You Empower What You Fear

Charles Green talks eloquently about why Non-compete agreements are bad. Along the way, he makes a particularly strong point:

People live up—or down—to expectations. You see it in kids. You see it when you approach a dog—if you fear the dog, it will growl and bark; if you approach in a friendly manner, you get the tail-wag response. In this regard, ich bin ein canine, and so are most other people.

What’s the alternative? Simple.

• If you really care about the employee who left, then be happy for him/her. If you’re not happy for them, then cut out the crap in your website where it says you believe in people development, because you don’t—you believe in the development of “human capital,” an oxymoron. People know the difference. Capital doesn’t.
• If you’re happy for them but wish they hadn’t left, then find out why they left and fix it before the next one leaves. If you don’t want to fix it, then go buy a lottery ticket. The odds of effectiveness are about the same.
• Make alumni of the people who leave. Your college didn’t go all resentful on you when you graduated; they didn’t make you sign a non-compete about getting a master’s from another university. And when your college phones you to contribute to the fund years later, you still do! (And if you don’t, it’s because your college needs to read this blog). Think of people who leave as graduating advocates of your company—not as disloyal double agents.
• Let everyone know that you run the company on the basis of rules 1 through 3 above. And tear up the non-compete forms.

There are of course some valid exceptions, mainly in the hard sciences and tech businesses. But the rest? Marketing execs? Consultants? Bankers? Please.

Read the full thing here.

Policies

A day return ticket for London costs £58. So a 2-day trip to London costs £132 (including taxi to station).

An open ticket which allows you to return any day over the next week costs £58, while a night
in London (cheap hotel / Travelodge) would cost £55. The total cost = £121.

However, booking a hotel room in London requires you to get a Purchase Order signed by a Director(!!!)

Guess what people do?

What’s the policy at your company? Why?

Quote of the Day – 11-Apr-07

From Joel Spolsky’s Interview in “Founders at Work”. As you can see, totally loving this book.

That was probably the biggest mistake we made. And that’s the advice I give everybody. All those little coupon schemes, this is what General Motors does. They figure out new rebate schemes because they forgot all about how to design cars people want to buy. But when you still remember how to make software people want, great, just improve it.

Talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Don’t pay any attention to the competition. They’re not relevant to you. Only talk to your customers and your potential customers and see what it is that caused them not to buy your product or would cause them to buy more copies of it. And do that, and then ship it. That was something we really, really should have focused on, but, you know, we didn’t know any better.

…We spend an outrageous amount of money on quality office space that other people don’t. That makes it easier to recruit and makes us more productive, I believe. But I’ve heard from people that it would be considered completely unacceptable by the average VC to have private office space—because it’s considered an extravagance of a successful company or something like that. And, you know, “Why aren’t you all in the same room talking?”

I’ve had that argument whether it’s better to have private offices for developers. I don’t want to have that argument anymore. I don’t want to have to try to convince people anymore. Certain features—flying first class, Aeron chairs, double monitors, the best computers that money can buy—these are things which might be considered extravagant, but it’s nice just to be able to do things the way that we believe they should be done, without having to have a big argument educating other people as to why we know how to develop software and they don’t.

…Now Microsoft has forgotten all these things, and they’ve hired a lot of morons that don’t know these things anymore. I think that now Microsoft is kind of a big tar pit where you can barely move forward because there’s so much bureaucracy. But I learned a lot.

…I think what makes a good hack is the observation that you can do without something that everybody else thinks you need. To me, the most elegant hack is when somebody says, “These 2,000 lines of code end up doing the same thing as those 2 lines of code would do. I know it seems complicated, but arithmetically it’s really the same.” When someone cuts through a lot of crap and says, “You know, it doesn’t really matter.”

Quote of the Day – 10-Apr-07

A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazine modified the “sports” model of some production car to get the fastest possible standing quarter mile. You know how they did it? They cut off all the crap the manufacturer had bolted onto the car to make it look fast.Business is broken the same way that car was. The effort that goes into looking productive is not merely wasted, but actually makes organizations less productive.

…In big companies there’s always going to be more politics, and less scope for individual decisions. But seeing what startups are really like will at least show other organizations what to aim for. The time may soon be coming when instead of startups trying to seem more corporate, corporations will try to seem more like startups. That would be a good thing.

– Paul Graham – Foreword of “Founders at Work”