When Millennials Take Over: Preparing For The Ridiculously Optimistic Future Of Business by Notter Jamie & Grant Maddie

Author:Notter, Jamie & Grant, Maddie [Notter, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781940858135
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Published: 2015-02-23T22:00:00+00:00

But, to do clarity right, it must go beyond the financial and business model implications. The effectiveness of decisions is not always tied directly to financial outcomes, so if that is the only kind of information you are willing to liberate, you will limit the effectiveness of your clarity efforts. Consider the case of the software company Menlo Innovations.

Case Study: Menlo Innovations

Menlo Innovations designs and builds custom software at its headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan. About 50 people work in its large, one-room, open-space office, developing software for a variety of clients, including bio-technology companies, universities, nationwide foodservice organizations, and large healthcare companies. Menlo’s mission as an organization is “to end human suffering in the world as it relates to technology.”34 Software, but without suffering? That must be some pretty good software. And, judging by Menlo’s consistent growth over the years, as well as the impressive demand to work there (when a position opens up at Menlo, it gets enough applicants to bring in 30 people at a time for an initial group interview), it seems to be hitting the mark.

As a company, Menlo Innovations has achieved some notoriety in the business press for its innovative approach to management. CEO Rich Sheridan has written an excellent book about his journey in creating and growing Menlo (see Joy, Inc.), and articles in Forbes and on NPR have highlighted some of the interesting features of its workplace, like the lack of offices (everyone works on moveable tables spread throughout one big room) and how the programmers work in pairs (literally one computer shared by two programmers), switching pairs every week.

They work out loud

What interested us, however, was the way Menlo embedded clarity so deeply inside the organization. Take its practice of pair programming, for example. The practice was not invented at Menlo; it is an aspect of Extreme Programming, a practice developed in the 1990s (and one that inspired Menlo CEO Rich Sheridan to create his company the way he has). Pair programming is clarity in action. Typically, software is reviewed and tested after it is created; that’s where you find and fix the bugs. In pair programming, however, one of the programmers is always reviewing the code, as it is being written, which has been shown to increase the quality of the code.35 In traditional companies, lone programmers write their code in private, essentially, but at Menlo the process of coding is made more transparent, which improves the decision making of both programmers who are working in the pair.

They make their culture visible

And that’s just the beginning of transparency at Menlo. Its project management system also promotes clarity. It is perhaps ironic, given that the employees write software for a living, that Menlo does not use a computer-based project management system. Its system is literally attached to the walls of the office and consists primarily of handwritten note cards, colored stickers, and yarn. Each project identifies specific tasks that are written on the cards and assigned to programmer pairs at the beginning of a week and placed on the wall based on the day they think they will get to that task.

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