Joyeur

There’s no question that one of the emerging business types is the virtual organization. Joyent is one of them. Of the twenty people that work for Joyent, only four of us regularly see each other at an office. The remainder are working around the clock around the world from Australia to Prague. It is very difficult to schedule a time for a conference call, so the question of real-time response to issues is tough.

This isn’t how I was trained. I started at Moody’s Investors Service (in New York City) where, while we had offices at the time in a few remote locations, all the important decisions were made in New York and face-to-face. Like any big organization, decisions always had a political element to them, and these “politics” (from the greek for “the art of people”) really only made sense when the nuances of the human face could be observed and judged. Wall Street trading firms take this up a level to the open floor where traders can see each other and extend the spoken language to the language of the body with waving arms, pointed fingers, jumps, outbursts, and big, visual dance. As soon as I got my own group, and enough influence to make my plans happen, I moved my team into a similar setup. It was a completely open space: even the furniture was designed to snap together so that desks, conference tables, testing spaces, could be conjured at will. Imagine the productivity of a team of digital pioneers mapping product, coding it, mapping it, delivering it, celebrating it all together. I remember thinking we had reached a level of authentic human interaction when the wide-open-space allowed one developer, maybe it was me, to hurl a chair twenty feet across the room into the plaster-board wall to make a big-point that everyone would have to receive about backing up the f*%&ing source code. Now, that is broadband.

My next attempt to create an open work environment (this time on the West coast) failed. By that time instant messaging was ubiquitous, people carried hundreds of CD-equivalents of music on their laptops for listening while at work. People still came to work, but every interaction was clearly an interruption rather than a tango. And the lure of outsourcing meant we could hire people to manage teams in far away places. It is very painful to fly coach to these far away places when one is 6 feet 4 inches. Clearly, the old ideal had been broke apart. I was either interrupting a developer sunk into his iTunes, or fighting off a panic attack thinking about the 30 hours in the aluminum tube to go talk with a team I really didn’t know, and never really would.

Joyent, being almost entirely virtual has been a managerial struggle for me at times. I can’t just pick up the phone and talk with the head of software (who happens to be in New Zealand). It is virtually impossible to conceive of a time when we will all be in the same place (and we’re only 20 people) at the same time. There’s something not right about that, but I haven’t been able to put my finger on it (“Hey welcome to the world!”) and I wonder if I should just accept the inevitable reality that some questions about the business won’t be answered immediately, ever. We’re like satellites circling the globe with windows-of-communication that must be packed with dense, meaningful messages without the benefit of facial or aural nuance.

Maybe that’s romanticism on my part. There was an article in the New Yorker magazine a few years back looking at the layout of most corporate offices. Basically, the author observed that since a corner office is prestige, and most senior executives did not mind burnishing their prestige, the senior executives tended to sit in corners apart from each other. The wasn’t intuitive since the executives should be in the center of the floor and the levels of influence should radiate out much in the same way that the church, the market, the magistrate, the public house were all in the center of a village rather than around the edges. On the one hand it seems that there are certain things that require proximity, require actual human interaction. Yet, the ability to create teams from the best talent possible, also seems like an obvious good. How are the two seemingly contradictory organizing principles to be reconciled, if at all?

It turns out, in my experience, that there are two types of actions that happen in a team. One is time based. The other is goal based. Note: I do not mean “time-based tasks” and “non-time-based tasks”. I mean “actions” and “tasks” and they are not the same thing. I think the distinction is that an “action” is a state of existence (or, in my philosophical parlance “being”) not the result of the state itself. I am running. Running is the action. I am a runner. The task is “to run” or “the run”. Another way to view this is to see the task as a product of the action. That is quite a bit to unpack, but I think it will bear fruit for the new emerging virtual organization when unpacked.

If we accept the distinction between “action” and “task”, we can begin to see how each might apply to a virtual organization. I think the difference is expressed colloquially in the phrases “want to hang out?” and “let’s execute”. This is all to say that there are some activities that are valuable to a team that do not admit measurement while there are others that do. Actions cannot be done (easily) virtually, while tasks can. When a team works together, while each person is ultimately and fundamentally acting individually, the actions impress themselves on the other team members in real time, and this is valuable. Sports and war examples are inevitable. In a battle, the courage (or cowardice) of each soldier impresses itself in real time on the rest of the soldiers. How different would a championship tennis match be, even, if the players contested one with the other in a warehouse, the match captured by robotic cameras. There would be no crowd to feed on.

For the “manager”, the temptation is to focus on “actions” (which is impossible to do) rather than “tasks”. Coming back to Joyent, we have had to struggle with the distinction between action and task. The solution we have arrived at as a team is to boil much more of what we want to accomplish down to specific, discreet tasks. These tasks are organized into two month delivery cycles thought a dialog between product/process management and the person that is going to be responsible for delivering the specific task. Many times the dialog happens in the mind of a single person, but the whole company is aware of the delivery cycle of each person and team. We use Joyent’s group calendar (part of Connector) to publish the equivalent of .plan files each week. And each team (generally) comes to Marin County, CA after every delivery cycle to just hang out, exchange ideas, and drink lots of wine.

We use a jabber chat rooms, Skype, Jajah, email, blogs, Connector notifications and RSS streams for collaboration.

The trick is to understand, over time, the intersection of these ideals (“action” and “task”) and the uniqueness of each person in the company and the teams they make. Yes, even when you bring certain types together and they are all sitting around the same group of folding tables, they’re still communicating using instant messaging. That is what is called a “sign of the times”.

While precise application of “action” and “task” (which could be restated as “local” and “virtual”) will depend upon your own organization, this is what we’ve learned at Joyent.

(1) Keep the C-suite together as much as possible. The strategic issues facing your team are subtle. They do not admit of easy dissolving into discreet tasks. Each issue is really a measurement of: can we lead, together, towards a win. That’s nearly impossible to gage remotely. Its corny, but think about a marriage and the rate of success for those where the spouses never see each other. There has to be some commitment to transparency at the executive level. And since the terrain changes so quickly…you need to sit together.

(2) Support actually works very well spread around the globe. This is an obvious insight when your customers are spread around the globe, too.

(3) It doesn’t really matter where your developers sit. The benefit of a virtual organization is you can recruit the best. Over time, the other benefit is a sharp focus on specific deliverables. However, you miss the opportunity to throw chairs.

(4) Red zinfandels are better social lubricants than cabernets.

We still need to figure out sales and marketing. I don’t think we’ve got it down. Entirely. Virtually, but not quite…there.