Breaking Glass by Rishi Dean

Summary: What happens when you get a 40+ person company to design its own office space? More importantly, will they want to? Turns out the results are better than expected, speaking in large part to an incredible culture and a great group of people. See for yourself.E-mail. Tweet. http://rdean.me/ez369R

Well, if you haven’t heard, we at Visible Measures recently moved office space. However, what you probably didn’t know is that this move, and all of the office space design, was performed entirely by the company employees….this is a lesson in crowdsourced design.

As a growing technology company, with state-of-the-art technology, and in a really hot market, we were bursting at the seams of our former office space…so it was time to move on to bigger, and better office space.

What we did

Unlike most companies of our size, we decided to go back to our roots, and keep things very frugal, and “startup”…or as VM advisor, David Cancel, would say “ghettopreneur”.

This approach meant all of the basics would have to be handled; like boxing stuff up, moving furniture, renting a U-Haul truck, and lots of little trips back and forth. However, in taking this approach, we were afforded to do something very unique: to all pitch in to design our own office space. To make things fun, we enacted an HGTV-style competition where teams signed up and developed their own concepts on a limited budgets, and timeframe, to execute their concepts. While the budget was fixed, we erred on the side of fewer rules, in order to let the creativity flourish. Additionally, we employed the best interior designer I know (um, well…ok it’s my wife) to provide guidance to the teams, and to help out with our other common areas.

See pictures of the space

Summary: While building culture at a startup is challenging, entrepreneurs often, implicitly or explicitly, follow five core patterns of hiring and managing people. These “employment models” have profound effects on the culture and performance of the firms. E-mail. Tweet.

In my previous post, I discussed some rules of thumb for designing and building culture at startups. Here I’ll dive into a little more detail into the academic underpinnings of those ideas, stemming from a course I took called Designing & Leading the Entrepreneurial Organization while at MIT Sloan, taught by Diane Burton. This is my retelling of that information, so I take no credit for the theories and research behind it…so I’ll do my best to do it justice.

The research, by the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies (SPEC), sampled 175 young high-tech firms in Silicon Valley, over the course of 1994 – 2000. They analyzed these companies along three core dimensions of how they approached managing people, and arrived at five prototypical employment models (whether intentionally or unintentionally)…which you can think of as like a business version of the famed software Design Patterns.

Learn about the 5 models…

Summary: While designing and building culture anywhere is difficult, startups have unique qualities that make it especially challenging. Here I give a mini-model, called the “Three Ps”, which can serve as a reminder of the key elements to create, maintain, and align culture. E-mail. Tweet.

I was recently asked by good friend, and coach Bob Radin, a professor at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, to speak to his MBA class, called “Managing People in Organizations”. Bob asked me to give them the perspective of what it takes to design and build culture at a startup; for which I provided some perspective, as well as a mini-framework, to help students think about how culture plays an integral role when founding a startup, or even selecting where to begin their post-MBA career.

In addition to the slides, here is a description of the main takeaways of the discussion.

See the presentation slides and commentary

Summary: Dan Pink’s “Drive” explores the roots of motivation, and can help in recruiting, retaining, and developing startup teams. E-mail. Tweet.

After my last post on evaluating startup personnel, I was referred to Daniel Pink’s book, Drive. Here, Pink explores the major factors that underlie our motivation, and applies them to the workplace context.

He asserts (with supporting research) that for basic, rudimentary tasks money can work as a motivator; however, when tasks get more complicated, requiring conceptual and creative thinking monetary incentives no longer work. That said, you need to pay people well enough to take the issue of money off the table…or said another way, a fair salary is “table stakes” for a highly functioning team.

Applying this to the startup context, makes enormous sense, as people who join those teams are motivated by something bigger, and their tasks are never “routine”. In Drive, Pink’s findings and suggestions are directly applicable to tangible mechanisms that can be used in a startup, or any other innovation management context.

See the major factors of motivation and the Drive video