Manifesto of rules for running a company

Manifesto vs. empirics:<p>"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.<p>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."<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Champions#Hidden_Champions.27_success_factors" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Champions#Hidden_Champio...</a><p>Yes, this is not necessarily the best model for hackers, but one should keep in mind that these hidden champions are successful tech companies.

It might be interesting to compare some of these ideas with large worker-owned cooperatives like the UK's John Lewis Partnership:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership</a><p>[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]. :-)

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.

<p><pre><code> 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) </code></pre> Isn't the "right of physical privacy" a good cause in itself? <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy#Physical" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy#Physical</a>

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.

"The Company is primarily created to generate bonuses for the employees (not to get sold)."<p>Wrong.<p>The company is primarily created to profit all shareholders, a group that should include most, if not all, employees.<p>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.

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.<p>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.