
Manifesto of rules for running a company - ecaradec
http://altdevblogaday.org/2011/05/21/the-hacking-business-model/
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jk4930
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Champions#Hidden_Champions.27_success_factors)

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

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arethuza
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]. :-)

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j_baker
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.

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DVassallo

      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>

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tptacek
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.

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hugh3
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.

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gruseom
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.

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Brushfire
"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.

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_delirium
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.

~~~
Brushfire
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.

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Silhouette
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.

