So what happens at a 37signals company trip to Maine? We talk about what we’ve done and what we’re about to do. We have breakout sessions to work on projects in small teams. We eat lobster. David talks about racing cars. Joshua plays flamenco guitar. We watch SNL clips. Ryan teaches us how to meditate. Jamis explains how to use an abacus. Jamie shows some of his fave ‘80s skateboard art. Sarah gives us a lesson on banjos. And more.
Plus, there’s rock balancing on the beach. Lots of rock balancing.
Why the random subjects listed above? We decided to let everyone give two different talks. One on work stuff, one on whatever. Here was the setup:
The first 15 minute talk will be on 37signals. What would you like to see us do next year? What sort of things would you like to work on next year? What do you think we can do a better job on? What’s good and what’s bad? Where are we failing? Where are we kicking ass? Everything is fair game. This is your chance to get good/bad/other off your mind.
The second 15 minutes will be about something else entirely. You’ll teach or talk on something that has nothing to do with work. If you’re into butterflies, tell us something interesting about butterflies. If you’re into golf, what’s fascinating about golf? Got a hobby that you just love? Tell us about what you love about it. Share whatever you’re finding interesting these days. Let’s all expand our horizons a bit.
During our typical one-day meetings, this sorta stuff isn’t possible. It was definitely nice to have the extra time to stretch out.
Music in video: “Captain Bacardi” by Antonio Carlos Jobim (Album: Wave)
The #1 piece of advice you hear from frequent travellers: Pack light. Lay out everything you think you need. Then put away half:
You see that pile of stuff sitting on your bed, waiting to be stuffed into your suitcase? Take half of that stuff and put it back in your closet. Seriously. I know you think you’ve already narrowed your pile down from what you really want to bring. I know you don’t see how you’ll ever survive for weeks/months/years on that meager selection. But you will, I promise. And you’ll thank me when you’re dragging/carrying an already heavy suitcase/backpack down a 500-year-old cobblestone road. If you don’t ditch the stuff now, you’ll ditch it on the road. Trust us: unlike most scenarios in life, having too little is far, far better than having too much.
It’s pretty good advice for how many features you “pack” into a product too. Lay out everything you think your product needs and then cut out half.
You’ll be liberated:
1) You don’t have to spend as much upfront.
2) You don’t have as much weight to carry.
3) In truth, you won’t actually need a lot of the things you fantasize you’ll need.
4) You can pick up whatever you didn’t include when you get there.
5) You have extra room for future additions.
Remember and repeat these words: PACK LIGHT. PACK LIGHT, PACK LIGHT. A good rule of thumb is to pack half of what you need, then take half of that out of the bag. Face it, do you really want to be schlepping around a three suitcases on the train or dragging them up five floors of narrow stairs in Amsterdam?
Keep your product light and it will have a lot better chance of chasing down that train about to leave the station.
Right now your beers are mainly available on the West Coast. How important is it to you to go national?
Not at all. We expanded three months ago into this new brewery space, so now we’re brewing in both our brewpub and in this brewery. And we started bottling Pliny the Elder, which until six weeks ago we had never done before. It had only been available on draft. We could be [widely available] like Stone or Lagunitas, and I get calls from distributors all the time from all over the country. But we do this more for the lifestyle, my wife and I, and same with our employees. I can ride my bike to work. I live one to two miles from either brewery. I fill my gas tank once a week. I think you can get caught up way too much in growth. We don’t have any growth goals.
If you have a problem with someone on your team, have the conversation in private: IM, one-on-one email, face-to-face meeting, etc.
But if you want to praise someone, do it in public so others can see it too: via a Basecamp/Backpack message, in your group’s Campfire chat room, in a blog post, an email that CC’s others, etc.
Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly…Let the other person save face…Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.”
Related: A transaction makes a customer [SvN] discusses Carnegie’s suggestion that if you want to make someone your friend, you should ask them to do something for you.
In order to appeal to us, employers need to rethink their rules a bit. Forget rigid 40-hour workweeks. Forget traditional company hierarchy…
One company that has led the charge in shifting the work-life paradigm, especially when it comes to employee relations, is 37signals. Headquartered in Chicago, it’s a multi-million dollar organization deeply committed to maintaining a work-life balance for its employees.
President Jason Fried says today’s employers present the biggest roadblock. “Simply put, employees are treated like children. They are not allowed to think for themselves, and there are too many layers of approval, just too much insulation that prevents anyone from doing anything. The traditional workplace is broken, and until someone realizes that, there’s always going to be conflict.”
This suffocation by protocol is dead on and will never allow an employee to “go beyond” or achieve something extra for the company. This is a critical link that most organizations continually fail to acknowledge. They are too focused on ensuring employees do no wrong that they actually prevent them from achieving anything beyond status quo.
But there is hope, and a solution that is more common sense than radical procedural change.
To counter the “traditional workplace,” Fried had this to offer: “We challenge them. We give them different, interesting projects. We encourage them to do something outside of work and teach us what they’ve learned. It’s no help to our company to hire someone based on a skill or to get stuff done.”
It is a simple, no-brainer solution, but one that is too often lost.
Think of yourself as a curator. You want to be a curator. You have to decide what comes in and what goes out. Curator’s job is to say no. Curator takes an entire universe of options to decide whether or not something makes it into a museum. If you think of your product as a museum and your features as art then you’re in charge. If you take all of the possible art and put it into a room it doesn’t make it a museum. All the art in the world in a single room isn’t a museum it’s a warehouse.
Momentum – Has its hands in just about everything and is incredibly important. Esp for morale. Most typical projects are really exciting at the beginning and then people tend to lose interest and fade out. Long projects eat at you and you’re not even looking to do good stuff you just want to finish things and they don’t turn out well. Create a situation where projects are short and there’s excitement and it’s a short 2 week project and it leaves people in excited mode. Break big projects into as many small projects. 2 week rule.
How did I get interested in all this? I wasn’t interested in programming I was interested in having programs. I desired an outcome. Same thing with REST.
Below is an interesting story about a building where tenants were complaining about long elevator waiting times. The solution shows how the key to solving a problem is often defining the problem correctly in the first place.
A classic story illustrates very well the potential cost of placing a problem in a disciplinary box. It involves a multistoried office building in New York. Occupants began complaining about the poor elevator service provided in the building. Waiting times for elevators at peak hours, they said, were excessively long. Several of the tenants threatened to break their leases and move out of the building because of this…
Management authorized a study to determine what would be the best solution. The study revealed that because of the age of the building no engineering solution could be justified economically. The engineers said that management would just have to live with the problem permanently.
The desperate manager called a meeting of his staff, which included a young recently hired graduate in personnel psychology…The young man had not focused on elevator performance but on the fact that people complained about waiting only a few minutes. Why, he asked himself, were they complaining about waiting for only a very short time? He concluded that the complaints were a consequence of boredom. Therefore, he took the problem to be one of giving those waiting something to occupy their time pleasantly. He suggested installing mirrors in the elevator boarding areas so that those waiting could look at each other or themselves without appearing to do so. The manager took up his suggestion. The installation of mirrors was made quickly and at a relatively low cost. The complaints about waiting stopped.
Today, mirrors in elevator lobbies and even on elevators in tall buildings are commonplace.
Working in Haiti, Shawn Frayne, a 28-year-old inventor based in Mountain View, Calif., saw the need for small-scale wind power to juice LED lamps and radios in the homes of the poor. Conventional wind turbines don’t scale down well—there’s too much friction in the gearbox and other components. “With rotary power, there’s nothing out there that generates under 50 watts,” Frayne says. So he took a new tack, studying the way vibrations caused by the wind led to the collapse in 1940 of Washington’s Tacoma Narrows Bridge (aka Galloping Gertie).
Frayne’s device, which he calls a Windbelt, is a taut membrane fitted with a pair of magnets that oscillate between metal coils. Prototypes have generated 40 milliwatts in 10-mph slivers of wind, making his device 10 to 30 times as efficient as the best microturbines. Frayne envisions the Windbelt costing a few dollars and replacing kerosene lamps in Haitian homes.
Neat thinking to take aeroelastic flutter, what caused the Tacoma Narrows Bridge to do this (starts around 1:20 into video)...
...and turn it into power for the third world (and potentially more):
Below, Frayne discusses his model for invention. Money quote: “A lot of times when you really box yourself into a tight corner, that’s when you do your best thinking.”
