Dear Tony, First of all, let me start by stating that I truly admire what you’ve achieved. Your book, describing your path from LinkExchange to Zappos, from culture-by-accident to the deliberate creation of an awesome company based on culture, was an inspiration for us at GrantTree. The idea of
The latest addition to the GrantTree books stable is Nonviolent Communication, by Marshall B. Rosenberg. It's spreading rapidly through the company and having a very positive effect on our communications. For the purpose of making it spread even faster, I decided to write a brief summary of the
As the amount of literature about open cultures grows, it's tempting to want to go straight for what is perceived as a final prize or destination, and just "implement a full-blown open culture right from the start". Unfortunately I don't think that's
Many people consider the purpose of a company to be something static and set at birth, or changing only very rarely. The truth is, the purpose of a company evolves as the founders and the company evolve[footnote]Additional complexity: the purpose of a company can be multi-faceted... it doesn&
One of the characteristics of open cultures is transparency, which is, in my opinion, a cornerstone necessity for trust to exist. One of the ways that this transparency is expressed is salary transparency. However, what I've noticed frequently happen and be masqueraded as transparency is a kind of
Here's an interesting article by Jeff Lonsdale about what he calls the "fungible worker". Jeff examines some of the old arguments about whether technology spells the end of the human worker, whether it will drive everyone out of work, etc. He dismisses the classic Luddite argument
