Maybe you've heard about Joel Spolsky, or maybe his blog domain joelonsoftware.com sounds familliar. No? Nevermind!
He seems a smart and open minded person and he managed to (co-)found quite some cool companies, which gave birth to some really cool products (Stack Exchange or Trello anyone?)
He recently came back from his blogging retirement with an article about Trello. While I think Trello is a very good product, I was a bit more interested in the company culture reminded in his article.
I would like to point out to you a few quotes, just to give you enough for the road to work, bear with me!
It’s OK to put people first. You don’t have to be a psychopath, work people to death, create heaps of messy code, or work in noisy open offices.
Attempting to see management as the ultimate decision makers demotivates the smart people in the organization who, without the authority to do what they know is right, will grow frustrated and leave. And if this happens, you won’t notice it, but you’ll be left with a bunch of yes-men, who don’t particularly care (or know) how things should work, and the company will only have one brain – the CEO’s. See what I mean about “it doesn’t scale?”
For every Steve Jobs, there are a thousand leaders who learned to hire smart people and let them build great things in a nurturing environment of empowerment and it was AWESOME. That doesn’t mean lowering your standards. It doesn’t mean letting people do bad work. It means hiring smart people who get things done—and then getting the hell out of the way.