There might be a master plan

Reading stuff out there on the seedy internet one gets the feeling that “20% time”, the practice of encouraging employees to work on their pet projects on company time, is some wondrous innovative idea invented by the GOOG.

People blog in hushed tones about “Google’s famed 20% time” and wonder aloud about the real benefits of such a scheme. Some even decide to try it on their own employees.

I am no innovation management expert, but even I know that 20% time is not a new concept.

Permitted bootlegging is an idea older than Google. Established companies such as 3M, Novell or HP have encouraged this work-on-your-wacky-stuff-on-company-time approach since time immemorial (i.e. from before the 80s). The term bootlegging was introduced into the innovation literature as long ago as 1967. The most famous product to come out of a permitted bootlegging effort is not GMail, but the post-it note.

Granted, Google is one of the few companies to put “innovation time off” into employee’s contracts, and they do deserve credit for that. [1] But it is not exactly like they invented the wheel of innovation management.

As for the benefits of 20% time, these are largely more indirect than the pundits would have you believe, and they are hard to measure. A 1998 Wired article explained it best:

3M’s 15 percent time is valuable simply because it “makes it OK to daydream — and I don’t think you can put that in a box and make it a two-hour slot in your day.”

[Disclaimer: As of this writing, I am a full-time employee of Google. I am also a joyful user of 20% time. The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not in any way represent those of my employer. Etcetera.]

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[1] Does anybody know if 3M ever put their 15 percent Rule on paper?

Ah, the contempt of it. The glut of contempt we seem to have achieved. Our own disguised contempt for ‘primitives’, the contempt of those who left the Culture when the war was declared for those who chose to fight the Idirans; the contempt so many of our own people feel for Special Circumstances… the contempt we all guess the Minds must feel for us… and elsewhere; the Idirans’ contempt for us, all of us humans; and human contempt for Changers. A federated disgust, a galaxy of scorn. Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain.

I’ve been meaning for a while to write a little post about Seth Godin’s book The Dip, but procrastination had gotten the best of me. Now that Seth is asking in his blog for owners of a copy of the book to lend it to someone, I feel I have no excuse to put it off longer.

The Dip is, like most Godin’s posts, insightful, inspirational and brief (you could read the book in less than an hour). It also contains some great illustrations by Hugh McLeod.

The message of the book is deceptively simple: The Dip is the slog between starting and mastery. The Dip is the reason we are here.

Some quotes:

Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff a the right time.

Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success.

In a competitive world, adversity is your ally. The harder it gets, the better chance you have of insulating yourself from the competition.

And yet the real success goes to those who obsess.

It’s easier to be mediocre than it is to confront reality.

The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable.

If you are in Zurich, you can borrow my copy. Just ask.

Skrymta is once again asking me difficult questions. This time his question is: what picture represents the nordic for you? He chickened out himself and ended up describing his mental picture of the nordic in words, so let’s see if I can manage to rise up to the challenge…

For me the Nordic is something cool, quiet, full of light, something made up of clean lines and primary colors, something extremely civilized and mostly decorated in light wood. As the song goes, Du gamla, Du fria, Du fjällhöga nord, Du tysta, Du glädjerika sköna!

And then there is the proverbial dark-red wooden house with white finishings. There is always a flagpole with a national flag nearby.

(Photo: House by *Kitto)

Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute.