Apparently not, according to a recent excerpt from Seattle-based games company Valve’s handbook for new employees, which is stirring up loads of fascinating conversation on Boing Boing. Founded in 1996, the company lists its hundred or so team members on its site in simple alphabetical order and claims it’s more profitable per employee than Google or Microsoft. It also has a corporate culture some would view as paradisaical (and some probably terrifying), according to the handbook:

Why do I need to pick my own projects? We’ve heard that other companies have people allocate a percentage of their time to self-directed projects. At Valve, that percentage is 100. Since Valve is flat, people don’t join projects because they’re told to. Instead, you’ll decide what to work on after asking yourself the right questions… Employees vote on projects with their feet (or desk wheels). Strong projects are ones in which people can see demonstrated value; they staff up easily. This means there are any number of internal recruiting efforts constantly under way.

If you’re working here, that means you’re good at your job. People are going to want you to work with them on their projects, and they’ll try hard to get you to do so. But the decision is going to be up to you…

How does Valve decide what to work on? The same way we make other decisions: by waiting for someone to decide that it’s the right thing to do, and then letting them recruit other people to work on it with them. We believe in each other to make these decisions, and this faith has proven to be well-founded over and over again….

While people occasionally choose to push themselves to work some extra hours at times when something big is going out the door, for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication. If this happens at Valve, it’s a sign that something needs to be reevaluated and corrected. If you’re looking around wondering why people aren’t in “crunch mode,” the answer’s pretty simple. The thing we work hardest at is hiring good people, so we want them to stick around and have a good balance between work and family and the rest of the important stuff in life.

This approach may sound loosey goosey (and there are certainly type-A managerial folks out there hyperventilating at the mere thought of such a non-system) but as a thoughtful blog post by John Geraci, general manager at faberNovel New York, points out there is method to this madness, and it all hangs on letting folks choose their projects and then, critically, determining “the value and compensation of each employee by peer review.”

Do that and this no-boss system will actually “leave no room for unproductive people to hide. Nobody can pass the buck on to the next person, as that person is going to be determining their salary at the next review,” says Geraci. Plus, “you reward people for finding the position in the company where they can make the biggest difference.”

Of course, not every company can take advantage of this sort of productivity-boosting quasi-anarchy, Geraci points out. “Valve is … entirely self-owned with no outside investment, and it owns all of its own IP,” he writes. If you’re firm isn’t, this probably won’t fly. Nor will this structure work as a top-down restructuring, he feels, noting, “Valve didn’t design and impose this structure on itself from the top – it evolved organically toward it from the beginning.”

To be a startup that’s in a position to grow its own structure without outside investment is pretty rare (though GitHub, notably, meets the criteria), but given these restrictions, do you think a complete lack of hierarchy could work for other companies?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Gigi Ibrahim.

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In past jobs, I managed quite a few people who worked out of remote locations. Some of them worked from home full-time while others were in offices that were spread out in California and Washington while I worked here in Portland, Oregon. But right now, all of the people that I manage are working in the same office building. While we all work from home regularly, we all have cubicles in our office. However, that is all about to change. The building that we work in is being renovated this summer, and we’re being kicked out of our little boxes. There isn’t really room for us in the other buildings, so the company is encouraging us to work from home full-time from July through September. I’ll be managing remotely again, and here are my tips for managing a remote team.

Regular Staff Meetings

It’s important to get the team together on a regular basis to stay in touch with each other and keep up with what other team members are working on. Depending on the team and how much collaboration happens between team members, you may want to meet weekly, monthly or somewhere in between. I’ve worked on teams of program managers where the team members spent most of their time working with stakeholders outside of the team, so the staff meetings focused on learning best practices from each other along with occasional corporate communications or budget updates. Other teams work much more closely together and meet more frequently to collaborate on common tasks. It’s important to get the team together occasionally at least over the phone, but how often you need to meet depends on the team.

Check In Regularly

The focus here should be on checking in with your employees (not checking up on them). This could be a regular meeting with each employee or something less formal over IM or email, as needed. One of the most important responsibilities of any manager is to make sure that the people who work for you have what they need to accomplish their jobs efficiently. You may need to help them overcome roadblocks from other teams, which could involve kicking some butt on their behalf, or you may need to help them get budget for some critical resources. When people are working remotely, it can be easy for them to feel a little alone, so it’s important to keep in touch and let them know that you’re happy to help with whatever they need.

Email Updates

I mentioned the importance of email updates for remote employees last week as way to make sure their manager knows exactly what they are doing. This goes both ways, and managers should also be providing regular updates for remote employees. These updates might include any corporate communications people need to know, updates from other teams and anything else you might hear that impacts the people who work on your team. Making sure that the people who work for you have accurate updates is especially important for remote employees who might otherwise miss important information.

An important task for any manager is to make sure that your team stays well connected and productive regardless of the obstacles. This is especially true for remote employees who can become disconnected from the company and other team members if they don’t have good support. Getting everyone working together regardless of their location is critical for managers of remote teams.

What are your tips for managing remote workers?

Photo by Dawn Foster, used with permission.

And that’s precisely what’s happening. Back in July, I reported here that China Unicom had secured the deal to supply to the iPhone in China. Just two weeks ago other sites were reporting the same thing and now, according to the Wall Street Journal, rival carrier China Mobile appears to be getting in on the action, too.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum, China Mobile’s chairman Wang Jianzhou said that Apple’s deal with competitor China Unicom was “…absolutely not exclusive.”

“We are still in talks,” added Mr Wang, “so I can’t say anything else.”

China Mobile was, for a time, the favorite for securing a deal to offer the iPhone in China but apparently negotiations hit a roadblock over Apple’s business model which, at that time, was based around revenue-sharing. In November 2007, speaking at the GSM Association’s Mobile Asia Congress in Macau, Mr Wang told attendees that he did not like the new business models emerging in the mobile phone industry — specifically, device manufacturers seeking to share revenues with cellular network operators. Instead, he asserted, “We still think we can maintain the operator-centric model because we have the customers, the end users.”

They certainly do. China Mobile is the country’s largest cell network operator with over 420 million subscribers. That’s more than the entire population of the United States.

This move marks the first time since the launch of the iPhone in 2007 that Apple has not expressly fostered an exclusive arrangement with a single carrier in a country, but is instead pursuing arrangements with multiple carriers.

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They’ve also added some new core functionality and optimized the backend. To me, this feels like more than a 0.01 update. With every update of Sequel Pro, the open-source project continues to close the gap between itself and commercial competitors such as Querious.

New Features

Sequel Pro now includes full SSH tunnel support built into the connection manager (which has also got a UI facelift).

There is a new Relations screen that lets you view and edit foreign keys for a table.

Enhancements

By far one of my favorite new enhancements is the ability to filter the database’s table list. When the list gets larger than the displayed area, a filter box appears at the top, enabling you to quickly find the one you’re looking for. I’ve been using this a lot already.

When running custom queries, the results used to be presented in a static table. Now you can sort the results on the fly by clicking the column titles. Even better, for supported queries you can edit the results directly.

Browser-like table history navigation has been added, allowing you to go back to previous table views, which is great for flicking back and forth.

Significant Update

There are also plenty of smaller enhancements. Another favorite is the ability to select a record (either in the content view or after running a custom query) and then select “Copy As INSERT Statement”. This is so handy, I don’t know why it wasn’t there before. There are plenty of small changes like this, and almost every part of the application has had numerous bugs fixed.

In addition to all the new features, enhancements and fixes, this release is significantly snappier, and very noticeably so. The memory overhead is also greatly reduced. The developers have done some serious optimizing, and the results have paid off. See the full release notes for Sequel Pro 0.96 for a complete list of changes since 0.95.

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The clipboard in a modern operating system is one of the most useful and practical tools available. Being able to select some text or images, copy them to the clipboard, and then paste them in other places is indispensable (look at the uproar over the fact that the iPhone OS 1.0 & 2.0 did not support a clipboard to see how valuable it is). You most likely use it without giving it another thought.

The standard clipboard behavior is that when you copy a new item, it replaces the existing item. You can’t go back to the previous item as there is no history of items copied. This is what a Clipboard Manager does, providing a memory and browsing history so you can paste something, and then find it later, even after using the clipboard multiple times.

There are quite a few Clipboard Managers available for OS X, some free, some not. Here’s a quick overview of what is on offer and what they can and can’t do.

Clipper

Clipper is the most simple of the clipboard managers available. It sits in the menu bar and allows no-frills access to text clipboard history. It’s an open sourced tool that provides no keyboard shortcuts, but does the job for a simple text clipboard manager.

Jumpcut

Jumpcut is another open source clipboard manager that focuses on the basic text history. A customizable hotkey will let you cycle through the various items in the history with an on-screen overlay, or you can directly select an item from the menu bar.

Clyppan

Originally also known as Clipper in earlier versions (name changed to avoid confusion with the Clipper mentioned above), Clyppan is an open source solution that sits in the menu bar, popping up with a customizable hotkey to let you see what’s in the history. Clyppan only supports text clippings, but the history is searchable and pressing the spacebar will give you a Quick Look-style preview of the clipping. It also has a rapid paste function, which pastes the current item, and then sets the clipboard to the next item; this lets you copy lots of items in a row to then quickly paste later on.

ClipMenu

ClipMenu is a freeware clipboard manager that offers support for both text and images. It sits in the menu bar and will break the history into browsable menu sections to avoid UI crowding. It has customizable hotkeys and many functional aspects are configurable, including being able to hold control when selecting an item to perform configurable ‘Actions’ before pasting (such as converting to upper case). ClipMenu also lets you configure regular text clippings for quick access to items you use often.

Savvy Clipboard

Savvy Clipboard is the simplest of the paid offerings, costing $12 (a free trial available). It supports both text and images in the clipboard and provides customizable hotkeys for accessing it.

PTHPasteboard

PTHPasteboard is comprehensive clipboard manager that supports multiple text and image clipboards. The normal version is free, while a Pro version is available for $24.95 that allows you to share and synchronize clipboards across multiple Macs, as well as run configurable filters on text (such as converting to upper case). Full configuration of hotkeys and aspects of the UI is present and you can search the clipboard history to find what you’re looking for.

iClip

iClip is a beautifully designed application (perhaps too fancy for a simple tool) that can behave in a Dock-like way, staying attached to a side of the screen and popping out when the mouse goes to the edge. iClip can handle images as well as text, and also allows groupings of permanently availably items, providing quick access to often used resources. It has fully customizable keyboard and UI behavior support. iClip costs $29 and a free trial (which can be run 30 times) can be downloaded to try it out first. Also available is iClip Lite, which is a completely free Dashboard Widget that allows you to view the clipboard history. If you only need basic use and like using dashboard widgets, the lite version may fit your needs.

Clipboard Evolved

Clipboard Evolved offers multiple custom-named clipboards for both text and images for $15 (a free trial is available). It offers full keyboard hotkey customizing and various UI options (such as a Dock-like display) including various quartz graphics transition effects (and thus requires OS X 10.5).

Cute Clips

Cute Clips is another OS X 10.5 only clipboard manager. It costs $15 and a free 15 day trial is available. It supports both text and images and focuses on a rich UI experience and provides features such as ‘stickying’ a clipping (so it will stay in that position and not drop off), naming a clipboard item, or giving a specific clipping a keyboard shortcut.

Stuf

Like PTHPasteboard, Stuf (formally known as Shadow) offers a shared clipboard across multiple Macs. It lets you create multiple clipboards and elect to make them visible to other Macs. It supports text and images, lets you search the clipboards, allows a customizable hotkey and provides Quick Look integration by pressing the spacebar. Stuf costs around $20 and a 30 day trial is available.

Which one?

There’s a great range of choices for clipboard managers on OS X — all which add great utility to the built in clipboard. I personally have been using Clyppan for a while now as I don’t deal with images often — the fact that it handles text only is no problem for me. However all of the options do their job well so it really just comes down to your workflow requirements and personal usability preference. If you’ve never used a clipboard manager before, give one a try.

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