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Man this is terrible management and exactly the type of thing that just asks for backlash. Where's the students of history? When you create a police state like this in a company, control will be lost, morale will fall and productivity crashes. Abusing your force only makes it worse.
I can't imagine treating the folks in my department that way. I don't want to own their souls. I hope that they consider the work that they do here enriching, and I also believe that in partnership we make a better department as well as better lives for all of us. I'm proud that our people lead fulfilling lives that include much more than banging out code.
Somebody who wants people to dedicate their lives to their jobs; indeed, someone who seems to want to live in a world where people act that way, is just a mystery to me.
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Thing is, people in aerospace in the 50's to 70's had a mission and they worked on cool things. If you're working for a typical software company you have neither (unless you consider refactoring that enterprise app as a mission),
High ranking people love this kind of moralism, because it feels like they're really doing something. But the proof is in the pudding and guilt-tripping people about having reasonable working spaces is not going to make people do good work.
This CEO is lazy. Building a good working culture is mundane and takes a long time with constant little tweaks. But nothing beats the rush of thinking you've ruffled some feathers.
It's the equivalent of parents doling out corporal punishment to kids: it really seems to work, but at best does nothing over a long period and at worst creates distrust and fear. Real parenting takes effort, as does real management.
In April of 2010, Forbes magazine named Patterson fourth on their annual list of "America's Best-Performing Bosses" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Patterson
Hmm... sounds like this issue could be solved if everyone stopped car-pooling.
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+1. Your comment may look like a "witty reply," but it hints at the futility of measuring results so indirectly. Cars in the parking lot != results.
To be fair, that was addressed in the letter.
Am I the only person who saw the line about the parking lot being half empty at 8 and 5 and thought, "Oh, that's consistent with a normal distribution of people working 10 hour days with a couple hour variance in arrival times"?
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On the company's web site there's a page about him (he's the CEO): http://cerner.com/public/Cerner_2.asp?id=27586 In that it says: "Cerner associates extol Neal for his passion and foresight, his ability to drive change within organizations, his entrepreneurial spirit, and his candid, uninhibited conversational style." So that's just a candid, uninhibited conversational style :-) Note that that message was sent in 20…
That's speculation. They've done better than the NASDAQ, but how do you know they couldn't have done better without the memo being sent out?