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.

An Employee’s Confusion

Hugh Macleod is running a manifesto-fest. Anna Farmery’s manifesto on An Employee’s Confusion caught my eye. Thought provoking stuff here! My favourites below, but do go & read this. And once done, head over to Anna Farmery’s blog for more.

3. If we are entrepreneurial, why do we make decisions by consensus?

5. If the future is important, why do we spend time in meetings looking at the past?

7. If we aim for a USP why, are encouraged to produce sameness?

2 for Today

This is Corporate Heresy at it’s best!

The first one is a dilbert, which frankly came as a shock. You mean we aren’t allowed to make up numbers?! How would we accountants (I speak loosely of course) justify our salaries? 😉

The second one comes from Ian Green’s wonderful blog Green Gathering, which I discovered via Hugh Macleod.

How we treat our people

Kathy Sierra demonstrates the psychology of Business when it comes to employees…

As she says in her post:

If we want customer evangelists, we better start with employee evangelists. Having killer technology and a great team at the top is not enough if the employees–people–who have the greatest impact on whether the customer kicks ass aren’t valued as highly as those who have the greatest impact onacquiringa customer. It’s not about an “Employee of the Quarter” Office-Space/Dilbertish reward system… it’s about saying to employees, “We need you. You are the people who can make our customers succeed or fail with our products.”

Maybe the companies should stop hosting all those nonsensical parties/events, and pay more attention to the day-to-day affair of treating their employees well.

ISO 9000

ISO, Eyesore. Eyesore, Mysore, I-soar, I-sore, well….whatever!

I was laughing so hard I couldn’t get past page 18 of this

Eyesore 9000 takes you through the ISO 9001:2000 standard clause-by-clause, translating each dry, pasty bite into a delicious morsel of sarcasm, wit and hilarity. Interspersed with the satire and biting commentary are bits of sage implementation advice, the latter of which must have gotten in there by accident.

(link via Deepak)