• Mar102008

    Calacanis and 37signals different perspectives on workaholics

    Posted by Gene in Business

    Here are some pretty interesting diverging opinions on the “how to run your business and treat your employees” or as I like to look at it “how to squeeze the most or best production out of your employees” blog post(s) battle. Both Calacanis and 37signals have dueling posts on the issue.

    From Calacanis.com:

    • If you do meetings, have them over lunch, because you shouldn’t let your employees eat alone
    • Don’t provide people with phones, they can always use their own cellphones, and this saves money
    • Buy a decent espresso machine and provide food in the office, because you don’t want your staff to ever stop working, this way you keep them in the office every minute of every day
    • Buy people who work hard a computer for home, so they can work after hours, on weekends and public holidays
    • Fire people who are not workaholics…. come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. go work at the post office or stabucks if you want balance in your life.

    From 37signals/svn blog:

    • People who are workaholics are likely to attempt to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at the problem.
    • People who always work late makes the people who don’t feel inadequate for merely working reasonable hours.
    • If all you do is work, your value judgements are unlikely to be sound.
    • Working with interesting people is more interesting than just working.

    Both of these look pretty naive to me, Calacanis certainly comes off as a pretty big “fill-in-the-blank” but 37signals comes off as really utopian at the same time. They both certainly come off as neither running businesses with employees that have kids or of running a typical small business or startup company (even though they are both couched as such.) People need to be told what’s involved when they join up to work with your startup so everyone can be adults when things go bad. At the same time, no one who 37signals is hiring isn’t going to be taken care of, it’s been pretty loudly touted how well their company is doing, which is certainly not typical in the industry. Where’s the reality?

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