First Project: Work
The future of Work: Re-inventing corporate culture.
Our first project is to create a set of very powerful tools for helping people work together. Our hope is that we can build and sell some fun and unusual software that helps companies work faster and better, compete more effectively, become happier places to work, and inspire their people.
At Linden Lab, we were amazingly successful in creating a very complex piece of software – Second Life – in a very short time and with a small budget. Second Life is a good deal more complex than a modern operating system, has hundreds of different interacting components and is deployed across thousands of server computers. And all this was achieved by a very small team and at a cost of only about $20M in investment (before we reached profitability). This wasn’t just luck or even hiring great people – part of our success was fueled by an unusual set of business practices and company culture. This culture was reinforced and sustained by several pieces of software that we wrote internally. That software is the inspiration for the first products we are building at LoveMachineInc.
So far, we’ve built 3 of these tools, and are also using and evolving them on on a day-to-day basis, because of course our own company is running on them. These tools are our shared chat client (Journal), a contract worklist (Worklist) that supports open development teams with small tasks, and the corporate recognition LoveMachine that is our namesake. Taken together, these tools create a different kind of work environment, with a high degree of transparency as well as individual responsibility and accountability:
The journal is a combination of a real-time web-based chat system with a permanent searchable archive of important company activity. Imagine that everyone in your team/company keeps a page open all the time, where everyone else is chatting. If they need help they can quickly ask a question and get an answer, or just plan where to go for lunch. When something important happens (like software being updated, or revenues received), a robot automatically chats this information for everyone to see. Hovering over someone’s name instantly tells you what they are working on. The whole thing is instantly searchable, right back to the beginning of time. New employees can get up to speed faster, remote employees are included and empowered, and the whole company has a single place to go to find out what is happening and search for information.
A fast, searchable list of jobs that are working or need to get done inside your company. You can look for new jobs and bid on doing them. You can easily see what has gotten done in the last day, week, or year. The system can be open to both internal team members as well as outside freelancers/contractors. Finding out everything someone is working on and when they plan on being finished is as easy as picking their name from a popup. Instead of trying to do the nearly-impossible job of effectively allocating tasks to people, teams and companies can simply put everything into the worklist and let everyone bid on what they want to do.
When you see someone do something in your company that makes you happy, you take a few seconds and choose their name from a popup, then type a one line description of what they did. They get an instant email message from you that makes them feel great, and everyone else in the company can monitor a list that shows all the messages being sent. Because it is so fun and easy, everyone rapidly builds a powerful collective picture of what is going on, and how individuals are performing. A network diagram, word cloud, and various reports let everyone see what is going on: what keywords/projects are getting the most love, for example. Typical usage is about 1 message per day, meaning that the history of love received for a team member becomes a very accurate and thorough performance review. Optionally, the company can hang big-screen monitors that show realtime statistics on keywords and latest love messages.
How to get these tools for your company?
We’ve reached the point where we are testing/selling these tools for interested companies, and would welcome the opportunity to talk about installing them for you. If you’d like more information, you can reach us at contact@lovemachineinc.com. You can also just jump in right now ask questions of the LoveMachine team members in the journal, they’re friendly!