Story:
No Employees! No Headquarters! No Salaries! No Product Pricing! No CEO! Just Success!
- Companies come up with service offerings and figure out how to differentiate them from competition. I wanted to be a monopoly. I didn't want to ever worry about competition or differentiation. If competitors ever came in, I didn't want to copy them. I wanted to envision what customers want and create my version of the offering, regardless of what competition thinks.
- Service offerings have pricing. While vendors look at pricing from the revenue perspective, I wanted to look at it from the customer value perspective, meaning my price may be different for every customer, depending on the value they gain. Therefore, I didn't want to price my services.
- Companies have employees. But employees represent legal risk (employment laws, tax burden, etc) and create fixed costs (you have to pay them salaries regardless of your revenues). I didn't want to face any legal risks, worry about benefits, taxes, unemployment insurance, and pay people salaries if I didn't have work for them to do.
- When companies hire employees, they look at their resumes. But resumes don't tell the right story. They may be poorly written, biased, specific opportunity oriented and limited. By reading resumes, I'd be biased too. I didn't want to select people based on resumes.
- When companies hire employees, they look for specific type of experience. This experience may be bad. Just because an employee did something at another firm doesn't mean he did it right. I didn't want to hire people who had the right experience. I wanted to find people that understood how to solve my problem in the right way.
- Companies have offices. One of them is called the headquarters. Offices represent fixed costs. I don't like fixed costs.
- Companies have leaders, org charts, and titles. When that happens, people spend too much time building leaders, figuring out who reports to who and giving each other fancy titles, thus limiting creativity, learning abilities, and reducing the amount of time people have to actually do the work. Plus leadership isn't natural. I wanted to find a way for people to work in a more natural way. I wanted them to be themselves and work in a team environment.
- Companies have CEOs. The only reason they have them is to give direction to people below them. But if you hire the right people and put them in right positions, why do you need to give them any direction? I didn't want to have a CEO.
- Companies engage in strategic planning and create business plans. I've reviewed over 200 business plans and strategic plans in my life and I am yet to see one that was able to clearly predict and describe what the firm will really do. While strategic planning is a nice exercise, I didn't want to spend too much time trying to forecast stuff I can't really predict.
- Companies have tons of documentation that no one reads. I didn't want to waste time creating unneeded documents.
- Companies select a business model and set it in stone. When competition comes in, companies have hard times changing their business model. I didn't want to do that. I wanted the organization to self-reinvent its business model often.
- There are numerous best practices and standard business processes that people follow without understanding why they do so. I wanted to question every process and only follow the ones I understand and agree with. Otherwise, I'd redesign them my way.
- "Customer is always right" is a bad slogan. While I care about customers, they can be wrong. I didn't want to hurt my organization at the expense of sucking up to customers who are wrong for the purpose of showing them that they are right.
- Companies ask customers what they want. But customers never know what they want. I never wanted to ask customers for their requirements. Instead, I wanted to figure out the context of their problem and design my own requirements.
Looks like fun place to work in.
As Rick mentioned, it is based on 2 factors - size of the company and the compatibility with other partners. Once the company becomes bigger, it is difficult to continue with the same vigor. Other partners, similarly, have to be also on the same wave-length as yourself to make it a good working experience for all.
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Interesting . I'll be interested to follow your progress. It's similar to the "Seven Day Weekend" (Ricardo Semler) idea. Seems to me there'd be a limited application of this model based on industry focus. i.e. works for services, less so for manufacturing; works for a small organization, less so for a large one, I'd imagine. But perhaps you imagine differently? Certainly requires "partners" of a certain nature who are able to handle the insecurity of no base salary.
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Really fascinating model and approach. I'm wondering if you've read Tom Peter's new book "The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence". His approach to competitors is presicely yours. Focus on what YOU do, not what you do to beat the competition.
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This is exceptional and I love it.
Find people who need help, provide that help if they want it. - What better business plan is there than that?
Kudos.
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