Great philosophy on “poaching employees” in your organization.

It’s simple. We believe that we are building the best company in the world to work for. But, in the end, everyone has a choice as to where they want to work. We want people who choose Fab.com. Fab.com is a career lifestyle decision. We’re confident about our ability to attract and retain the best.

Ben Chestnut, Founder of Mailchimp, offers their five rules for a creative culture.

1. Avoid rules. Avoid order. Don’t just embrace chaos, but create a little bit of it. Constant change, from the top-down, keeps people nimble and flexible (and shows that you want constant change).

2. Give yourself and your team permission to be creative. Permission to try something new, permission to fail, permission to embarrass yourself, permission to have crazy ideas.

3. Hire weird people. Not just the tattoo’d and pierced-in-strange-places kind, but people from outside your industry who would approach problems in different ways than you and your normal competitors.

4. Meetings are a necessary evil, but you can avoid the conference room and meet people in the halls, the water cooler, or their desks. Make meetings less about delegation and task management and more about cross-pollination of ideas (especially the weird ideas). This is a lot harder than centralized, top-down meetings. But this is your job — deal with it.

5. Structure your company to be flexible. Creativity is often spontaneous, so the whole company needs to be able to pivot quickly and execute on them (see #1)

Khoi Vinh talks about what he’s working on and feelings that I’ve also had.

Nothing may come of all this, and the business may just bomb and I may yet have to go and find another salaried job somewhere. But I’ve grown so much since I undertook this little adventure that I wouldn’t trade it in for nearly anything. In fact, I’m lucky that I underestimated the enormity of the undertaking from the outset, because one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned is that, once you’re really committed to something, once you stop hesitating and hedging your bets, then you find a way to make it happen. Even if you have no idea how you’ll make it happen, you find a way.”

Matt Haughey discusses MetaFilter’s business model that I’ve always said would be perfect for me.

I’m OK with this lifestyle business. [...] I think it’s the best thing in the world. You don’t have to kill yourself. I’ve been at startups where we worked 16 hours a day and didn’t get anything out of it. It’s stupid. Geeks who know how to program and make things should be able to make a small thing that runs forever and make $100,000 a year and live off that. I mean, what is wrong with that? It’s an awesome goal. [...] Like, what is wrong with making a decent living in doing something you love forever?

I can’t find the link for this, but it’s inspirational for those who are looking for their dream job; you have to make your (own) dream job.

Every job description in the entire world has been written by someone else. Expecting someone to have dreamed up your ideal job is like expecting someone to read your mind. The good news is that you can alter your job description and your working conditions in ways that will get you closer to a job you love. It doesn’t necessarily matter what you were hired for. Fundamentally, most employers want you to help them make money (or whatever the currency of your profession happens to be, but don’t fool yourself—it often comes back to money).

Mlkshk’s work philosophy is one I like.

Get Things Done without wasting money. Work hard. Do it yourself. Do a good job and you’ll be rewarded.

Our dreams are not of a million engineers, our dreams are of a very small number of highly-talented people and we think that’s one of the keys to staying very innovative and flexible, because with a small number of people you can run very informally, you don’t need a lot of process.

—Reed Hastings

Svpply CEO, Ben Pierratt, gives an honest look at what it’s like to be a first-time CEO.

I truly have very little understanding of what I am doing [...] I have zero experience or expertise in building a company. I’ve never worked at a web or product startup, I’ve never worked in a healthy team environment [...] So I’m learning on the fly [...] My situation is blessed and I rarely let a day go by that I don’t say a silent prayer in thanks for the position in which I’ve found myself, but good gracious is this hard [...] The most frustrating part is that it is difficult to get into a rhythm in your work when you have no real understanding of the next steps you need to take. There’s no opportunity for flow if both outcome and process are foreign experiences. There’s just a lot of poking around and mystery and inadvertent negligence [...] I couldn’t ask for better. I am thankful for the opportunity. It is an amazing challenge.

I love Svpply and have been using it for quite some time (my account here). I think Ben and his team have done a great job building up a service that I truly see value in.

keiretsu

is a set of companies with interlocking business relationships and shareholdings. It is a type of business group.

Could how JSOC’s operates work for business? I want to create a team that comes in, fix what needs to be fixed and moves on to the next business/problem. Anywhere, anytime, any problem.

Col. W. Patrick Lang, a retired Special Forces officer with extensive operational experience throughout the Muslim world, described JSOC’s forces as “sort of like Murder, Incorporated.” He told The Nation: “Their business is killing Al Qaeda personnel. That’s their business. They’re not in the business of converting anybody to our goals or anything like that.” Shortly after the operation was made public, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey called JSOC’s operators the “most dangerous people on the face of the earth.” “They’re the ace in the hole. If you were a card player, that’s your ace that you’ve got tucked away,” said Gen. Hugh Shelton, who was the Chair of the Joint Chiefs on 9/11, in an interview with The Nation. Shelton, who also headed the Special Operations Command during his career, described JSOC as “a surgical type of unit,” adding “if you need someone that can sky dive from thirty miles away, and go down the chimney of the castle, and blow it up from the inside—those are the guys you want to call on.” Shelton added, “They are the quiet professionals. They do it, and do it well, but they don’t brag about it. Someone has to toot their horn for them, because they won’t, normally.”