Company Culture

At the best companies, "company culture" is more than just a buzzword. Here's how the most innovative companies make company culture real.

To get started, you may want to read articles about specific companies like Zappos, Amazon, Shopify, Wistia, and Buffer.

For a comprehensive look at company culture, read our guide Company Culture for Startups.

12 Awesome Infographics To Help Grow Your Business

October 13, 2015 by Blake Thorne Leave a Comment

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Constant learning is one of the the best habits an entrepreneur can build. Thankfully there is no shortage of information available. More than ever before, in fact. From books, essays, Ted Talks, email newsletters, even entire college curriculums. Not to belabor a point that everyone is making — but there’s a world of information at our fingertips.

Sometimes, you need that information fast. The world is recommended a 5-course meal, and all you’ve got time for is a protein bar. Especially if you’re hard at work growing a business. Enter the infographic, Web 2.0’s comic book, magazine, pamphlet and business card all rolled together.

Why Everyone Will Have to Become an Entrepreneur

Shaking off the office grind to chase entrepreneurial dreams is more common than ever before. This infographic from San Francisco-based startup organization Funders and Founders breaks down just how important entrepreneurship has become. And it shows exactly why so many companies prefer to hire contractors over employees.

How to Never Give Up on Becoming an Entrepreneur

Another smart infographic from Funders and Founders. This one helps you overcome the drudgery and pain of growing a business. It is quite comforting to know that Michael Jordan missed the important shot more than 300 times.

How to Increase LinkedIn Engagement by 386%

This infographic from Quicksprout will help you master LinkedIn. It’s a huge network and unquestionably valuable in the business world. Consider the stat that 94 percent of recruiters use LinkedIn to screen potential job candidates.

Email Cheat Sheet

Don’t build your empire on rented land. Facebook or Stumbleupon might allow you to reach tons of people in an easy way, but those businesses will always control those channels. You’ll never be in the driver’s seat. That’s why so many companies still prefer to build their communication over email. The folks at Marketo built this great infographic that shows you how to build a killer email strategy.

How to Grow a Business: When Big Companies were Small

Everyone starts somewhere. Especially in tech, where behemoths like Facebook, were they a person, wouldn’t be old enough to drive a car. This helpful infographic from Salesforce shows you how giants like Amazon, Virgin and Facebook grew.

The Modern Small Business Owner

No two businesses operate the same way. And no two small business owners work the same way. But they definitely have a lot of things in common. This infographic from Intuit breaks down the characteristics of the modern small business owner. Did you know that running a business brings three times as much stress as raising children?

Inside The Mind Of A Startup Entrepreneur

What goes on inside the head of a startup founder? This infographic from Top Management Degrees answers exactly that. Did you know Bill Gates never took one day off in his 20s.

18 mistakes that kill startups

How do you sink a startup? Mark Vital at Funders and Founders built this helpful infographic based on the iconic Paul Graham essay on the topic. A simple infographic packed with great advice. Be sure to read the corresponding essay.

The Year in Startup Funding

Where does funding come from and flow to in the startup world? The crowdfunding platform Fundable has an excellent infographic that dives into startup land and follows the money.

The Many Paths to Starting a Startup

Starting a business can happen a lot of different ways. This infographic from Polish web development agency Naturally illustrates a few of the most common paths.

The Staggering Cost of a Bad Hire

A bad hire can sink a business before it gets very far. Before you make the mistake of hiring the wrong person, use this infographic from Mindflash to burn in the hard truth: bad hires cost big bucks.

The 10 Commandments of User Interface Design

Is there any better medium to teach design than a well-designed infographic. The folks at Designmantic show off great principles of UI design using a beautifully-built infographic.

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Anatomy Of A Great Mission Statement

October 6, 2015 by Blake Thorne Leave a Comment

Richard Branson has a thing for mission statements.

He likes them. He just thinks most of them suck.

Most mission statements are full of blah truisms and are anything but inspirational. A company’s employees don’t really need to be told that “The mission of XYZ Widgets is to make the best widgets in the world while providing excellent service.” They must think, “As opposed to what? Making the worst widgets and offering the lousiest service?” Such statements show that management lacks imagination, and perhaps in some cases, direction.

Mission statements — the good and the bad — have a way of bringing out the true core of your company. If that core is boring and jargon-filled, so will be the mission statement. If it’s fun, inspired, unique, caring … you can see where this is going.

How To Dress When You Work From Home

October 1, 2015 by Blake Thorne Leave a Comment

Work remote, and this conversation comes up all the time.

“You don’t even wear pants to work! Lucky!”

Some version of that.

Workers without an office are the pantsless winners in the occupational lottery, sleeping until 10 before enjoying a few hours of gleeful twirling in an office chair while wearing boxer shorts. At least that’s what the rest of the world seems to think.

In reality, remote work is a lot harder than that. In many ways it’s harder than working in the traditional office setting. It takes discipline, practice and the right kind of person to pull it off.

But unfortunately, many of us have succumbed to the stereotype. OK, maybe we’re wearing pants. But probably not the kind of pants you’d prefer to be seen in outside the house.

When you work in an office, you’re concerned about being presentable for the people around you. Even if the dress code is silicon valley casual, it’s nice if your t-shirt and hoodie aren’t stained. Or worse, smelly. It’s being polite to the people around you. Or as iconic designer Tom Ford put it: “Dressing well is a form of good manners.”

Working remote makes it easy to ignore this.

Dressing well isn’t just for other people. It makes you feel better. It helps your self esteem. It gives you confidence. It helps you feel — and thus, act — like the best version of yourself. Even if you work from home, the best version of yourself isn’t wearing dirty gym shorts and a smelly oversized sweatshirt.

The legendary writer Gay Talese works each day from a home office underneath his New York townhouse. Before going to work alone in his basement all day, Talese puts on a jacket and tie. Talese channels his Italian heritage and the phrase “La bella figura,” the beautiful figure, a reminder to put care into how one looks and composes themselves.

So maybe you’re not an 83-year-old magazine writer. Maybe you’re a 33-year-old designer. La bella figura can be a part of your life, too. You just have to find your own version of it.

It probably doesn’t include a jacket and tie. And that’s OK.

Here’s my rule of thumb on all this. I call it the waiting room rule. If there suddenly were an emergency and you had to spend the next 12 hours in a hospital waiting room (morbid, but stay with me), would you be embarrassed about what you’re wearing? If so, don’t wear it to your remote job.

You gotta find what works for you. Here’s a guide to get you started*

How to convince your boss to hold fewer meetings [a step-by-step guide]

September 29, 2015 by Blake Thorne 1 Comment

Try stealing money from your company’s bank account and you’re behind bars for a very long time. Steal thousands of dollars from the company in another way, and you’re a forward thinking go-getter.

We’re talking about time, and the countless hours wasted in frivolous meetings every day. Because time is what people exchange for money at work. And time is more precious than money. You can’t grow time. You can’t set some aside now and have more of it to spend later. You can’t use it foolishly and get a refund the next day. Time comes and goes, regardless of what you do with it.

That’s what makes frivolous meetings even more wasteful. Say you pull 10 people into a meeting that runs 90 minutes. Say the average hourly cost of each employee (after benefits, overhead, etc.) is $50 per hour. That’s a $750 meeting. Run that meeting once a week, and that’s a nearly $40,000 cost.

Google Didn’t Get It Wrong: The Open-Office Trend Just Isn’t Right For Your Workplace

August 26, 2015 by Blake Thorne 2 Comments

First we had hunting, then farms, then factories.

Then there were offices, with their doors and thick walls. Then cubicles, thinner and shorter walls and no doors.

Today, no more walls. No more doors. Want a picture of your kid on your desk? Better set it as your computer background. Because that chair is up for grabs tomorrow morning, pal. We all belong everywhere and nowhere in the cafeteria of modern work. We live in a strange new world. Your digital desktop is more permanent than your actual desktop.

A scientific guide to creative juices [what they are and how to summon them]

August 24, 2015 by Blake Thorne 2 Comments

Does this happen to you?

It’s Friday and you’re sitting in an all-hands-on-deck staff meeting. The boss needs creative ideas for next quarter. “Concentrate!” You’re told. “Be creative!”

You concentrate with all your might, but you’ve got nothing.

The next day you’re outside cutting the grass. There’s the steady hum of the lawnmower engine, the rhythmic predictability of the mowing pattern. Your mind slows down, wanders. Drifts off. But suddenly.

Lightbulb.

Some creative idea nearly knocks you over. It’s brilliant. Where was that kind of thinking when you needed it in yesterday’s meeting?

The answer has to do with our creative juices. And the science behind them. And although “creative juices” isn’t exactly a scientific term, there’s plenty of science behind what we understand to be creative juices.

Why Remote Companies Are Doing Employee Perks Better Than Google

August 19, 2015 by Blake Thorne 2 Comments

Employee perks. The idea rushed into our vocabulary sometime around the year 2000. The world feared Y2K, it got foosball and laundry service. Since then perks at tech companies have covered all positions on the field, from the practical (catered lunch) to the silly (birthday parties).

Some perks — casual dress, equity — are so common in Silicon Valley that they don’t even seem like perks anymore. We take them for granted.

In your parents’ or grandparents’ day, insurance and sick days were the only perks needed. Even weekends and holidays started out as a wacky and progressive idea. Those days are gone. Today’s employees expect ping pong, pizza Fridays and bring your dog to work policies. Or at least that’s what we’re told.

In reality, many companies are evolving their understanding of what a good employee perk really is. We’ve gone from the early perks of the dot-com bubble (ping pong tables to seem cool and attract press attention) to the perks designed to help keep you sitting on your squishy exercise ball writing code all night. Now, a new kind of perk is emerging, and remote companies are leading the way.

How To Solve The 8 Causes Of Workplace Conflict

August 10, 2015 by Blake Thorne Leave a Comment

The workplace is for work. You’re here to get things done, grow the business, improve the world and get better at whatever it is that you do.

It’s not a place for squabbling with coworkers, managers and subordinates. But that’s what seems to happen. Workplace conflict is everywhere, eating up productivity and taking precious time away from the things that really matter.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The causes of workplace conflict are recognizable. In separate articles on workplace conflict, psychologists Art Bell and Brett Hart identified eight common causes of conflict in the workplace. Think about the conflicts you’ve had in the workplace. You’d be hard-pressed to find on you can’t trace back to one of these root causes.

It’s important to see workplace conflict this way, as a symptom of a great structural problem. That argument with the boss over coming in on Saturday isn’t really about coming in on Saturday. It’s about the misaligned expectations and poor communication that led you to have to come in on Saturday. In other words, the problem is bigger than the problem.

Thankfully, smart and innovative companies are changing the way we work — and eradicating the causes of workplace conflict at the source. Here’s a look at the eight causes and what great companies are doing about them.

How To Obsess Over Customers Like Jeff Bezos

August 6, 2015 by Blake Thorne 1 Comment

What external metric is your company most proud of? Facebook likes? SEO ranking?

For Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, it just might be this: each year, the company is ranked at the top of its category and often top overall on a national index measuring customer satisfaction among America’s largest companies.

Sounds a little dry, a little technical. But it reflects Amazon’s mission in the strongest way possible.

Bezos is famously customer-focused. “Obsess over customers,” he has said. While some companies chose to obsess over competition (or default to obsessing over competition because it feels right) Bezos has consistently chose to push Amazon to obsess over the customer.

Why I Ignored a Late-Night Email From My New Boss (And You Should Too)

July 17, 2015 by Blake Thorne 3 Comments

late-night-emails

It came, like most terrible and dangerous things, in the night.

OK so like 9:30.

But late enough. It arrived through the buzz of my phone. A new message in my inbox. A message from my new boss. And on week two of my tenure here at iDoneThis. The subject matter was nothing time sensitive, he wanted to introduce me to Jimmy Daly, an excellent writer and content marketer (whom you can find here).

I immediately opened the email and started typing a reply. I was excited. I felt that rush of opportunity. That ah-ha here’s my chance moment. Then I stopped myself. I deleted the draft and put my phone in my pocket. This is dangerous, I realized.

Company Culture

12 Awesome Infographics To Help Grow Your Business

Anatomy Of A Great Mission Statement

How To Dress When You Work From Home

How to convince your boss to hold fewer meetings [a step-by-step guide]

Google Didn’t Get It Wrong: The Open-Office Trend Just Isn’t Right For Your Workplace

A scientific guide to creative juices [what they are and how to summon them]

Why Remote Companies Are Doing Employee Perks Better Than Google

How To Solve The 8 Causes Of Workplace Conflict

How To Obsess Over Customers Like Jeff Bezos

Why I Ignored a Late-Night Email From My New Boss (And You Should Too)

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