John Maeda on rewards and motivation:

“Some reward systems stem from recognizing progress itself as the payoff….The reward, in this case, was growth. When we’re older, we tend to forget this simple buy key motivation we all had as children.”

Ok, you’ve set me up, now bring it home John…

“At the core of the best rewards is this fundamental desire for freedom in thinking, living, and being. I’ve learned that the most successful product designs, whether simple, complex, rational, illogical, domestic, international, technophilic, or technophobic, are the ones that connect deeply to the greater context of learning and life.”

Now that’s a product design manifesto!!

So yes, everyone loves a scobby snack now and again but don’t mistake that for what we’re really after. Try this experiment, pick a really close relationship in your life. I mean spousal not your boss or butcher. Now think of some behaviour in that person you’d like to change. Nothing trivial, I mean serious stuff that causes tension, battles and push backs. Stopping smoking, drinking less, picking up after themselves, having sex, etc. Pick something serious that’s a point of irritation in that relationship. Got it?

Ok, now devise a reward scheme for it. Let’s use the stop smoking example. Pick a reward, something significant that they’ll be excited about. Put a calendar up on your fridge. For everyday they don’t smoke they get a gold star on the calendar. If they can get 4 stars per week for the next 4 weeks then they get their reward.

Got it? Ok now pitch that to this person and see how they respond. Chances are you’ll have some hesitations when you’re about to pitch this. Maybe you’ll think, this is dumb, gold stars? We need to talk about how smoking is harming them and others around them not gold stars. Maybe I’m simple but explain to me how this is different from 95% of HR incentive schemes out there?

Joel’s apparently done some learning on middle management. While Rick Chapman may be right in that a middle management layer is inevitable, the glaring line that jumped out at me in Joel’s article was…

“Michael is our president, and he and I are 50-50 partners, so whenever there was something really important to talk about, you had to get both of us together in a room. But everyone else was a Member of Technical Staff.”

Joel goes on to explain how his people are concerned about career paths and compensation. While I do NOT know all the details, and can only speak to the information in that article, it sounds to me that there’s a glaring mismatch between the structure fogcreek wants and it’s compensation model. He’s created a culture where people are empowered to do what needs to be done for the business to succeed, however, the fruits of that success land in the laps of 2 individuals. Now the people are left having to ask to share in those fruits they feel they were a part of. That sounds like a nightmare for all. I’m pretty sure people will not work their hands for the bone if they aren’t sharing in the rewards the resulting business is generating in a fair fashion.

Middle management may be where we all have to land eventually, however, I’d say it’s also a simple, common answer to a complex problem. There are very few companies alive who’ve strayed from this path. Joel has a history of crafting bold solutions to complex problems instead of taking the worn path. Here, not so much.

Sure I’m relying on business press here but one company that comes to mind is Gore Associates who claim to be a business without bosses. How are they doing it? They work to “get big by staying small” keeping small plants that accentuate a close knit and interpersonal atmosphere. They created a very successful sponsor program aimed at assisting “new people to get started and to follow their progress”.

There are three kinds of sponsorship at Gore:

“1. The sponsor who helps a new associate get started on the job or helps an associate get started on a new job (starting sponsor)
2. The sponsor who sees to it that the associate being sponsored gets credit and recognition for contributions and accomplishments (advocate sponsor)
3. The sponsor who sees to it that the associate being sponsored is fairly paid for his or her contributions to the success of the enterprise (compensation sponsor)
A single sponsor can perform any one or all three kinds of sponsorship”

Along with the sponsor program, their associates are asked to follow 4 principles:

“1. Try to be fair.
2. Use your freedom to grow.
3. Make your own commitments and keep them.
4. Consult with other associates prior to any action that may adversely affect the reputation of financial stability of the company.”

It looks to me like Gore is trying to solve the same problems Joel’s addressing in a different way. I agree there’s an issue that needs to be addressed. I agree adding a layer of management is one potential solution. I don’t agree that it’s the only one. I’m curious to see how it works out for Joel and the gang as I wish them only continued success.

I’m with Doug, not much has changed….

“I was an idealistic country boy. Eventually I realized that the world is getting more complex at an ever more rapid rate, that complex problems have to be dealt with collectively, and that our collective ability for dealing with them is not improving nearly as fast as the complexity is increasing. The best thing I could think of doing was to try and help boost mankind’s capability for dealing with complex problems”, Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse

Next Wednesday evening is DempCampGuelph7. It’s an open event, all are welcome including mom, talk about us, get people out! If you’re attending, please make sure to put your name on the wiki attendee list. If you want to demo, contact me.

At Business of Software I had a great discussion with Zakir from iLoveRewards about, of all things, rewards in the workplace. As well, Mark and Razor have had some chats lately.

First, I’m going to be an ass. Some names, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Douglas McGregor, Abraham Maslow, Joe Scanlon, Alfie Kohn and John Taylor Gatto. If you don’t know of, and have read, at least three of these guys then start there. Why? If you don’t even know those names then we’re going to spend all our time on the basics like incentives in modern schooling, hierachy of needs, theory x versus theory y, etc and fail to get into the fun stuff.

So technically no, I’m not all that into extrinsic rewards in general, however, the stuff iLoveRewards is up to is still light years ahead of the average companies compensation policies. They’ve managed to fix a lot of the caveman policies like centrally controlled distribution. In the end though, it’s built on the flawed premise that you can motivate people over the long term. As my friend John asked a college teacher who’d offered the reward of beer for submitting an assignment, “I have a fridge full of beer at home so I can skip this one?” I do, however, believe greatly in the rewards a business can produce as a whole and focusing everyone in your company on achieving those rewards. Most companies don’t even have a common goal little on actually ensuring everyone in the company understands it.

Here’s my pitch for a rewards plan….Get at least the executives together. Possibly some investors, clients, maybe your entire company? The more open and transparent you can be with all steps, the better. Spend an afternoon choosing a milestone that would excite you all as a business if you hit it in a few months time. Take some time and talk this through, dig deep and keep working until you hit a clear, meaningful milestone. Something like “We have 1000 users signed up” or “We’re earning x in revenue which covers our current burn”.

Now pick a reward. This is tricky because you can only pick one and it’s the same reward for everyone. If you think you can pull it off, get everyone involved in this so your people choose the reward. Some examples that come to mind, Aeron chairs, spa days, gym memberships, better computers.

After that it’s simple. Spend a day with your team where you talk through the goal. Find out what tools and information your team needs to deliver on this goal and let them loose. The ‘executives’ job should be primarily to support by providing those tools and information required not making decisions and plotting course.

While it’s not perfect, this approach work towards a culture of interdependence by uniting your team on a common goal instead of forcing them to compete against each other for a bag of treats. Can you eventually work your way off the reward part? Yes and you should, Scanlon was doing it over 50 years ago so you have little excuses.

I was part of a working session here at BOS where the topic was ‘hiring and keeping great developers’. The topic of testing in interviews came up. The majority of people agreed that testing was important, however, they acknowledged fundamental flaws in that people could be nervous, feel rushed, etc.

So what’s the problem with tests? The test environment is completely unlike the real work environment. Maybe I’m naive but isn’t the simple fix to strive to make your test environments as much like the real work environment you need that person to perform in?

Do you need to hire someone who can stand up in front of a room full of strangers and write software on a whiteboard with no outside resources?

Do you need someone who can sit in a room alone with pen and paper and write pseudo-code?

I doubt it but if you do, you’re in luck. Most of the existing testing environments are perfect for your company. If, however, you need to hire a developer who can make use of all the resources they can find, work both alone and with a team, and produce creative solutions to stated requirements then keep tweaking your test environment to get as close to that setting as you can.

Cooper design has been doing this for years with their interaction design exercise. Recently we started using simple developer tests for both brainpark and boc meant to put the candidate in a truly work-like environment.

How? Find a simple tutorial publicly available on the net that’s technically related to your work. The tutorial should take the average person 1 to 3 hours to complete and should end in a functioning application. With brainpark we use the django tutorial. We have the candidate go through the tutorial on their own time with their own resources and then submit the code when complete. You could provide clear directions such as satisfying a requirement not in the tutorial or just leave it open ended.

Then sit down with them and their resulting application, run it and walk through the code. We now have the opportunity to discuss real code…why did you extend that class? would that method be difficult to maintain? Why doesn’t your application start?

The goal is to give candidates an opportunity to shine and truly show you what they’re really capable of.

To be blunt, I really don’t know where I stand on how to effectively price software. The answer for me is that there isn’t AN answer. It’s one of those questions like “what’s the secret to a great relationship?” or “what’s the best job?”. There isn’t an answer. It depends on everything, you, your people, your clients, your software, the climate around you, competition, etc, etc. Warning, there are no answers in this post…..

I can tell you about one of my ideal sales experiences which was of all places, Blockbuster. Why? The main reason is that they managed to always make it about me and my goals. The first time I ever rented at blockbuster was painless. I went in, picked out a video, prepared to be sold to and wade through paperwork. Instead I flashed a credit card, signed one thing, paid some cash and was out in not much more than the average member rental time, carrying a new membership card.

I didn’t think much about it at the time but later realized how lovely this was. We’re so used to being pushed silver, gold and platinum packages and features that we hardly notice it now. In this case they recognized that all I needed was the ability to rent a video. They got me setup for that and left it there. That I greatly appreciate.

Did they miss out on the upsell? Well no. A few weeks later after having rented a whack of videos, they technically did upsell me but again it was about me. They now recognized that my rental patterns dictated that I could save some cash through joining their rewards program. They offered it once, explained the benefits based on MY buying patterns and I happily signed up. There was no fictional pitch. No “well IF you do this and IF you do that then maybe you’ll save this”. It was “you’ve rented x videos in the past y weeks. With this program you would have saved $z”. Am I giving blockbuster too much credit? Well possibly but I still never felt sold to which is more than I can say for just about every other company I’ve dealt with.

In a ruby web framework session at OSCON where the concept of opinionated software was mentioned. The rails framework and all the 37signals apps pride themselves on being opinionated.

What’s your opinion on opinionated software?

• Make Opinionated Software: “We think that’s bullshit. The best software has a vision. The best software takes sides. When someone uses software, they’re not just looking for features, they’re looking for an approach. They’re looking for a vision.”
• A Fatal Flaw in Opinionated Software: “The problem with this approach is that punishment is only appropriate for children and criminals. By actively working to make my life as a hacker more difficult, David is treating me like a child or a criminal. ”

Related to super cd, if you don’t already know about pushd and popd then read up as they’re helpful as well…

“The pushd command saves the current working directory in memory so it can be returned to at any time, optionally changing to a new directory. The popd command returns to the path at the top of the directory stack.”

• pushd and popd
• Improving the usefulness of pushd / popd / dirs troika in Unix filesystem navigation
• wikipedia page

If you end up using these commands then I highly recommend this tip.

I pitched the idea a while back to a friend for a super cd. The idea being to add a means of easily creating, managing, and using shortcuts to directories you often use. I currently handle this by creating aliases in my .bashrc like this one:

alias cddir=”cd /home/some/directory/used/a/lot”

It’s a pain, however, to manage them, recall what I named one, delete old ones etc. So my thought was to build a python program to wrap cd. You could then use some special syntax like hashing to reference shortcuts. So typing “cd #dir” would move you into the directory you saved under shortcut “dir”. If super cd didn’t feel the command was meant for it then it would simply pass the request down to the base cd.

While sitting here in Vancouver sipping a tasty americano, I finally got around to some searching to figure out how I could change directories in a shell by calling into a python script. Not quite as simple as it first seems. In searching for that I not only found the answer but I found almost the exact tool I was about to write. Adding to the weirdness is the fact it appears to be written by a guy here in Vancouver.

If you use a shell, try go. While not exactly what I had planned, it allows you to type “go -a dir” to add the current directory. Then type “go dir” at any point later to change back to that directory. I like…