You’re reading Signal v. Noise, a publication about the web by Basecamp since 1999. Happy !
We owners of Web-based businesses love to gloat about how many customers/users we have. But do we really know any of them? Sure, we can calculate their lifetime value and figure out how many times they’ve logged in over the past 90 days, what brand of mobile phone they use, and how much they spend a month. But we wouldn’t know who they were if they walked in our front doors.
The New York Times has a fascinating interview about using Big Data to guide hiring and management techniques with Google’s VP of people operations, Lazlo Bock. Two things in particular stood out.
First, “On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time”. I couldn’t agree more.
Second, “One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless”. This ties in well with rejecting the top-tier school pedigree nonsense and downplaying the benefit of formal education altogether. On the last point, Lazlo notes: “What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well”.
But beyond that, the interview is full of good tips on management as well. Especially around figuring out who’s a good manager and how they can improve. If that’s a subject you’re interested in, checkout our newly launched Know Your Company.
As we watched Apple unveil iOS7, the 37signals Campfire room quickly turned to awe of what they had achieved. A redesign so shocking and deep bestowed upon a product so popular left many mouths agape. Whether you happened to like the final product wasn’t as relevant as marveling at the vision, drive, and sheer determination to pull it off.
Apple has a way of making people feel like that.
But what followed next is at least as interesting: We all sought to explain just how they did it. Is it all Ive’s eye? Is it that they explore more ideas than anyone else? Is it never accepting “good enough”? Forgoing customer input and trusting their own instinct? Hundreds of triple-A designers and developers?
There were lots of suggestions. But stepping back a meter or two, it was clear that we all simply reached for our own grandest ambitions and rebranded them Apple’s secret sauce. Theorizing why Apple is able to do what it does is an organizational Rorschach.
That doesn’t make it a useless exercise. Au contraire. It just makes it more about you than them. It lets you tease out your goals and aspirations for your own work and process. It’s a kick in the ass to marvel at greatness and think of reasons “why are we not as awesome as that?”.
An organization as rich and storied as Apple has a thousand reasons for why it got to where it is. Pinning it on any one answer is futile, but it’s sure to spark a healthy debate. Indulge.
For a long time I’ve felt like the only thing worth working on is the next most important thing. Why spend time working on something that’s less important if there’s something more important that needs work?
I’ve changed my mind on this. I think it’s always good to be working on two things: The next most important thing, and the next most interesting thing.
It’s hard for an interesting thing to compete for your attention if your only criteria for attention is criticality. Interesting things are rarely critical. They’re exploratory. And if you only think in terms of what absolutely needs your attention right now, you’ll never leave room for things that might satisfy your curiosity. That’s important too, just on a different level.
It’s in this spirit that I hope we have the courage to be more experimental at 37signals. Experimental design, experimental tech, experimental business models, experimental strategies, experimental experiments that may lead to brand new insights and outcomes we didn’t know we were capable of before.
I’m looking forward to the surprises.
We talk about the benefits of remote work for employees and employers as well as the desperate measures taken by Yahoo and Best Buy.
Customers don’t just buy a product — they switch from something else. And customers don’t just leave a product — they switch to something else.
It’s in these switching moments that the deepest customer insights can be found.
On the 12th of April, a group of 24 people will attend a unique, hands-on, full-day workshop to learn about “The Switch”.
Most businesses don’t know the real reasons why people switch to — or from — their products. We’ll teach you how to find out.
The workshop will be at the 37signals office in Chicago. The cost to attend is $1000. The workshop will be led by 37signals and The Rewired Group.
There’s only one simple requirement: You’ll be asked to bring something with you. It won’t be a big deal. Details will be provided one week before the workshop.
Spots are limited. Only 24 people will be able to attend and participate. Want to be one of the 24? Register now.
Note: All previous workshops have sold out well before the event, so don’t delay if you want a spot.
The hardcover version of REMOTE: Office Not Required, our upcoming book on making remote working work for employers and employees, is now available for pre-order from these top online booksellers:
The book is planned for release on October 29th, 2013. eBook versions (Kindle, Nook, iBook, etc.) will be available for pre-order shortly, too. It’s up to the book stores to decide when these go live.
If you want to know more about some of the topics covered in REMOTE, here’s a recent interview I did with Quartz.
Managers who complain about slacking staff without examining their work environment are deluded. Being a slacker is not an innate human quality, it’s a product of the habitat. Fundamentally, everyone wants to do a good job (the statistical outliers who do not follow this are not worth focusing policy on).
The problem is that deluded managers expect unreasonable returns from their investment. They think you can get the best from people by thinking the worst of them. It just doesn’t work like that. You can’t crack the whip with one hand and expect a firm handshake with the other.
If you want star quality effort, you need to provide a star quality environment. No, window dressing like a free meal is not it. It can serve as a cherry on top, but if the rest of the cake is full of shit, that’s not going to make it any more appealing.
A star environment is based on trust, vision, and congruent behavior. Make people proud to work where they work by involving them in projects that matter and ignite a fire of urgency about your purpose. Find out who you are as a company and be the very best you. Give people a strategic plan that’s coherent and believable and then leave the bulk of the tactical implementation to their ingenuity.
If you’re doing work in a less than star environment, you owe less than star effort. Quid pro quo. By all means, do yours to affect and change the environment. Nudge it towards the stars. But also, accept the limitations of your power. You can drag a horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink.
So ration your will and determination. Invest what’s left over, after meeting the bar of your work environment, in your own projects, skills, and future. The dividends is what’s going to lead you to the next, better thing.
Everyone deserves to work at a place that inspires them to give their very best. Don’t stop reaching until you have that.
(Like this? There’s more where this came from. Pre-order REMOTE: Office Not Required, our new book on remote work.)
But tethering the Yahoos to their stalls in the company’s offices does not seem like the right way to go about boosting their output. Plenty of evidence suggests that letting employees work from home is good for productivity. It allows them to use their time more efficiently and to spend more time with their families and less fuming in traffic jams or squashed on trains. It can reduce companies’ costs… You can shackle a Yahoo to his desk, but you can’t make him feel the buzz.
