Manifesto of rules for running a company | Hacker News Reader

Manifesto of rules for running a company

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58 pointsecaradec14 comments

Manifesto vs. empirics:

"The corporate culture of hidden champions is distinctive. Their values are conservative: hard work, strict selection, intolerance of underperformance, low sickness rates and high employee loyalty — and most are based in smaller towns.

Leadership style is authoritarian on strategic issues but participative on operations level. The leaders identify themselves with the company, are focussed on their products, and stay for a long time, much longer than is normal in large public corporations."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Champions#Hidden_Champio...

Yes, this is not necessarily the best model for hackers, but one should keep in mind that these hidden champions are successful tech companies.

It might be interesting to compare some of these ideas with large worker-owned cooperatives like the UK's John Lewis Partnership:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership

[I have to admit to being very fond of Waitrose, the very successful up-market supermarket chain that is a part of John Lewis - this does no good to either my bank balance or my waist]. :-)

I mostly agree with the principles behind this post, but not the implementation. For starters, voting invites design by committee. And giving everyone veto power only makes it worse. I think the better alternative is to empower individuals to be the final decision-makers about their work unless of course there's a good reason to override them.

  The employee is assumed to be cost efficient...

  - When traveling they should strive to stay over at their fellow employees’ 
  places and/or share rooms with their fellow employees. (This item can 
  be overridden with a ‘good cause’ by their manager)

Isn't the "right of physical privacy" a good cause in itself? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy#Physical

That item jumped out at me as well. I'm reasonably sure you can't enforce it in the US; that, instead, you could get in trouble for having a clause in your handbook suggesting that you were expected to open your house up for coworkers.

It's also just creepy.

And how much money can it really save? If an employee doesn't travel often then who cares about a hundred bucks a night for a moderately-priced hotel, and if the employee does travel often then it'd have to be completely intolerable.

That's a good example of what I meant in my earlier post. More generally, I didn't like the "low-cost" approach to things like travel and accommodation.

Partly, that smacks of treating employees as nothing but "human resources", a term which is forbidden in any company I own, BTW. It ignores the massive disruptive effect you are having on their lives by expecting them to stay away from their home, family and social life outside of office hours.

Even without that, if you're sending an employee to conduct business in person at a remote location, you're surely committing a lot of time and money to whatever it is they're doing. It seems a no-brainer for me that you make travel arrangements that minimise the hassle to them, book comfortable accommodation, and provide some sort of catering/recreation budget so they can relax when they're not working. Otherwise, you just spent a lot of money to get a valuable member of staff somewhere, and then you made the member of staff tired and stressed so they aren't at their best anyway. How does that make any business sense?

To be taken seriously, something like this needs to be backed up by a clearly successful example. Otherwise it's like a framework with no successful applications.

"The Company is primarily created to generate bonuses for the employees (not to get sold)."

Wrong.

The company is primarily created to profit all shareholders, a group that should include most, if not all, employees.

There are a lot of great points in this article, but there are at least 5-10 bullets that I cant get close to agreeing with.

If you don't have outside investors, and distribute profits as bonuses, the effect is basically the same as if employees had shares and you were paying dividends, except that shares only persist for the duration of employment (since you stop getting bonuses once you leave).

A more formalized way of setting that up is to use a cooperative business structure, where ownership is shared by current employees.

Good point. Although the tax implications are different (worse), this would be effectively the same.

But I think the idea of shareholder is more powerful. It is not just about cash, but also about ownership and having a vote. And it also means equality per share. Bonuses have none of these characteristics.

Have you studied any law? A company should follow it's constitution. If that constitution says that the company is there to waste it's investors capital, then that's fine. Just don't invest in one of those, unless you have a good reason.

The article is about propositions for how to ideally structure a company, not the range of possibilities.

I am all for a reasonable employer-employee relationship, and I'll be the first to agree that many employers try to impose offensively one-sided terms that I would never want to impose on staff at a business of my own. Things that distort work-life balance to invade employees' private lives are top of my "never" list, with artificially limiting someone's career as a form of employee lock-in probably coming in second.

On the flip side, this deal looks so one-sided the other way that I can't see it working out for most businesses. For one thing, many of the preferences seem to be subjective, and I can see different priorities being in the interests of both employees and employers in some cases. A few of the ideas sound like either crazy risks to the business or even implicitly illegal behaviour in some business areas/jurisdictions.

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