Can ROWE and 20% Time Help your Company Through the Recession?

This is not the time to freak out. It’s a time of reflection and introspection for companies as well as individuals. It’s a great time to ask, “why are we here?” Are we in the right market? Are our customers delighted with our products and services? Are we in the right market? It’s a great time to do research and design and it’s a great time to start something new.

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ROWE and City Planning

If more and more people start working from home, what affect will that have on our cities and communities? Will our need for office space decrease? Will traffic lesson, will we need less parking spaces in business districts? Will it strengthen or weaken our relationships at home or at work? Certainly there will be consequences for changing the way we work. Some of them intended, lower cost for office space, higher employee engagement and satisfaction, some of them unintended. What will the unintended consequences be?

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Unarticulated Needs

Filling needs that people don’t know they have is hard. Earlier this week I read a blog post that Seth Godin wrote about: Marketing to the bottom of the pyramid. It got me thinking, that that’s what I’m trying to do, fulfill unarticulated needs. Needs that most folks don’t know they have. The average person doesn’t know that they could have a work life that lifts them up and makes them feel great. For that last 100 years we’ve been programmed to believe that work is a necessary evil, that we need to give up 40-60 hour of our week to purgatory, that being happy, fulfilled and engaged at work is more of a fairy tale than a reality.

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Zappos: Happy People, Delivering Happiness and Shoes.

Tony Sheih, CEO of Zappos has just written his first book,’Delivering Happiness, a Path to Profits, Passion and Happiness.’ It chronicles Tony’s life, from childhood entrepreneurial efforts, to college and his time at LinkExchange. In some ways it reads like Ricardo Semler’s’Maverick, The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace,‘“Both books talk about lessons learned, mistakes made and happy coincidences that lead them to success.

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Are you a stone cutter or do you build cathedrals?

Ricardo Semler took his company SEMCO from a 4 million dollar a year venture with one division to 212 million a year with 15 divisions. This is from 1982 to 2003, I couldn’t find any newer numbers, but at that time his staff was aiming for 1 billion dollars by 2008. Sales have an average growth of 24% a year and SEMCO has less than 1% turnover. Beat that Wall Street! Ricardo has some very unconventional ideas about how to run a company.

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