A Better Company Organization (part 2)
What follows are some more thoughts on an article I wrote a little while ago.
Ever notice how some companies start losing employees after their stock price tops off? This was definitely more true in the dot com days, less so now. However, the point remains the same. If an employee has a really good idea (which may or may not be in the company’s area of expertise), what would the employee gain by giving his idea to the company? He would lose the monetary compensation that he would have otherwise gained, and a good amount of recognition, which would probably go to the ‘head’ of the company instead.
It seems that the employee would more likely set out on his own to create his own company, in this way, he would have more freedom (to succeed or fail), and more incentive to work hard since it is his name and financial future that is on the line.
However, there are many things that need to be ‘re-invented’ when someone leaves to form a new company. Why not structure a company in such a way as to have all (or most) of the positive aspects, and none (or little) of the negative ones? As described before, a company could offer its employees several compensation packages: (1) time-based, (2) project based, or (3) cashflow based.
An additional feature could be that the employee could elect to not collect his company ‘profits’ as cash compensation, but rather retain them within the company for usage toward future company projects (thereby avoiding getting taxed prematurely, as would also happen if the employee set out on his own).
Is management overhead a problem? If rentacoder.com (and other sites) work, then why can’t they work for this type of application? If anything, it would help to more formally and thoroughly investigate the ‘cost-benefit’ for a particular project before going too deep in the implementation.
(reposted from old blog. First posted May 21, 2008)