18 April 2003

The New Military-Industrial Complex Which companies are building next-gen land, sea, air, space, network military technology [via ?] 1:32:59 AM     comments

Chronology of Human Technology Interesting: Recognised art happens a looong time before we were speech-enabled. [via ?] 1:32:18 AM     comments

Royal Tenenbaums various things A supplementary compendium to the Royal Tenebaums The artwork of (in) the Royal Tenebaums 1:31:48 AM     comments

A massive index of many (all?) Business2 articles Which we found when daypop-searching for Ricardo Semler. 1:28:42 AM     comments

Ricardo Semler on peopleware: Idleness is good Ricardo Semler's methods at Semco may seem nutty (you can choose you 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. "We have a higher trust in human nature," says Semler, "but we're also convinced that peer control is fabulous as long as there is a common interest. If someone's interested, the sort of corporate corruption you see elsewhere can never happen. It can only happen in places where people really don't care, where they're doing their nine-to-five thing, and the chief executive knows he's under the sword of Damocles so might as well make as much as he can. If he has that attitude, a lot of other people think the same way, so that system is doomed." As XP is to coding, Semler's methods are to peopleware: they seem arse-about-face. And we suspect that without embracing the culture 100%, it's hard to get the benefits. The Guardian's article pulls a quote out as its headline (Idleness is good), but the core idea is that Trusting People Is Good, and trust is something sorely lacking in many workplaces these days. The next step is probably to ask customers to name a fair price they want to pay for services, and accept it (or for customers to ask their suppliers to do a fair amount of work for a budget of X). Perhaps Semco do this already. Awesome stuff. Related: Thunderbird's case study on Semler and Semco has a more in-depth overview of how Semco's participative management culture works (Thunderbird: "The American Graduate School of International Management") At Ideo, team-leaders make a pitch to fellow employees about the kind of work direction they want to take their team in, and the employees get to choose which team to join. 1:19:52 AM     comments