37Signals - There are lots of ideas I plan on stealing from this company. Most of them documented in their book Getting Real, required reading for potential co-founders by the way. Not the least of which is the idea of a 4 day work week. One of their employees wrote a post describing how they’ve been able to do it and actually increase output.
Google - I really like the idea of 20% time. If you’re not familiar with the idea, Google allows all of its employees to take 20% of their time and basically work on whatever they want. Or at least that’s my interpretation of some of the things I’ve read.
So basically a day a week or so you build a project or product that you hope to bring to market for the company. I don’t know what Google enforces any standards on these projects or not.
My thinking is that if I’m to adopt the idea I mentioned above from 37 signals, that in a way people can choose to either work 20% of their time on a project, or take their fifth day off.
Best Buy - Tim Ferris wrote a blog post today about Best Buy’s Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE). The basic idea is that employees are allowed to work whenever and wherever they want, as long as the work is getting done.
Ternary Software - Ternary is the pioneering company behind Holacracy. Holacracy is basically a fundamentally different way of making decisions and organizing a group of people. Once my company has 2 or more people, this is the process we’ll use to organize ourselves.
From what I can tell, Ternary has also successfully integrated Agile Software Development methods like Scrum and Extreme Programming into a software practice that has proven very successful. Ternary offers training on their methods.
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