I don’t often give CEO types much credit but anytime they’re using this much common sense they’re ok in my books.

CEOs say how you treat a waiter can predict a lot about character

“A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person”

Tom Peters has a similar post regarding treating your vendors like customers. His point is simple, give your vendors a little love to get good service.

I remember recently showing up late to a pub with some business associates and chatting with the waitress for a bit as I ordered a pint and some food. When I returned to our table I was asked by someone if my wife minded me talking to waitresses like that. My first thought was like what? Like another human?

While I’m sure, in the end, I annoy way more wait staff type people than the opposite, I do at least take a crack at treating them like people….I think…..oh crap, maybe not…..

I recently registered the domain ElasticOffices. The idea being office space that grows with your business. The simple first step is to get a coworking space running here in Guelph. Please add your name to the wiki if you’re interested in that.

It looks like the easyBoys are getting into the mix as well.

Meetings make you dumber. I hate to say I told you so, but I kinda sorta maybe did.

Now that‘s some interesting office space. Some videos.

So the one thing I certainly do miss about not working in a big office is that last week before Christmas when, let’s face it, productivity is almost non-existent. Oh, and that last day before the holiday break when productivity may actually total up to a negative value, I do miss that.

In honor of that maybe I’ll try to incorporate some of the usual trappings of the day around the house today. I’ll get on the bad santa hat, have a few naughty nogs this afternoon, corner the chooch and bore him with some disorganized non-sensical stories only to eventually pass out in my cubicle and hope an office mate can give me a lift home.

On man I miss the office.

What’s below is verbatim from here…

Can absence make a team grow stronger? In 2002, NetAge teamed up with two business school professors to try to find out whether virtual teams really work. Harvard Business Review publishes the results this month as its Best Practice. We found that “far-flung” teams are more productive than their face-to-face counterparts if they keep three practices:

They exploit diversity. The team can’t just be diverse; it has to make the most of it. Our teams credit their creative breakthroughs to challenging people from different disciplines, cultures, and the like to come up with something better together. They did.

They use pretty simple technology to simulate reality. By today’s standards, what they use is not very complicated. More than 80% of the teams use teleconference calls and shared websites. More than half used IM even when their companies prohibited it. Only a third used video conferencing. Some banned email.

They hold the team together. It takes a lot of communication. Some leaders spent as much as a third of their time just on the phone with team members.

The place on the web for virtual work.
HBR article

“Among the changes she experienced for the first time was people emailing or IMing each other across the room. It’s no different from working at home, she concluded. And she’s considering doing exactly that.”

It’s true, I talk as much, or more, with project team members now that I work from home than I did in an office. Not only is working from home becoming more intimate with the tools available, including screen sharing, IM, voip, etc but a lot of office environments are becoming less intimate for the exact same reasons. Tools and technology will never build you a team or a community.

In the last office I worked, I used to love suggesting that we ban email and IM within the office. If you’re both in the office then you have to go talk with the person, or at least pick up the phone. I’m willing to sacrifice so-called productivity in order to build community.

I’ve spent years mouthing off about how important the systems and environment around a companies people are. I used to work the argument from the improvement angle, let’s improve our systems in order to get more out of our people. Stereotypical manager types are tough to convince of this and tend to take the ‘few bad apples’ approach to explaining away any problems.

Next I moved to the ‘give me your bad apples’ approach. Give me your supposed rejects and I’ll work the environment around them and shape them into A players. That still didn’t seem to convey the point.

Of late, I’ve landed on this one. Give me your A players, your superstars and let me run the environment around them. I guarantee you I can ruin your A team within months. Not only that, I promise to only use techniques that are published, acceptable HR techniques and practices within the world’s top 50 software companies.

All of the above are simply meant to illustrate that the talent myth is just that. Getting a company to allow me to prove it is another thing. Hey, this has TV show written all over it!

Joel on management consultants. You have to read it all as the last sentence is worth the trip.

If you know me personally then I’m sure you’re shaking your head at this title, as in here we go again. I’m a relatively outspoken advocate against the entire model of grading employees, and for that matter possibly students as well. I’m not avoiding hurting any previous egos and I’m not opposed to firing employees or failing students.

If you’re grading employees then you’re basically following the model set out in the school system. It works in assessing students, most of our people were students, therefore why shouldn’t it work for grading our employees? So you start giving your employees grades for participation, client satisfaction, etc.

Let’s assume for now that grading students actually works, I’ll leave that one to Alfie. The main reason it doesn’t translate to the work environment is simple. In school you are independent and for the most part you succeed or fail based on you and your actions. Sure there’s group work but that’s a farce at best.

In contrast, work, and success in business, is highly interdependent. You are dependent on others actions and help in order to accomplish your job. A company only succeeds if everyone, or the majority, succeeds. Who cares how perfect your ‘scores’ have been this year if you show up to locked office doors tomorrow?

If you’re hiring recent graduates this is, in my opinion, one of your biggest tasks in terms of their development over the first few years. That is, break them of the independent success model that they’re accustomed to, having spent their entire lives in it. It’s why I’m always hesitant to hire people who did very well in the school environment straight out of school. I’m not suggesting they can’t florish in the interdependent work environment, just to keep an eye on it and help them out with it.