Story:
Nobody’s as Smart as Everybody—Unleashing Individual Brilliance and Aligning Collective Genius

Scrapping the Pyramid—Building a Good Neighborhood

From the start, we scrapped the pyramid and the power politics that go along with it to rethink the company as a community. Or, even better, think of the best neighborhoods and what it means to be a good neighbor. In an organization that is full of boxes in a big old triangle, every time there’s an opening, there’s a food fight over that box. In a good neighborhood, people step forward when they’re needed and do what they can becuause they like where they live. There’s a lot less trauma in a good community than there is in an organization driven by vacancies.

How do you build a company into a good neighborhood? Start by putting everybody into the same boat. Every employee is an owner of the company (and the company is 100% employee-owned). Instead of a job title, every employee’s business card reads “One of FEW” ( which means “friends enjoying work”—and we mean that)! We all share offices (including the co-founders and all the top executives). All work here is team based and each person plays multiple roles and can work on multiple teams, many of them on a volunteer basis. Information is shared widely and often. We make it very clear that every person here is important to the future of this company, that we care about them—and that nobody can go it alone. We discuss that our success will be through One of FEW producing the Power of We.

You start to get the message Day One. At 9am on your first day of work we throw you a birthday party—with wrapped presents, cake and all kinds of fun. That morning, your family gets the “welcome wagon”—flowers, gifts and a personal note from me and Joe, delivered at home.

Why do we give people a party when they’re leaving a company?  That’s not the time to make them feel important! How do we make people feel important the moment they join a company? The idea behind the birthday party is that you’ve arrived at a new place where you belong, you were expected, and you are important.

Even better, when  you go to your birthday party, everyone in the room has a lot of different reasons to relate to you. New recruits fill out a “birth certificate,” which details their hobbies, travel experiences, family, schooling, pets, military service, and surprising facts—like a hobby of growing giant pumpkins or playing a particular instrument..

 The birth certificate becomes a “trust token” both inside the organization (it pops up in your phone and email interactions with colleagues) and beyond. On every page of the Rite-Solutions website you’ll find an owl icon & the word “Who?” Click on it and up pops a window of birth certificates and contact information/e-mail form for every person connected to that piece of the business. By letting outsiders contact our people directly, we have shown that they are both important and trusted to interact on behalf of the company with potential clients. And it’s a lot more engaging for people interested in the company to email a real, living, breathing, human being than info@sales.com! Who you personally select to conmmunicate with will be a function of your hobbies, pets, hometown, instrument, etc.

Revving the Innovation Engine

In our old company when you had a good idea you had to go up in front of what we called the “murder board.” You’re standing up in the spotlight in front of six fat white guys who say they are there to help with your idea, but what they’re doing is shooting down your relevance.

In our quest to create a culture of innovation, we tried everything—and quickly learned what doesn’t work: innovation as an annual ritual (the Innovation Summit), just-in-time innovation (a jam, blitz brainstorming, an innovation offsite), the “innovation room,” and unstructured white space (put up whiteboards and the ideas will come). What usually happens, is the idea with the most theater (extrovert) that wins, and the people with the most charisma suck all of the oxygen (budget) out of the room (which generally has few intorverts in it anyway).

Ultimately, we turned to what we know: games and software. We wanted people to invest their intellectual capital in ways that they felt would benefit the community. That led us right to the stock market as a good game platform for our innovation engine.

In 2005 we launched a collaborative stock market-based game with the aim of making our people feel relevant to the success of the business in the most tangible way, and tapping their amazing intellectual bandwidth far beyond assigned “job tasks.” We wanted to demonstrate that we trust them and entrust them with the future of the company.

We call it Mutual Fun. Here’s how it works:

On your second day at Rite-Solutions, the serious fun begins. You’re invited to join your colleagues in a stock market-based game called “Mutual Fun.”

Imagine a typical stock market portfolio—but instead of buying and selling shares of stock and other financial instruments, players can float, advance and develop portfolios of ideas. Every person in the company gets an initial $10,000 in “opinion” money to invest in their peers’ “idea stocks.”

But the first step is to complete a profile that details your work experience, your expertise and capabilities, your interests and curiosities. This may seem like an obvious step, but it’s a crucial one. This is how players establish what they bring to the game table—and ultimately allows other players to search for people who might be able to assist them in various areas of their innovative ideas based on profile information.

Then the game begins: in addition to investing in and developing other ideas, any player can propose an idea—from a cost saving or efficiency measure (which gets listed on “Savings Bonds”) to an extension of the company’s current capabilities (“Bow Jones”) to a truly disruptive venture into a new business or technology (“SPAZDAQ”).

 The creator fleshes out his or her proposal in an “Expect-Us” (rather than a prospectus), assigns it a ticker symbol, and follows a detailed template to describe the value-creating potential of the idea. Ideas are advertised on the Tickler Tape as initiaI piblic offerings (IPOs) with a starting price of $10. Colleagues can make dollar investments in stocks, volunteer time (via “assists”—discrete activities to help move the idea forward), or express interest (in the threaded comments attached to every idea). An algorithm dynamically derives individual stock values (from the collective activity and investment around an idea), portfolio values (from an individual’s activity), and a player’s place on the leader board (from an individual’s own idea stock values and activity in assisting, investing, and discussing their co-workers ideas).

Inevitably, volunteer teams spring up around initiatives on Mutual Fun. We don’t assign anyone to anything. The creator posts “assist” projects and can recruit help, but people end up belonging to initiatives based on their own interests and ability to help (relevance).

You can browse ideas by date created, current value, number of assists, views,  comments or just your persoanl portfolio. You can explore a single idea (or a single player profile) in great detail (including its history and recent activity), and you can zoom out to review the best performing ideas and players, the ideas with the most comments or assists, and the velocity of an idea over time.

Another feature, “Penny Stocks,” offers players an opportunity to be heard. Management can pose a question to the player group and the players to provide their 2 cents via a simple template. The “Challenge” template is a way to get a thinking blitz going around a focused topic—and to allow the people doing the thinking to weigh-in on the other inputs provided.

When stocks crack the “Top 20” list of most valuable stocks, we often fund them (with real money!) and volunteers organize to take them to the next level. When any idea turns into a real cost savings or revenue producer, the creators share in a percentage of those gains. (And whenever we file a patent, the individuals behind the ideas are listed as inventors on the patent filing).

Just a couple examples:

One of the first stocks proposed on Mutual Fun (ticker symbol: VIEW) was a proposal to create a 3-D, videogame-like environment for emergency decision making for the company’s Navy and domestic security service clients. That product, called Rite-View, now accounts for 30% of Rite-Solutions’ revenues.

Some of the most valuable ideas come from the most unexpected places. Take the case of Rebecca Hosch, and administrator with no technical experience. In the process of planning the company’s annual holiday party and helping her daughter with a school project, she came up with an idea for using a bingo algorithm we created for our casino clients to create a web-based educational tool. That idea, “Win/Play/Learn” (symbol: WPL), immediately caught the attention of some engineers, who developed her idea into a product ultimately licensed by toy-maker Hasbro. We continue to work with Hasbro on a variety of projects and products well beyond the scope of WPL.

Joe and I would never have come up with either of these ideas—much less funded them—without Mutual Fun. The market not only taps into the quiet genius in the organization—it routes around the management disapproval loop.

So, it’s probably not surprising that Mutual Fun is one of the all-time most popular stocks on the market. We continue to evolve our innovation engine based on the lessons we’ve learned living with it inside Rite-Solutions and building versions of it and embedding them within other relevance-thinking organizations.