In the past five years, I’ve held three different jobs. My perception of each can be summed up like this:
So what’s the difference? Bureaucracy, mostly. Red tape, or lack thereof. At Washburn, I had zero influence over anyone. My manager pretty much saw to it that any idea that wasn’t hers went no where. A K-State, we had a good enough web team, but upper administration and politics between departments got in our way of doing great things at times. At World Online, we’re mostly free of red-tape. If someone has a great idea, we do it. We don’t ask many questions, we don’t plan much, and for most things, we don’t need to go too far up the chain seeking permission. We just do it.
Try cutting down some red tape and giving your creative minds that know their industry inside and out a bit more autonomy. I don’t promise it’ll work for everyone, but it seems to work for us.
001 // Adam Spooner // 07.20.2006 // 8:06 AM
I’d love to work in that kind of atmosphere! Sometimes I get tired of having my ideas squashed because they aren’t seen as important [even something as small as wanting to redo a website done by a previous employee because it’s not done with web standards and doesn’t even validate at HTML 4.0]
Have any Junior positions? =)
002 // Baxter // 07.20.2006 // 8:21 AM
Oh, how I can sympathize. Interestingly, Seth Godin wrote on the same topic this morning. He suggests people use the “What’s the worse that can happen” test: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/sethsblog/2006/07/carefulconside.html
003 // Deryck Hodge // 07.20.2006 // 8:54 AM
Well said, Jeff. I’ve been thinking similar things myself lately.
Here’s my little “Amen, brother!”
004 // Mark Otto // 07.20.2006 // 10:41 AM
It’s almost awkward to say that this is exactly how my line of work is. I do what I want, when I want, how I want. That’s the real beauty of working with an interactive design agency.
I think web designers have the best jobs in the world :).
005 // Thomas M. // 07.20.2006 // 10:50 AM
Where I’ve been working at, I’d had a lot of freedom to play around, but, in the end, being the only member of the team, it was difficult to know everything from top to bottom - design, coding, frameworks, etc. I didn’t have much red-tape, but I also didn’t have great deal of resources at my disposal. If I wanted it done, I had to do everything - and that gets very burdensome and consuming.
Now, I’m heading into an atmostphere, at the nearby University, where there will be more red-tape, but I’m also not developing a the University’s web site - only teaching the principles of web-design (standard based, of course).
Fortunately, on the classroom side, I’ll have a bit of room to manuver, but also know many of my “new” ideas will have to be “proposed” to the administration. Having that undergrad degree in Political Science from KU has really come in handy for many of those “red-tape” situations.
However, I’d love to have your resouces (aka Jacob, Matt, et. al) at my disposal!
006 // Chris Griffin // 07.20.2006 // 11:58 AM
Your Washburn boss treatment of you describes my situation exactly right now.
Funny how experience works, my boss is over 10 years older than me, yet I’m a better designer and developer, and I know more about SEO.
Yet, when I tell him stuff it goes in one ear and out the other. One idea of mine actually made it through, and he’s the one working on it, I’ve had no hand in the creation of it.
We had to create a page one time to be implemented into our system that would be displayed on several sites. I asked him to let me take a look and I’ll clean up the code, and he agreed. But, nope it didn’t. The page is cluttered with tons of div and break tags.
Anyway I’m working my way out of this situation because it drives me mad.
007 // Brian // 07.20.2006 // 8:08 PM
Chris,
It’s your boss here…. You’re fired……
Back to reality…. Jeff, you are also lucky to work in an enviroment that understands the value they gain by allowing creative types to run free. Sure sometimes they go off on tangents that go nowhere, but sometimes those tangents pay huge dividends. I the real difference is hiring quality people and having trust in their skills and abilites. Not all managers are capable of that.
008 // James John Malcolm (AkaXakA) // 07.21.2006 // 4:53 AM
You’ve just explained one of the core points of new/current organisational theory (and practice): Empowerment.
Glad to see it’s working out well for you guys :)
009 // Brian // 07.21.2006 // 2:30 PM
I suspect that if you asked 100 managers if they empower their employees you would get a very different answer than if you asked the same question to 100 employees of those managers. Many companies believe that they empower employees, while very vew actually do. It is particulary frustrating to work in an “empowered” enviroment that isn’t
010 // Matt // 07.24.2006 // 3:58 PM
LJW is amazing, but they are a monopoly that runs on a very unique business model: basically, profit can be a fraction of what most other places expect. With little to no competition, they can afford to experiment, take risk, hire young passionate people and not have to worry about the long history of disgruntled employees. You’re lucky to be at LJW but not everyone is so fortunate.
011 // Jeff Croft // 07.24.2006 // 4:04 PM
Matt-
You may be right that LJW is in a unique place compared to other news organizations, but this post wasn’t aimed at news organizations (necessarily).
Anyone who thinks they can’t afford to empower their creative teams is shortsighted. I don’t care who you are or what you do, if you don’t allow your brightest people room to think, you’ll never go anywhere.
If you can point out a successful origination that hasn’t gotten there by hiring smart people and letting them do their thing, I’ll be damn impressed.
012 // Jeremy Dunck // 07.26.2006 // 1:24 PM
Jeff, As organizations scale up, the law of averages dictate that the people will, on average, be average. ;)
Also, large organizations have a lot going on, a lot of interdependence, and a -lot- of communication overhead. The developer can’t hear the designer say “wouldn’t it be nice if…” because he’s in a cube, surrounded by 50 other developers, shielded by 30 middle managers, insulated by 200 pages of specification.
That generally means that large organizations are incapable of creative work.
Tools help, but there’s also the problem of fitting everything that needs to be known in one brain. I know a lot of geeky stuff, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what the F01011 table’s IBNXTR column is used for, or what would happen if I started putting a new value in it.
The conclusion I draw from all that is that in order to do useful work, I need to work in a small organization. I think economies of scale are ourstripped by overheads of complexity in creative work.
013 // Jeff Croft // 07.26.2006 // 1:38 PM
Jeremy, there’s no doubt you’re right — but does it have to be that way? My point, really, was that we should look for ways to alleviate this situation. Are there ways larger organizations can cut down all all this bureaucracy?
For example, The World Company (which is the parent company of World Online) is actually quite large. But, they’ve done a nice job of breaking our group off into a smaller team and then letting us act as a small organization, even though we’re really not.
This less-bureaucracy stuff is definitely easier to achieve in smaller organizations, but I’m not convinced it’s unattainable in bigger ones. It just takes more creative solutions, is all.
014 // Jeremy Dunck // 07.26.2006 // 4:38 PM
It also takes non-conformist leadership. “No one got fired for buying from IBM”, and all that.
Related: http://paulgraham.com/marginal.html
015 // Jeremy Dunck // 07.26.2006 // 4:49 PM
That came off more harshly than I intended. I’m bruised from working overly-long in corporateville. I’ve stopped trying to evangelize here because it’s clear the gap is too large.
I agree with you, Jeff, more than my prior comments let on. I think that with effective communication tools and flexible roles and processes, large organizations can do well by flattening heirarchies and just generally getting out of the way (and canning people that can’t hack it).
I’ve given a lot of thought to this, but short of unions, I don’t think there’s ever been a corporate coup, so to speak, and the CxOs at the top won’t yield their power (nor options or parachutes) without a fight.
Maybe startups will grow in the ‘net environment to be large enough and successful enough to make the classic job-title’d incentive-driven MBAs think twice about how useful it really is to specialize to the point of corporate incompetance.
Maybe.
Until then, I hope to do something useful. ;-)
016 // Jeff Croft // 07.26.2006 // 4:52 PM
Jeremy, I totally get where you’re coming from, and I have no doubt you’ve got me experience than me on this. There’s a good chance you’re right — that things will never change — but until I’m burnt out on trying, I’ll keep advocating the change, anyway. :)
017 // Oscar // 08.02.2006 // 1:04 PM
I totally agree with you Jeff that red tape slows things down and makes it real difficult to be creative and more productive. We would all love to work in the kind of environment you currently work at, BUT unfortunately that’s not possible on all kinds of businesses and I agree with Jeremy, when you’re on a bigger corporation (or dealing with big corporate clients) it becomes really hard to be “creative” and just bypass layers of red tape.
I currently work as a software developer for a company that offers software solutions for eSourcing/Supply Chain Management/Contract Management and contractual obligations just kill this ideal environment where there’s no red tape at all. If we as developers get creative and implement something without first going through all the bureaucracy layers to find out if what we’re trying to change is not something that was funded by a client, or was implemented as a mandatory requirement of some kind, we might easily get the company in deep trouble.
If a client pays tens of thousands of dollars to have something implemented and their users trained on how to use it a certain way, and some creative guy comes and change it because he believes it doesn’t work as good as it could, they’re going to at least want their money back, if not take other legal actions.
Again I agree with your point of view, unfortunately it’s just not always possible in all industries, no matter how hard you try.
018 // Paul // 08.05.2006 // 12:10 AM
Jeff,
Nice post…I knew your manager…but maybe it’s more about leadership? I worked on a team at WU that you knew…with a gifted leader, and those folks let own my tasks…
Just remember that your corp. could change hands, and ALL this could change. But enjoy!!!
Peace; Paul