Workplace experiments: A month to yourself

I've seen a lot of articles from 37signals.com on HN but I have no idea who they are or what they do. They certainly seem quite innovative in terms of how they treat their employees, which is great.<p>Are they profitable? I'm curious if their generosity to their employees translates to their bottom line in measurable ways.

'This June we’re trying something new'—I don't believe this. 37signals will always do the same: blogging.<p>Instead of coming up with new products or groundbreaking tech 37signals still relies on one past success and heavy Marketing which is mainly about blogging. Yesterday, somebody on HN wrote a laconic post and marked their articles as 'recycled trash from popular business / personal wealth books.' But people seem to like this appreciating every little advice with stronger or just different opinions. And they never forget that 37signals created the foundation of their income and wealth as a coder—Rails. So, upvoting 37signals can't be bad.<p>It's good to be aware that these writings are Marketing activities and basically indirect lead generation to all of their products. This isn't something bad and everybody should have a decent Marketing strategy too but if it's your <i>only</i> strength while missing product development at all I doubt that's enough to be successful in the long run and you are nothing more than a typical Clickbank vendor.<p>This is now really the ironic part, sharing advice how to come to new fresh ideas and projects (by taking one month off) considering that 37signals didn't have any new and really successful products for years. And we shall take such advice seriously? Especially when seeing failed and unsold 37signals projects on Flippa right now (Sortfolio offered for 480K).<p>Maybe one month off is not enough, maybe a hard reset would help 37signals better.<p>EDIT to downvoters: downvoting != disagreeing, reply if you disagree

Everyone knows that the best work comes when you are free to create something you believe in and that you have a real desire to create.<p>The problem is combining that desire with capitalism where someone wants to get rich from your ideas, and with a minimum of costs.<p>Googles most successful products such as Gmail and the search engine was created as small, experimental products, born from the brains of people who were NOT under strict deadlines and pressure to perform. The brain works much better under those conditions, and so does creativity and thinking outside the box.<p>Today we see the influence of managers and bosses in the way Google ignores privacy. That was probably never part of the vision the product creators had when they put their products together.

Kiva has been doing this for a couple years now, we do a full 2-week innovation iteration where us engineers get to work on whatever we want. More info: <a href="http://blog.build.kiva.org/buildkivablog/2011/02/10/kiva-engineering-innovation-iteration" rel="nofollow">http://blog.build.kiva.org/buildkivablog/2011/02/10/kiva-eng...</a><p>It's pretty awesome, and has some produced some great projects like <a href="http://kiva.org/live" rel="nofollow">http://kiva.org/live</a>

In other news:<p>"Profitable trendy app vendor shows off about how they can afford to piss a month up the wall while their clients are paying for it"

If someone is capable of putting a product together they should probably quit, start a company, and enjoy infinity time to themselves. It's frustrating when companies try to coax innovation out of employees when its pretty much guaranteed in a company of any significant size that people less, ahem, "production inclined" will step in and try to own anything that gets the slightest traction.

I love this idea. Many tech companies have hackathons that run over a day or a weekend. Hackathons are a strange mix between R&#38;D (any idea is on the table), lean startup (prove your assumptions through minimum work) and a work party. Whilst usually great fun, the projects attacked are limited in scope in order to fit in the limited time available. Turning this into a longer exercise means more time can be put into properly proving your assumptions and investigating concepts that can't be bashed out in two or three days.<p>The other important fact is that, when you have good employees, allowing them kind of flexibility can pay dividends both for the company and their own workplace satisfaction. The fact this flexibility is so widely encouraged in the start-up scene is really encouraging.

Great idea , but i wonder how this would work for other companies:<p>a) This works for 37s because they have a somewhat don't care attitude. So if a customer quickly wants feature-x, they could respond with "We will look into it but won't guarantee anything". I am not telling that's wrong, but other companies might not have created the same image for themselves<p>b) Having 'Everyone' work on some other idea could be distracting. Especially Support.<p>c) Last, and i've heard this from a ceo, if the company dosen't accept the idea to be implemented, by that time employees might be so much interested in the idea that they might want to quit and startup their own with 'that' idea.

Obviously 37S has built up enough of a trust level with the employees to even experiment with something like this. That in itself is commendable. Dan Pink talks about Atlassian and their "FedEx days" in his talks on intrinsic motivators. Seems like he should be using 37S instead.

I've been thinking of doing this on my own, since my workplace won't honor this kind of request.<p>Just take 3 weeks off or so, and go work on something I want to work on.<p>Anyone tried this? Any tips?

This reminds me of A/B testing. Sure, you may stumble upon a method that leads to a more motivated and productive staff, but do your successes have a reasonable chance to make up for the lost productivity when your social experiments perform worse than current industry practice?<p>I don't know, maybe that doesn't even worry them. Maybe their real goal is to attract the sort of workers that would be interested in this sort of workplace experimentation. (Edit - I'm noticing a number of comments asking if they're hiring.)

Sounds like someone found Dan Pink's lecture: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc</a>