Posted
by
Nicolas Lara
on
October 9, 2012.
Filed under
business,
presentation,
remote working
Whenever I have a conversation with someone about how we work at Lincoln Loop, people tend to be quite surprised, intrigued and skeptical, but mostly, they want to know more.
A while back we started blogging about how we do business, and I love pointing people to these articles to learn more about the details of our (un)management style. It’s particularly interesting hearing back from them about their impressions, questions, problems. Some of the most interesting ones for me are:
- Few people know that there are more companies out there working in an unorthodox way, getting better results and happier people (yes, it’s not only us!)
- It’s very easy to see how it would be hard (or imposible!) to apply these ideas to any other organization, but most people fail to realize how easy it is to actually do it: a culture of trust and motivation ...
Posted
by
Peter Baumgartner
on
August 20, 2012.
Filed under
business,
remote working
Here’s a map of our current offices at Lincoln Loop:
That’s 10 people, 5 timezones, and 3 continents for those of you counting at home. I use the term “office” loosely because we don’t have a central office in the traditional sense. Instead, Lincoln Loop is a distributed (people work where they want) asynchronous (people work when they want) workplace.
Why?
Compared to a traditional office, we think our distributed workplace is better, not only for us, but also for our clients. The biggest improvements are:
Better Talent
When I started Lincoln Loop, I wanted to work with great developers. Living in a small mountain town with no tech scene to speak of, my only option was to hire people remotely. As we’ve grown, we’ve continued the trend, hiring based solely on talent and compatibility rather than proximity. Hiring remotely has resulted in a team ...
Posted
by
Graham King
on
June 15, 2012.
Filed under
business,
remote working
When your client is hundreds of miles away, but your bed only three feet, it helps to understand motivation.
The first thing to understand about motivation is that it’s not something you do to someone. That’s called coercion. With enough power you can make anyone do almost anything, but you can’t make them want to; and typically creative work done by people who want to do it is better. The tl;dr of motivation is this:
If you want to build a ship, don’t start by collecting wood, sawing planks and assigning tasks, but awaken in people’s hearts a yearning for the beautiful deep sea. – Antoine de St Exupéry, Citadelle
Extrinsic motivation (especially contingent rewards such as bonuses) has been shown to only improve performance on menial repetitive tasks, and to decrease performance on even slightly creative tasks. There’s a good summary in ...
Posted
by
Michael Trythall
on
September 12, 2011.
Filed under
design,
remote working
I recently came across this article from EightShapes detailing how they are sharing sketches in a remote environment. Lincoln Loop is entirely remote and we’ve run into the same problem, but I’ll admit we haven’t been as MacGyver about solving it. I applaud EightShapes for their resourcefulness! Mounting a camera phone to a stick and taking pictures is hardcore. Apparently this concept worked well enough for them and they went with an official product – an IPEVO Point 2 View camera.
Our early attempts at solving this problem were about as clumsy as EightShape’s. At one point sketching became the step where you thought through the idea on your own. When satisfied, you’d port the ideas to a wireframe for discussion. We settled on Google Draw because its limited drawing capabilities were akin to the crudeness of our sketches and we could use it to collaborate ...
