CeBIT was always on my agenda. Despite being disappointing last year and despite annoying me with a flood of email, it’s still the biggest IT trade show in Australia. It’s worth going just to see who’s confidently spending money on promotion, if nothing else.

I’ll be touring the trade show floor on Wednesday 21 May. If you want to meet up, let me know. Maybe I should even do a Stilgherrian Live Alpha from the bloggers media room? Whaddyathink?

If you still haven’t organised your free pass, you can register online using my promotion code, “stilcs08″.

On Thursday 22 May I’ll be at Transaction 2.0, with an interesting set of speakers. Again, it’s a matter of choosing the priorities. Who should I talk to? Should I pick a fight with Jason Calacanis?

But I kick off the Geek Week on Tuesday 20 May with ReMIX 08, where Microsoft says I’ll “experience all that is new in Silverlight 2, Expression 2, IE8, Live and a host of other great web technologies… You will also see how local Australian innovators are creating the next generation of engaging websites and unprecedented user experiences for the web.”

Provided they build it with Microsoft’s tools, of course.

That’s unfair. Microsoft is changing. It’ll be interesting to hear what they’re up to.

Now my only challenge is working out how all this fits into one week, while still leaving room to do some billable hours for clients.

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When I first compared this enlightened approach to people-management with the drive-them-harder style of Jason Calacanis, it triggered a massive debate, and I wrote a follow-up comparing the Calacanis approach to an evil cult. Last week 37signals reckoned that urgency is poisonous.

One thing I’ve come to realize is that urgency is overrated. In fact, I’ve come to believe urgency is poisonous. Urgency may get things done a few days sooner, but what does it cost in morale? Few things burn morale like urgency. Urgency is acidic.

Emergency is the only urgency. Almost anything else can wait a few days. It’s OK. There are exceptions (a trade show, a conference), but those are rare.

When a few days extra turns into a few weeks extra then there’s a problem, but what really has to be done by Friday that can’t wait for Monday or Tuesday? If your deliveries are that critical to the hour or day, maybe you’re setting up false priorities and dangerous expectations.

If you’re a just-in-time provider of industry parts then precise deadlines and deliveries may be required, but in the software industry urgency is self-imposed and morale-busting. If stress is a weed, urgency is the seed. Don’t plant it if you can help it.

I can’t agree more. A client phoned once, all a’fluster about an “emergency”. Before I could think, I blurted out the question, “Why? Whose life is in peril?”

Of course no-one was in danger. This client was operating in crisis mode, as usual: that anti-pattern also known as “firefighting mode”: “Dealing with things only when they become a crisis, with the result that everything becomes a crisis.” I’ve written about that before here and with my colleague Zern Liew.

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I’d never visited Techmeme until this weekend. Even then it was only because someone told me I’d blipped up there. It’s just another feed of what someone thinks is “important” in infotech, yeah? Who cares. It’s not as if it’s Reuters or BBC News.

It’s just more geeks telling geeks what geeks think other geeks should think about stuff that geeks think about.

But Jason Calacanis cares.

Jason Calacanis must care very deeply because he “joked” about it on this website, and over at TechCrunch he “joked” about getting pageviews. His fan club speculates that Duncan Riley and me and others are only attacking him to generate our own web traffic. Well, I can’t speak for Duncan, but no, I couldn’t care less about website traffic — especially the low-grade drive-by flamers that usually wash up here after being mentioned on high-traffic fan sites. That’s not why I’m here.

I’m attacking Calacanis because I reckon the business style he describes, the one championed by his defenders, is rotten to the very core.

But first, let’s talk about religion…

The Cult of the Internet Start-up

Attracting attention and scoring pageviews is very, very important to these guys — and for good reason. They’re fully indoctrinated into the Cult of the Internet Start-up. They must generate The Buzz.

Let us now read from their gospel…

… 19 Soon, our Labours will have produced The Beta. We shall ready ourselves to supplicate Our Great Saviour the Venture Capitalist. 20 He shall ask, “Doth thy Beta have The Buzz?” 21 If it does have The Buzz, He will see that It is Good, and He shall writeth The Cheque. 22 And there shall be much rejoicing.

23 And then cometh the Second Phase wherein — praise be to The Great Saviour! — we shall write the IPO. 24 If we still have The Buzz, the Shares shall Rise, and the land will overfloweth with milk and honey. 25 And there shall be much rejoicing…

Internet Start-upers are fundamentalists. Anyone who doesn’t follow their pathway of monomaniacal self-sacrifice (read: high-risk workaholism) in pursuit of the Nirvana of the successful IPO is branded a Slacker, even by The Prophet.

The Cultists truly believe that the faster-faster-VC-to-IPO chase to these glorious riches is the right and proper thing to do — and like all zealots, they think the ends justify the means.

Note also Bill Moore’s comment. “A few million (or 10s of millions, max) dollars a year” and being “very comfortable” isn’t enough for him. He talks a bit about “industry changing”, but soon gets back to the money, complaining if he’d get “only” 15% of $100M.

That’s 15 million dollars, Bill!

There’s a word to describe that.

Greed.

If you’re on an average US, Australian or European wage, you’re already richer than 99% of the planet. But forget the top 1%. Even being in the top 0.01% isn’t enough, it seems. And anyone who isn’t this filthy greedy, anyone who isn’t prepared to treat people as disposable, exploitable objects along the way, is a “wimp” or a “wannabe”.

“There’s a Pig Loose in the Mosque! Sooooooooooooeeeeee!”

This discussion is heated because we’re not talking about subtly different ways of doing business here. We’re challenging the Cult’s core tenets. That greed is good. That the ideal is to grow fast and cash out, not build something of lasting value. That it’s just fine to burn people out along the way — collateral damage, I guess. That it doesn’t matter if your life is totally out of balance now because it’ll all sort itself out later.

Magically.

Somehow.

A few years ago I was discussing a couple of Internet start-up concepts with a well-respected VC-savvy adviser who paused and said:

You do realise you’ll be doing business with evil people? They don’t care about anything other than the return on their investment. As long as you deliver that, it’s fine. Just remember, though, they are evil.

The Cult of the Internet Start-up is evil. It’s selfish. It’s inhuman It’s amoral. Using the term “work ethic” to describe driving (or seducing) people into appallingly long work hours to the neglect of family and community and even self is disgusting.

This “grow now, worry about the consequences later” attitude is precisely the greedy, short-term thinking which has driven the world to the edge of an environmental disaster. But who cares, eh? You got your $100M — all of it! Leave someone else to clear up that mess, and plough on to the next “world-changing idea”.

Assuming you don’t die of a heart attack first.

Assuming you have a heart.

Calacanis’ original post exhibited the language of exploitation. Petty bean-counting to suck every last productive hour out of the meat-assets. He changed that wording quick smart, eh? But did he change his attitude?

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington did a beautifully-written follow-up — though really the message was standard advice for any business: (1) hire the right people, and (2) don’t waste money, but avoid being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Some of Calacanis’ points were probably written in haste, like his statement “Fire people who are not workaholics” (he later changed it to “Fire people who don’t love their work”). Others were not controversial, like his advice to “Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs.” Overall, I get the impression that if he had spent just a few minutes editing his post, he would have had a 100% different reaction from readers.

Agreed. The reaction wouldn’t have been as sharp. But changing the surface PR spin is just spraying perfume to cover the underlying stench.

Arrington exhibits the same exploitative signs in a later comment.

“And I totally agree with you that for x duration you can work someone to death but the person needs to understand what happens once x duration is completed. There has to be downtime.”

No, they don’t need to understand that. Think of them as a goldfish. Goldfish will eat everything you give them until their little stomachs explode (or so I hear). The key isn’t to find a goldfish that knows when to stop eating. They key is to know when to stop feeding the goldfish, for their own good.

Once again, it’s about treating your staff as objects to be manipulated at your whim. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

“If you’re not like us, you’re a loser”

This is not the only way of starting a new business. It’s just one specific model — about fast growth and high risk. Without a doubt, it can sometimes produce astounding results. It can also crash spectacularly, leaving no survivors.

You can also build a business calmly, rationally, with solid foundations — and with respect for the people and world around you. A business which can weather the storms because the captain has a clear view from the bridge, accurate maps and a firm hand on the wheel — as well as a dedicated crew, of course.

Calacanis has been more measured since he encountered the criticism of his original post, but he’s still condescending when comparing the fundamentalist Cult approach to the truly enlightened 37signals.

You haven’t raised tons of money and you’re building a “lifestyle” business from what I gather (correct?) You’re not trying to displace Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. You’re not trying to build a service that gets to 100M monthly users, and you’re not on some aggressive timeline. You’re trying to build something that you enjoy working on and that helps people… correct?

When you take VC money and try to compete in a really aggressive space like search/research you’re faced with folks like Google, Wikipedia, about.com, Yahoo, eHow, DMOZ , etc. These are big companies with lots of resources… the way you beat them is to zig where they zag and/or out hustle them. So, if you want to compete in that space you’re gonna need to really work hard — you’re not going to do it working a four hour work week that’s for sure!

I’ll gloss over the fact that one of his differentiators is that 37signals is trying to build something “that helps people”, compared to his megalomaniacal goal of “displace Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc”. 37signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson quite rightly takes exception to all this.

[W]e’re not building a “lifestyle” business. We’re just building a business. To take the sound bytes [sic] from the recent Wired article, a multimillion dollar one that doubled in revenues last year…

So please don’t make the choices we’ve made about treating our employees one of a “lifestyle” (aka “small timer”, “toy”) vs “real” business. That somehow only those happy hippies who are not going for the gold can afford to hire whole people with a life outside of work. That’s bullcrap.

I very much do believe, though, that taking VC money with loads of strings attached will put hard pressures and increased stress on the decision making. And that in turn can lead to a culture where long hours and no walking outside for coffee can be seen as good, patriotic practices.

What I take the most offence to, though, is the dichotomist split between the workaholic go-getters who gets the quick cash and the lame waiting-in-line nine-to-fivers who get a gold watch after 30 years. What a crock.

We launched Basecamp four years ago. We built it off a 10 hour/week technical time budget. It’s very possible to build a “real”, multimillion dollar business that has high growth without resorting to the workaholic path.

Mr Calacanis, failing to comprehend that there are paths other than your own is fundamentalism. Even when you pretend to accept that there are alternatives — but still wrap your words in condescension.

Cult Myth #1: “It’s OK, I choose to work this way”

No it’s not OK. If you’re immersed in one specific highly-focussed environment for almost your entire waking life, then your decisions will not be made with a sense of perspective. You are not what DHH calls “a whole person”.

Vast slabs of the social fabric which informs good long-term, ethical decisions simply won’t be on your radar.

And then there’s the guys who say, “Well, I can work 16 hours a day for 7 days a week and it doesn’t do me any harm.” Well bully for you. I bet your dick’s bigger than mine too, eh? This isn’t a contest to see who’s the biggest martyr. It’s about who can achieve the most, not suffer the most.

Remember, Patty Hearst was there “voluntarily” too.

Cult Myth #2: “This is what makes America great”

This is the most toxic myth of all — wrapping your obsession in the flag.

No, this attitude is what makes America look like it’s populated by arseholes. Ignorant, arrogant, self-righteous, self-centred arseholes who consume everything in sight and dump their crap on the rest of the world under the delusion that their way is the best and only way. A nation that only now is starting to realise the mess it’s in.

What actually made America great — past tense — was the visionary foresight of its founders, the political geniuses who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. At the time they knew they were creating some special — not just for the moment, but for all time.

God Bless America.

She’d better, because a clear-headed America will be needed to help face the challenges of the future — the very near future. And an America retreating into medievalism and stubborn arrogance is not what the world needs.

Fighting the Good Fight

So, this is why I refer to Jason Calacanis as a prick. His ill-thought-out wording in an essay intended to convey good advice — and some of it is good advice, let’s not forget! — exposed this smelly underlying attitude of winner-take-all exploitation and devil take the hindmost.

I strongly believe this to be a dangerous, toxic, anti-human attitude and it’s infecting others. It must be fought vigorously and with passion.

Calacanis and his defenders reckon that workaholic exploitation is the only way to “change the world”. It’s not. There’s also clarity of vision, a really good idea, and well-planned execution. It’s the difference between beating one’s opponent with serried ranks of massed foot-soldiers, or using snipers.

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]]> http://stilgherrian.com/religion/john_calacanis_evil_cult/feed/ http://stilgherrian.com/business/bigger_not_always_better/ http://stilgherrian.com/business/bigger_not_always_better/#comments Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:47:20 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/business/bigger_not_always_better/ In the context of our on-going argument, it’s refreshing to stumble across the observation that bigger isn’t always better for business. “Americans think big. This has helped make them the most powerful nation on Earth, but bigger is not always better, either for our bodies or, I suggest, for our organizations. If I were to visit a symphony orchestra and ask them about their growth plans for the future, how would they respond? They would talk about their plans to extend their repertoire and to bring their work to new audiences, not about increasing the number of violinists… Why does almost every business that I know seek to grow in size, year after year, in fact, as if there were no limit? Why can’t they be content with doing more with less?” (Hat-tip to Signal vs Noise.)

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]]> http://stilgherrian.com/business/bigger_not_always_better/feed/ http://stilgherrian.com/internet/a_calacanis_pause/ http://stilgherrian.com/internet/a_calacanis_pause/#comments Sun, 09 Mar 2008 05:27:23 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/internet/a_calacanis_pause/ A note for folks stumbling across this website thanks to the Jason Calacanis / 37signals / TechCrunch discussion: It’s 4.30pm on a sunny autumn Sunday afternoon here in Sydney. I have been writing a further post which explains, amongst other things, that I’m not trolling (deliberately stirring up controversy), but passionately arguing a genuine concern. I’m amused this has turned into a global controversy, flattered even, when I reckon it’s more a storm in a teacup — though at its heart is a fundamental issue about how we do business. However for the next few hours I’ll be enjoying the remaining sunshine, doing some shopping and generally spending Sunday evening with my beloved. More soon.

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]]> http://stilgherrian.com/internet/a_calacanis_pause/feed/ http://stilgherrian.com/internet/calacanis_boosts_profile/ http://stilgherrian.com/internet/calacanis_boosts_profile/#comments Sat, 08 Mar 2008 03:54:30 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/internet/calacanis_boosts_profile/ [Update 10 March, 1030 AEDT: I've written a follow-up article which, while bound to piss off a few people, explains precisely why I'm so concerned about this issue.]

…but I don’t know whether this was exactly what I had in mind. Calling a high-profile Internet entrepreneur a prick, and then being referenced by some of the highest-traffic tech blogs on the planet.

OK, I participated in the discussion at TechCrunch and the 37signals blog Signal vs Noise, as I should. But then it was picked up by Mashable and then TechMeme (see screenshot). And now I’m seeing inbound from TechCrunch Japan and Colbert Low’s technology blog and who knows where else to come.

Jason Calacanis has edited his original post in face of the fallout:

Fire people who are not workaholics. don’t love their work… come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. don’t work at a startup if you’re not into it — go work at the post office or stabucks [sic] if you’re not into it you want balance in your life. For realz.

He’s also posted an explanatory piece. My take on that: lots of good words, but in my experience the words that people blurt out first are closest to what they really believe.

If an employer can’t tell the difference between passion and being a workaholic, or if he blurts out critical policies without thinking about the language he’s using and how people might respond, then he’s a dangerous employer. Working the way Calicanis suggests has serious long-term health impacts, and in some places is illegal.

Should I have called Calacanis a “prick”?

I don’t see why not. I’d certainly call him that to his face, if we were discussing this issue. It’s my honest opinion. Sure, I know nothing about him except his writing today and the way he’s responding to the criticism. But hey, I figure both he and I have been in the public media space for a long time and we’re both used to worse.

However he wants to smudge it over after the fact, what Calicanis said was that he’d only employ people who work in conditions which are dangerous to their health. I’m certainly glad he doesn’t have kids, ‘cos he’d probably have them in the coal mines by age 5.

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]]> http://stilgherrian.com/internet/calacanis_boosts_profile/feed/ http://stilgherrian.com/human-nature/treat_staff/ http://stilgherrian.com/human-nature/treat_staff/#comments Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:50:08 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/human-nature/treat_staff/ [Update 10 March, 1030 AEDT: I've written a follow-up article which, while bound to piss off a few people, explains precisely why I'm so concerned about this issue. There's also my first follow-up, written on the weekend.]

“Chalk and cheese” is how I’d describe two approaches to staff management I stumbled across this week. One treats staff as trusted contributors to a shared enterprise, the other as disposable work-droids from which you squeeze every last effort.

Jason Calacanis (pictured) has started various firms, including Mahalo, a “human-powered search engine”. (Don’t worry, I’d never heard of it either.) In How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips) there are some good tips — like outsourcing accounting and worrying more about good chairs than tables. But to paraphrase the bad ones:

• Hold meetings at lunchtime so people never get a mental break from work.
• Don’t provide phones so staff have to use their own.
• If someone shows signs of working hard, buy them a computer for home so they end up working nights and weekends too.
• Buy a good coffee machine — not because you’d like to give your employees good coffee, but to prevent them “wasting time” getting it from a nearby barista.

But that’s not the worst…

The worst one for me, and this is the precise quote:

• “Fire people who are not workaholics… come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. go work at the post office or stabucks [sic] if you want balance in your life. For realz.”

Can you imagine what it’d be like working for this guy? Do you think you’d get much loyalty in return for being a wage-slave?

As Duncan Riley says in TechCrunch, “Expect to check your family at the door if you want to go work for JCal. Up to 18 hours a day for $30-35,000 (what I’ve heard is the going rate for base Mahalo employees), you’re never allowed to go outside during this time or have a proper break.”

Compare that with the enlightened attitudes at 37signals, creators of truly innovative software which I use every day, like Basecamp and Highrise. They trust their staff!

Here’s the 3 workplace experiments they’ve just implemented:

• A 4-day working week. “People should enjoy the weather in the summer. We found that just about the same amount of work gets done in four days vs five days… Three-day weekends mean people come back extra refreshed on Monday. Three-day weekends mean people come back happier on Monday. Three-day weekends mean people actually work harder and more efficiently during the four-day work week.”
• They fund people’s passions. “We want our people to experience new things, discover new hobbies, and generally be interesting people. For example, Mark has recently taken up flight lessons. 37signals is helping him pay for those. If someone wants to take cooking lessons, we’ll help pay for those… Part of the deal is that if 37signals helps you pay, you have to share what you’ve learned with everyone. Not just everyone at 37signals, but everyone who reads our blog.”
• A corporate credit card for everyone, for whatever they want. “If you want a book or some software or you want to go to a conference, it’s on us. We just ask people to be reasonable with their spending. If there’s a problem, we’ll let the person know. We’d rather trust people to make reasonable spending decisions than assume people will abuse the privilege by default.”

37signals have responded to Calacanis’ post:

Fire the people who are workaholics! Here’s five reasons why:

1. Workaholics may well say that they enjoy those 14-hour days week after week, but despite their claims, working like that all month, all the time is not going to be sustainable. When the burnout crash comes, and it will, it’ll hit all the harder and according to Murphy at the least convenient time.
2. People who are workaholics are likely to attempt to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at the problem. If you’re dealing with people working with anything creatively that’s a deadbeat way to get great work done.
3. People who always work late makes the people who don’t feel inadequate for merely working reasonable hours. That’ll lead to guilt, misery, and poor morale. Worse, it’ll lead to ass-in-seat mentality where people will “stay late” out of obligation, but not really be productive.
4. If all you do is work, your value judgements are unlikely to be sound. Making good calls on “is it worth it?” is absolutely critical to great work. Missing out on life in general to put more hours in at the office screams “misguided values”.
5. Working with interesting people is more interesting than just working. If all you got going for your life is work, work, work, the good team-gelling lunches are going to be some pretty boring straight shop talk. Yawn. I’d much rather hear more about your whittling project, your last trek, how your garden is doing, or when you’ll get your flight certificate.

If your start-up can only succeed by being a sweatshop, your idea is simply not good enough. Go back to the drawing board and come up with something better that can be implemented by whole people, not cogs.

Precisely. Innovation is creative work. Happy employees are loyal employees — and they’ll put in those extra hours voluntarily when they’re really needed.

Mr Calacanis may have generated more dollars in a shorter time than 37signals — or maybe he hasn’t, I don’t know. But I know who I’d rather sit next to on a long flight. And I know who I’d invite to dinner or to share a beer.

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