How We Work [talk]

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 drives everything else. It’s a mindset change.
• We need to bring science into the work place. According to John Medina, author of _Brain Rules, even if we constantly use our brains “most of us have no idea how our brain works” and “brain scientists rarely have a conversation with teachers and business professionals, education majors and accountants, superintendents and CEOs”.
• Everyone seems to like at least some of these ideas and would love to implement them.
• I still haven’t heard from anyone actually trying to put them in practice in their companies.

Recently, I was invited to give a talk about Lincoln Loop at Ideon Innovation, a business incubator in Sweden. The talk focused on how we work, the reasons for doing it that way, and how it is something any workplace could take advantage of.

At the end of the talk we had a discussion based on the questions:

• What name can we give a company that works like this?
• What do you do, have you done, or would want to do that is “different”?
• What would prevent your company from implementing similar policies? Need help?
• How can we handle conflict?
• How can we mix asynchronous communication with real time communication?
• Do you see any of this policies as negative?

I would love to hear what you think!