Out at Five
I developed a conceptual model for a perfect company.
The primary objective of this company is to make employees as effective
as possible. The best products usually come from the most effective employees,
so employee effectiveness is the most fundamental of the fundamentals.
The goal of the hypothetical company is to get the best work out of
the employees and make sure they leave work by five o’ clock. Finishing by
five o’clock is so central to everything that follows that I named the
company OA5 (Out at five) to reinforce the point.
If you let his part of the concept slip, the rest of it falls apart.
The goal of OA5 is to guarantee that the employee who leaves at 5 PM
has done a full share of work and everybody realizes it. For that to
happen an OA5 company has to do things differently than an ordinary company.
