- Company dress codes encourage workers to spend time thinking about their dry-cleaning. That's weaksauce.
- Incentives that reward time spent in process instead of impact—they reward bloat. That's weaksauce.
- Rejecting lo-fi prototyping in favor highly-polished demos means you can't afford to try many demos. That's weaksauce.
- Pushing down changes from on high instead of setting direction from on high squanders ideas for change from the folks who will make those changes. That's weaksauce.
- Punishing folks who work unusual hours– this policy rewards blearily unfocused work. Further weaksaucery.
If I worked at one of those stuck-in-the-mud places (who of course don't realize that they're stuck in the mud), I could learn a lot The Work Revolution. It talks about how things can work if you take the good advice from the revolutionaries—while steering you around some pitfalls. (Encouraging innovation if you don't have at least a half-baked idea of what the group's mission is, a set of priorities for choosing ideas to adopt, adapt, and discard—well, it's a good way to waste a few years working on something cool and useless.) It's hard to tell if learning this stuff would make me happy, though. I assume that the reason that a lot of these places are still top-down command-and-control places is that the folks on top enjoy being bottlenecks. You sure get to feel important when you have approval power over all changes. I expect most folks who heed the cry of revolution will need to have revolting feet. Uhm, that is, they'll need to move to the west coast and work for other organizations.
But maybe I don't give despots enough credit. Maybe some of them would rather be 17% in control of something awesome instead of 50% in control of something mediocre. Maybe some of them will read this and learn.
Whatever. If they figure it out, great. If not, maybe they'll think of me as a wild-and-wooly revolutionary. I'm not some boring technical writer, I'm a dangerous badass tech writer for the people.
Ha ha ha. Oh man.
Maybe that's what's revolutionary about these ideas. They work. They work fine. They work fine even if the people carrying them out aren't fervored fervid? weird wild-eyed revolutionaries. These ideas are fine for mild-mannered folks who just want to get stuff done.
