Over the years, I’ve often given sermons on management ideas using lines taken from great films. Movies are very memorable, meaning if you can link a clever work idea to them in someone’s mind, it’s a huge win. Thought I’d collect a few of my favorites here for the benefit of future generations. “Never [...]
As discussed in the past posting, part of being a new kind of transparent company means that as a leader I will do an anonymous survey every quarter that asks everyone whether they want to keep me, and then report/trend those results. The link to the first version of that is: http://www.surveymonkey.com/sr.aspx?sm=vXF7UUl2j_2fQOcDbv_2bk_2f2VqmnQ0fx1KmvJ39QNnzNRxs_3d Obviously these are [...]
My last post was about the rewarder, which removes (and optimizes) one of the main historical jobs of ‘Management’: evaluating people. So if these managers aren’t spending time evaluating people’s performance, what should they do instead? Do the companies of the future need no leaders? No! On the contrary, the companies of the future [...]
Conventional bonus or compensation-setting exercises are (and here I trust you will agree I am being rather understated) pretty much universally unsuccessful and disliked. At LoveMachine, we use a bonus/profit-sharing system that is simple, extremely accurate, inspiring, and empowering. And we’d love to come and install it in your company – just ask us. The [...]
When people run, they are frequently afraid of hills. Steep hills are generally regarded as making the run harder. But physically, this doesn’t actually make any sense – there is very little extra work done in climbing a hill, in comparison to the energy expended by running at all. The reason we have a harder [...]
Ryan and I have been wandering San Francisco, working fulltime out of coffee shops, hotel lobbies, and bars for the past 2 months or so. Sometimes we have been joined by other LoveMachine teammates for meetings or just fun. After giving it careful consideration, we’re going to strive never to have a central office, regardless [...]
In the last 3 months, the LoveMachine has built 3 major projects, using about 50 contributors, at a development cost of about $30K US. We’ve created an impressive shared chat client, a contract worklist that supports open development teams with small tasks, and the corporate recognition messaging system that is our namesake. This is remarkable [...]
LoveMachine means several different things, some of which you’ll have to talk to us to figure out. We’re working on several different projects. We believe that the right band of people can work together, have a huge amount of fun, make a bunch of money, and try to save the world. Right now we are [...]
We need a great looking wordcloud that is generated on the server as a graphic, so that we can put a frequently updating wordcloud on our site. We’d love to pay someone to develop such a thing for us, if there isn’t something out there already. I’ve put up contracts to build something on eLance [...]
We’ve been working on our first secret project, using a novel (well we think so anyways) dev approach involving lots of small simultaneous contracts. If you have PhP/MySQL/Apache experience and want to help, create an account on Elance and check out our projects. You can look up the stuff we’ve already done, and bid on [...]