How We Work
http://rodcorp.typepad.com/rodcorp/2004/12/how_we_work.html
[A nifty and eclectic collection. Some excerpts]
Paul Valéry, poet wrote some poetry and prose in his early twenties and then paused to take twenty years off to study his mental processes. After being encouraged by friends, he finally returned to poetry and in six years produced the three volumes that made his name.
Entrepreneur Ricardo Semler's anti-Taylorist methods at Semco may seem nutty (you can choose your own salary and manager, everyone can see the company financial accounts), but apparently they work. Semco's staff work in small, autonomous units of about a dozen (the size, says Semler, of a close family group). They make the decisions, choose their leaders, set objectives and decide who they need and what they should be paid: someone who wants too much pay for what they are doing might be frozen out by the group. "From a distance it can sound like a workers' paradise," says Semler, "but the system is pretty unforgiving, because if you put your salary too high, and people don't put you on the list as someone they need for the next six months, you're in more trouble than you would be at General Motors. There is little bureaucratic control beyond financial accountability; almost everything depends on peer pressure. . .
Author Phillip Roth stands while he's working, and "walks half a mile for every page". Like others, Roth has a strict regime: He works standing up, paces around while he's thinking and has said he walks half a mile for every page he writes. . .
Scott McNealy, entrepreneur: In 1997, McNealy banned the use of Powerpoint at Sun because it clogged disks, bandwidth and brains: "We had 12.9 gigabytes of Powerpoint slides in storage on our disk drives. Ha ha ha. It freaks me out just to think about. Do you how many person centuries that is? Of clip-art manipulations? I banned Powerpoint from our company - I just edicted it. . . If I just gave everybody overheads, you know, blank Mila overheads with all the free pens they wanted - I could drive productivity through the roof, as opposed to having - I mean you've all seen these overheads that have 14 pieces of clipart, 13 fonts, right hand justified, spell-check, 13 colors and you know your employee is exhausted by the time it finally comes off the printer. And do they communicate anything? No."
Jackson Pollock knocked a wall down in his studio in order to fit in the canvas that would become Mural (1943), for Peggy Guggenheim's apartment. But he didn't commence work on it until 15 hours before it was due to be delivered - "it was a stampede", he would later report. When it was delivered, Guggenheim found that it was eight inches too long to fit into the space. On Marcel Duchamp's advise it was chopped down to fit.
[A nifty and eclectic collection. Some excerpts]
Paul Valéry, poet wrote some poetry and prose in his early twenties and then paused to take twenty years off to study his mental processes. After being encouraged by friends, he finally returned to poetry and in six years produced the three volumes that made his name.
Entrepreneur Ricardo Semler's anti-Taylorist methods at Semco may seem nutty (you can choose your own salary and manager, everyone can see the company financial accounts), but apparently they work. Semco's staff work in small, autonomous units of about a dozen (the size, says Semler, of a close family group). They make the decisions, choose their leaders, set objectives and decide who they need and what they should be paid: someone who wants too much pay for what they are doing might be frozen out by the group. "From a distance it can sound like a workers' paradise," says Semler, "but the system is pretty unforgiving, because if you put your salary too high, and people don't put you on the list as someone they need for the next six months, you're in more trouble than you would be at General Motors. There is little bureaucratic control beyond financial accountability; almost everything depends on peer pressure. . .
Author Phillip Roth stands while he's working, and "walks half a mile for every page". Like others, Roth has a strict regime: He works standing up, paces around while he's thinking and has said he walks half a mile for every page he writes. . .
Scott McNealy, entrepreneur: In 1997, McNealy banned the use of Powerpoint at Sun because it clogged disks, bandwidth and brains: "We had 12.9 gigabytes of Powerpoint slides in storage on our disk drives. Ha ha ha. It freaks me out just to think about. Do you how many person centuries that is? Of clip-art manipulations? I banned Powerpoint from our company - I just edicted it. . . If I just gave everybody overheads, you know, blank Mila overheads with all the free pens they wanted - I could drive productivity through the roof, as opposed to having - I mean you've all seen these overheads that have 14 pieces of clipart, 13 fonts, right hand justified, spell-check, 13 colors and you know your employee is exhausted by the time it finally comes off the printer. And do they communicate anything? No."
Jackson Pollock knocked a wall down in his studio in order to fit in the canvas that would become Mural (1943), for Peggy Guggenheim's apartment. But he didn't commence work on it until 15 hours before it was due to be delivered - "it was a stampede", he would later report. When it was delivered, Guggenheim found that it was eight inches too long to fit into the space. On Marcel Duchamp's advise it was chopped down to fit.
posted by T. Scott Brineman at 1:10 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home