Author Archives: Carl Erickson
Innovation service companies, like Atomic Object, sell their time and talents to help clients grow revenue or expand a market through the creation of software. Without products of their own, innovation service firms have no financial leverage: it’s an hour out, a dollar in. Like a shark that can’t stop swimming or it will drown, [...]
It was about a year ago that I described employee ownership of a company as a “partial emergent order”. An emergent order is a system that arises between the interactions of many independent components with no central control. Markets are emergent orders. Made orders are systems created with rules and central control. Companies are made [...]
What do you call the kind of company you work for? I think most people have a pretty simple answer to this question: retailer, construction company, coffee house, grocer, insurance company, hospital, etc. I don’t think that’s true for companies that build custom software.
Conventional wisdom says to keep your personal friendships separate from your work relationships. Some companies supposedly even try to restrict friendships in the office. This idea seems, to me, similar to the naive strategy of keeping your life in balance by strictly limiting the hours you work. My belief about having friends in the office [...]
The absence of something bad can be just as valuable to your company as the presence of something good. The trick is, it’s hard to appreciate the absence of something. Not only is it difficult to remember or motivate yourself to pay attention to the practices or policies that create the absence of a bad [...]
The value mantras of Atomic Object arose from a common understanding that lived in our collective heads and daily interactions. For example, it was during an interview debrief, when we were deciding whether or not to extend an offer, that I first heard Patrick Bacon observe that the candidate really didn’t seem to “give a [...]
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