> He secretly rented a room at the Marriott across the street from the corporate offices, took his best engineers to the room and told them, "Don't come out until you have a payroll system. Our goal is to get it live in 60 days," he said.<p>It's good clickbait, but why's that a good management strategy? What does it even mean? Who was it a secret from, the other employees? If the productivity gain of dropping some team members is not canceled by the losses of setting up a temporary office in a hotel room, maybe you were doing something wrong at your real office. Or you're exaggering about the cloistered nature of this "secret hotel room" for the press.
Is 60 days to build an <i>automated</i> payroll system really a selling feature or success story?<p>Mistakes in payroll can cause a tremendous amount of effort for both the employer and employee, and I would want my payroll system to be well tested, battle hardened, and near bullet-proof as possible.<p>In other words, not one built in a hotel room in two months.