrapped everything from that base.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#82

Post by sili »

I like the idea of keeping people closer to what they are good at. However I'm afraid this strategy will backfire on your employees if they are forced to leave to another company for whatever reason. In an environment where every company does not have this flat hierarchy it is strange to see a person who has spent 10 years in one place and has not advanced to some managerial position. New employer will think that he is unfit in some way (even though the opposite is the case) and will probably not even give the person a chance to explain themselves.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#83

Post by ck2 »

Way to reward the one critical person who actually has to do the hard work of interacting with your customers AFTER they've been sold and paid you money.

That's the hard part because it's only dealing with problems and never "great to have to call you".

I guess customer service these days is disposable and easily replaceable.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#84

Post by tomlin »

dailyrorschach wrote: post #45
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 f…

I would say in high-output environments that a PM is a good thing, if the PM in question is good at being a PM. I've met a few, but many more terrible PMs unfortunately.

Oftentimes PMs (or better, their organization culture + workflow) have thrown a wrench or 2 into production and caused cascading failures because they forgot a detail, or couldn't admit to fault. The culture is surely to blame amidst most of these catastrophes.

The fact that you can admit that your PM skills need work already makes you a frontrunner for being a much better PM than most.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#85

Post by [deleted] »

Wolf_Larsen wrote: post #75
hapless wrote: post #69

"The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have." This quote really, deeply bothered me. One of the major differences between alpha males and the rest of the population is that they will always assume they'll end up in the top spot. Your prototypical alpha male won't even consider the odds of being on the bottom in that lottery. To push it further, those…

You aren't making a very clear point. Are you saying that : "Alpha males will always assume they'll end up in the top spot, so when they choose rules for a situation regarding two competing agents, their choices will favor the agent in with the most authority"? If so, then you are assuming a context in which the agents of the situation can change the roles in which they are assigned permanently. That is not the case…

[deleted]

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#86

Post by gms »

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.

How did the employees feel about the various bits of organisational experimentation carried out? Did any balk at the constant change?

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#87

Post by dhh »

ry0ohki wrote: post #55
jasonfried wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 really like your approach, especially making everyone manager for a week. I think the only problem I see with it is that if people want to find another job, their 37signals title makes it seem that they essentially "went nowhere". So even if you are paying them a lot more then when they started and they are the best customer service person ever, their resume still says: "Jane Doe - Customer Service Rep 2005-2011" w…

We solved this in part by using "cocktail titles". So anyone who works here can call themselves senior. So we have "senior designer", "senior programmer". At least that has some ring of fancy.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#88

Post by jasonfried »

rosenjon wrote: post #78

The thing I've always liked about Jason's writing and approach to business is that he isn't afraid to say that they might not have the exact right answer. At the same time, they refuse to accept the "conventional wisdom" as being the correct answer; I think too often we believe that because most companies do things a certain way, that all companies should be run that way. The takeaway for me is that you should be con…

Thanks for this comment.

You're right - we don't have the exact right answer. We're always trying to find the right answer for the right time. We may have a different opinion in 3 years or if we have 35 people. Who knows, but we're open to figuring it out once we get there.

In the end we want to build a company that allows people to do the best work of their lives.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#89

Post by dhh »

ibejoeb wrote: post #73

It's unrealistic to not promote people. If you run a "flat" organization, you're telling your employees "I don't care that your resume indicates no progression." That's a real career limiter, and it can be perceived as an underhanded way to retain talent. Also, more pragmatically, how realistic is it to have 30 direct reports?

Is "unrealistic" a version of "that wouldn't work in the real world"? Of course it's realistic. Jason is describing how things actually work at 37signals, not how he'd wish them to be. So we have an entire staff of programmers, many who has been with us for years and years, who started out as "senior programmer" and has stayed with that title. The progression has been measured in salary.

Re: Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company

#90

Post by dhh »

sili wrote: post #82

I like the idea of keeping people closer to what they are good at. However I'm afraid this strategy will backfire on your employees if they are forced to leave to another company for whatever reason. In an environment where every company does not have this flat hierarchy it is strange to see a person who has spent 10 years in one place and has not advanced to some managerial position. New employer will think that he…

We're optimizing for having the best work environment today. Prioritizing what some employer somewhere else might think a decade from now over improving working conditions today seems like a bad trade.
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