

Free for all Friday at Inventables - Crazy or Obvious? - zkaplan
http://inventables.blogspot.com/2010/05/our-motivations-dan-pink-inventables-on.html

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slapshot
Sure as heck matters what your employees do on other days. If I had a customer
service team, I don't think my customers would appreciate it if they all
decided to stop answering support calls on Fridays.

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SkyMarshal
Google did it, Google did it!

Seriously though, it's obvious, and shown to work with quality engineers, but
no less cool for all of that. Bravo to Inventables, we need more companies
that do this (and in general, organize their workforce according Dan Pink's
insights).

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InclinedPlane
At some point between the Renaissance and today we, the western world, seem to
have acquired the notion that inventing and craftsmanship are not creative
endeavors. That seems to be going away, and with it the correspondingly
outmoded ideas about work environment, schedule, and structure. If you treat
creative endeavors like an assembly line you'll get assembly line employee
satisfaction and assembly line levels of innovation and creativity.

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zkaplan
That's an elegant way of putting it. At the core I don't believe that software
engineers are assembly line workers. They are not cogs in some big machine
that can be automated. Writing web applications requires creativity and
intellectual thought. Everyone knows that telling someone "be creative now!"
is a ridiculous approach.

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jamesbritt
'They are not cogs in some big machine that can be automated. Writing web
applications requires creativity and intellectual thought. Everyone knows that
telling someone "be creative now!" is a ridiculous approach.'

On a number of occasions I've talked with people in the Web
development/software business, and they make regular use of the term
"creatives". And every single time they use it to distinguish some group of
people (designers, ad writers, whatever) from mere software developers. Who,
apparently, are not creative, or not doing creative work.

It's probably a lost cause to get people to consider software developers part
of that group (at least with those who most often us that term), so I propose
we call developers, hackers, engineers, etc. "Inventives."

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robg
Bad title, good article.

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zkaplan
What would you have titled it?

