The Blog of StuffTim Robinsons Rants about Business, Efficiency, Philosophy and Sultana Bran

Business Efficiency, lagging behind the real world

Tim on April 28th, 2009

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Whoa, haven’t posted in here in aaages.

Been having a lot of thoughts about the future recently and where the world is going.

One of the most interesting areas to me is that of automation and efficiency, the entire world is getting faster, more effective and better at what they do, yet at the same time people are doing more. Why is this? I believe it’s mostly to do with us as Humans being able to easily adapt, but the systems we have built our society on can’t. 

A Notable one is that of every business in the world believing it’s best to work 9 to 5 and you get paid on the amount of time you are in the office. 

When you think about it, it just doesn’t make much sense. It makes sense from a managers point of view because it’s easy to mark a role and judge someones productivity based on what time they logged in and out. 

However it’s incredibly inneficient. 

Just like on office space what it boils down to is employees giving the job their best shot in the early days, realizing they get 0 reward for putting in extra effort and slowly falling back to do the minimum required work not to get fired. 

If you go to work 4 hours a day and get twice as much done as the guy next to you who worked a full 8 hours you’re still more likely to get fired. 

The company will simply say:

“Work 8 hours a day and get 4 times as much done…

But we’re still going to pay you just as much…”

So where’s this motivation coming from again?

It’s all well and good wanting to help grow the company, but if your reward for doing work… is more work, then why would you give a shit about working hard?

What it comes down to is a system that was designed in the past primarily for simplicity. 

It’s kind of hard for managers to look over every detail of every person in a 10,000 person company and judge them based on results achieved. 

It’s sooo much easier to just look at the times they logged in and out. 

But with computers and technology so advanced these days you can monitor pretty much anything, just set up systems with checklists and more that staff can all work with and managers can easily see. 

The problem is: companies aren’t keeping up.

and the government especially isn’t keeping up. 

Out of every friend I have who’s working / worked in government none of them would say they worked especially hard, it’s just too easy to do sfa and get away with it. 

Now the problem isn’t that people are just lazy and don’t want to do work. Because anyone that’s ever played World of Warcraft can understand just how friggin hard people work for that new shiny piece of loot. I’ve known some to spend 1000 hours+ doing the same repetitive task over and over to get one new mount. 

and it isn’t even real…

The problem is games and web applications (web 2.0 stuff) are keeping up with the times, they are setting the pace. They are entertaining, addictive, fun and everything people want. 

Jobs are not.

Some jobs are quite fun I must admit, the games company I worked for previously is a good example of that, so is working in a bar. Google is doing a superb job at making a fun workplace happen.

But they are still missing a few critical elements to being places people WANT to go. 

Rewards are a big element, nobody wants to do extra work for no reason (even raiding in WoW you get loot sometimes ). 

Cutting the beurocracy and unneccessary tasks would be another great step (I’ve seen companies throw money down the drain because half the staff are doing jobs that don’t even need to be done). 

If you think an 8 hour day is needed for your employees to get their stuff done, here’s a test:

Tell your employees if they get their work done by lunch time they can go home. 

Now watch how fast that 8 hours of work magically turns into 4. 

Tasks expand to fill the time alloted to them. 

What I’d love to do is create an ideal work place, discover everything people want and provide it, provided they are being as efficient and hard working as possible I see no reason not to. 

Have any ideas on what you’d love in your workplace? List em below.

Technorati Tags: beuocracy, Business Efficiency, company growth, Management, paretos principle, real world

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Don’t Make This Newbie Business Mistake

Tim on July 29th, 2008

It’s come to my attention that many beginners in the business world are making the same basic mistakes. Now these aren’t mistakes per-se, simply that this beginner is doing things in the wrong order and at the wrong time.

You may disagree with the following, and if you do I encourage you to leave me a comment to tell me why, for I love a good argument… I mean discussion.

The Mistake: Building a Business
Now don’t get me wrong, building a business is awesome and is by far the best way to make money in the long run. The simply fact is however, those who start out by attempting to build a big business, produce their own products and try and be really big from the get go usually fail miserably.

The problem is not that this is a sound business model, it’s simply too much for one person to carry and as such you’ll run out of motivation before the project is finished, netting you no income and a lot of wasted time.

A Better way to go about it is to start off small, keep those big dreams in mind for the future, but don’t work on them just yet. Whenever someone asks me “How do I make money on the Internet?” I always give them this simply quiz:

What do you like better, English or Maths?

If they pick English I tell them to start blogging, or do the Bum Marketing Method. If they pick maths I tell them to start working with adwords selling affiliate programs.

The reason I do this and don’t tell them to start their own business is simply that when you’re a beginner building a business from scratch is just way too much work. The thing that gave me and gives most people the most motivation to keep going with making money on the internet is that very first dollar, the dollar most will never see if they set their sights too big to begin with.

Of course aiming high isn’t bad, it’s awesome to aim for the stars (I’d love to be the next Sergey Brin or Larry Page someday), it’s just not good to undertake a huge project right off the mark, because most people don’t have the willpower to carry through with it.

Once you’ve made that first dollar online it’s like you’re a giant snowball rolling down the hill gathering more and more snow and momentum as you go, it truly is an exhilarating experience. You can start to really see the potential of the online world and will have much more motivation to keep on going with it.

Once you start to bring in a moderate income from the internet it’s a great idea to ditch those early methods of making money (keep a blog going, but writing articles to promote affiliate products is still not building your own brand and product) and start focusing on building a real solid income. It’s at this stage you should be able to outsource some of your work to get the ball rolling. No longer do you have to spend months doing boring tasks to build a business, you can outsource it to India for $200 and get it done in days

Then you simply continually reinvest that money that you earn into even bigger and better projects, building your own brand, your own company with your own products and start taking on the big boys. The best things is, due to outsourcing being inexpensive and fast you can build a business as fast as your budget allows.

Technorati Tags: business mistakes, online income, Outsourcing

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