I was talking to a younger colleague recently and he mentioned the Feeling Business post. He’s a recent graduate working at his first job, getting married this summer, just bought their first house. He mentioned that he didn’t think he could handle the part where you don’t get paid until the client pays. He doesn’t have that type of ‘wiggle room’ in his budget.

It’s always interesting to hear first hand what people take away from the things you write. He rightfully noticed fear as I was focusing on that, possibly too much. The real history, however, is that our client’s have a basically perfect track record when it comes to paying. We have some late payments, usually nothing more than thirty days, but that’s expected. Ultimately our client’s have a stellar track record when it comes to compensating us for what we do for them.

I have a house, student loans, more debt than I care to think about, and two young children. I think I have a decent argument for having little to no wiggle room. If I don’t get paid there’s at least four people directly impacted.

Bottom line, working in a model like ours provides the opportunity to get an on the job MBA. It may hurt some days but it’s better than paying gazillions to sit in a room and talk about running businesses, in my opinion.

Cause Paul Graham says…

“Where the method of selecting the elite is thoroughly corrupt, most of the good people will be outsiders.”

“If it’s corrupt enough, a test becomes an anti-test, filtering out the people it should select by making them do things only the wrong people would do. Popularity in high school seems to be such a test. There are plenty of similar ones in the grownup world. For example, rising up through the hierarchy of the average big company demands an attention to politics few thoughtful people could spare. Someone like Bill Gates can grow a company under him, but it’s hard to imagine him having the patience to climb the corporate ladder at General Electric – or Microsoft, actually.”

“I think that’s one reason big companies are so often blindsided by startups. People at big companies don’t realize the extent to which they live in an environment that is one large, ongoing test for the wrong qualities.”

Taken from “The Power of the Marginal” article. It sounds interesting to me but I’m sure on the day I head back into a traditional office I’ll magically come up some great justifications for the opposite.

Another sweet looking coworking space, this one in gastown in Vancouver.

Via Todd.

People often ask about the way we work(edit to remove dead link). Some are actually curious, some just need a small-talk topic. Working at home, surrounded by your family all day, no commuting, no boss except your clients, etc. People tend to speak about, and view, this model as being new. I think of it as old.

Within my family, my parent’s generation was the first to leave the farm. Both my father and mother grew up on working farms in the Maritimes. They were surrounded by their families all day, didn’t commute, and had no boss except their clients. As well, they stayed within their communities, spending their days there, living there, eating there, etc. They kept all their energy within a certain geographical area instead of commuting elsewhere to spend their time and money.

I’ve always felt commuting will eventually be viewed as a failed experiment. To me, we’ve been dabbling in the past century with a new model based around commuting. The way I’m able to work today is really a step backwards to a model that’s existed far longer than todays. I think we’re seeing the beginnings of undoing a mistake we made. It may take a few more decades still but I think our larger companies will eventually come ‘back to the farm’ as well.

Joel‘s always been on about the advantages of having private offices for developers. This is one advantage of us all having our own home offices is that we certainly have private offices. The piece we have to work harder at is the face to face meetings.

Having spent many previous lives in various forms of ‘open’ offices, I’m completely on Joel’s side of the fence on this one. The worst of which was an office where I sat near a meeting room. The result being I could hear every damn meeting held there and had to buy large headphones in order to have any chance at being productive.

One aspect of ClearSpace we don’t talk about enough is that we aren’t full-time employees. We work full-time hours, or more, but we aren’t full-time employees. We certainly don’t hide this fact but I’m not sure we focus on it enough as a uniqueness and strength. In some ways our offering directly competes with teams of full-time employees. We offer a viable alternative to staffed developers, you can hire your own staff of developers, architects, etc or you can bring us in. As well, we augment existing teams.

Anytime you identify your competition it’s difficult not to think about what they’re doing. In doing so you can drift into emulating them. It’s like a high school dance. You suck, have no clue how to dance, so you watch that other guy who’s got some moves. Before you know it you’re doing a sad imitation of rolling up the garden hose.

The obvious problem is that in trying to compete with the other choice we make ourselves indistinguishable from them. In those fine, gray line situations we should be doing the opposite, that is focus and highlight what makes us unique not what makes us alike.

We allow our clients to start projects today, not months from now when they’ve hired a team. We allow our clients the flexibility to grow and shrink their teams as their business needs change. They’re able to slow development for a few months while they raise funds, perform research, negiotiate a deal, without having to pay a team of developers.

I guess I’m just agreeing with what my mom always told me, be yourself, be unique. Ok, my mother never said that but I think I’ve seen a mother in a movie say it.

An interesting story about innovating from the bottom up.

“In my experience, innovation can only come from the bottom. Those closest to the problem are in the best position to solve it. I believe any organization that depends on innovation must embrace chaos. Loyalty and obedience are not your tools; you must use measurement and objective debate to separate the good from the bad.”

I tend to fall on the choas and ad-hoc side of this debate, however, how do you balance that with accomplishing the business goals that keep you around tomorrow? I can’t imagine trying to run a business with any level of productivity while your entire team feels it’s their job to ignore you and do what they want.

The only answer I know of is to embrace them. Google’s tried this with their 20 percent projects. Most businesses spend energy working to stop these projects in an attempt to optimize productivity. It just doesn’t work that way outside of business textbooks. These pet projects exist in some form, possibly only ideas, and you aren’t going to eliminate them so stop wasting your valuable time. Find a way to get them out in the open, embrace them, talk about them and you’ll be startled what shows up.

The point here isn’t to find usable ideas, that’s gravy in my opinion. I’m sure some companies have tried a version of 20 percent projects and then measured it by how many features and products it’s produced. Do NOT measure that. The value here is in engaging your individuals because that’s how you achieve productivity. Work everyday to drag your people into your business problems. That’s how you engage them and allow them to be productive.

Bottom line, people are naturally productive, crave responsibility and ownership. Don’t think of the problem as how do I ‘make’ my people productive because you can’t make anyone do anything. Have some children if you’re unsure of that one. Instead, think of the problem as what’s broken in our environment that’s preventing my people from being productive and taking responsibility.

You can’t control people, you can control your environment. Assume your environment’s broken everyday. It doesn’t mean you were wrong yesterday and that doesn’t matter. You can control your environment so assuming it’s broken at least puts you in a position of control. It gives you something to actually work on.

It’s the same with personal relationships. The only reason I’m still married today is because I always assume I’m wrong. It isn’t about who’s right, it’s about what I can do. I can control my behaviour not my wife’s so that’s where I need to focus. After I’ve calmed myself down I get into the headspace of ‘ok you were wrong, what can you change to make this better?’

Do the opposite and focus your energy on controlling the people around you’ll frustrate yourself to no end while driving everyone away. Wow, I somehow ended up on my soapbox in the end, sorry about that….

This is a great read, thanks to Guy for the link. A big part of Mark and Bobby’s vision for CreationStep is this act of rescuing people from environment’s that aren’t allowing them to grow and thrive. They’ve done this successfully many times. In a lot of cases the environment they’re rescuing people from is a traditional corporate environment, however, it’s not the rule. I know of people who’ve tried running their own businesses only to return to an office where they’re able to excel and grow again.

Whether you’re in a large company or not, the ideas and suggestions in the above article are worth thinking about.

“My main purpose in life is to take your best, your brightest, most creative, hard-working and passionate employees and sneak them out the hallways of your large corporation so that they are free of the yoke of lethargy, oppression and resentment.”

We don’t have an office. We all have our own offices and improvise when we need to meet, choosing to meet at one of our offices, rented space, a coffee shop or pub. It works and keeps things fresh.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s also something I wrestle with, would we be better off in a traditional office? Looking into coworking is about maintaining the positive aspects we possess today while gaining the good parts we’re missing from a traditional office space, hopefully leaving behind the annoying toxic parts.

“Teams work best when you get to know each other outside of work”

That’s key. Whether you have an office or an RV, that’s a big part of building a functional team. Having an office doesn’t guarantee you that and even without one I think we’re better at this than most offices I’ve worked in. Having an office can act as a crutch and leave you not explicitly focusing or working on this aspect. This should be our focus, not simply keeping up with the jones’ by getting back into the cube.

Does this Globe & Mail piece count as plagerism?

“So she organized workshops that encourage managers to stop telling people what to do and, instead, ask thought-provoking questions of employees.”

I’m kidding and while I don’t pretend to pull any ideas out of thin air and we’re all just reinventing each other in the end, I’m sure glad I put that post up before today’s paper. Had I not, I would have hesitated in order to prevent the appearance of outright copy and paste. The G&M piece is a good read and details some specific steps to move forward with this approach.