BW Online | September 25, 2000 | Mark Breier: Don't Forget to Have Fun

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SEPTEMBER 25, 2000

BOOK EXCERPT

Mark Breier: Don't Forget to Have Fun
The 10-Second Internet Manager -- Survive, Thrive & Drive Your Company in the Information Age (Part Three)

The 10-Second Internet Manager - Part Two

The 10-Second Internet Manager - Part One

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It's Beyond.com's quarterly meeting and I'm standing in front of the entire company; four hundred people hanging on my every word. The past few months have been our best ever. We put together some major deals with publishers, added a whole slew of new products, made huge increases in site capacity, and had our one-millionth customer. I'm recognizing the teams that made all these things possible when something slams into the side of my head. It's a Nerf dart. As I turn to see where it came from, I get hit by another. Then another. I duck down but it's too late. I get plastered by a volley of twenty darts.

I take the Nerf attack as a good sign. Our company is doing well and everyone is feeling proud enough of themselves to shoot the CEO. This is corporate life at its best. Plus, how can I complain? I'm the one who gave them the Nerf darts in the first place. I quickly pull out my own dart gun and fire back into the crowd.

Earlier I told you that people in Silicon Valley (and the East Coast's Silicon Alley as well) love talking about Internet time, where a second is a minute, a day is a week, a week is a month... Well, the reason that those little expressions ring so true for so many people is that things in our world are changing incredibly quickly and people are accomplishing so much in so little time. Employees get pushed hard and expectations are high, both for the company and for ourselves.

SITUATION NORMAL: ALL FIRED UP. But working hard isn't all there is to the Internet. There's also work long (spend huge amounts of time at the office and stay connected via e-mail and cell phone when you're not there); work cheap (go out of your way to dress down the office environment -- no frills); work fast (stay ahead of the competition and immediately respond to customers' demands); and grow fast (hire and train new employees, implement new systems, move to new locations). This is just the way things are in the Internet world. As crazy as it may seem to people who aren't in the industry, those of us who are see the pressure and pace as completely normal.

The danger is that too many companies get so caught up in doing what they have to do that they forget one of the most important keys to Internet success: fun.

Fun? In the hard-charging, fast-changing Internet world you'd think there'd be no place (let alone time) for fun. And there's no question that sometimes that's the way it seems. But in the Internet world having fun at work is even more important than it is anywhere else. Here are just a few reasons why:

* While working hard, fast, cheap, and long is often a recipe for Internet success, it's also a recipe for employee burnout. Fun can extinguish burnout flames before they spread.

* Building a team is everything in e-commerce -- more so than in any other business sector because of the focus on speed. People from different backgrounds, with different skills and different abilities, all have to work together to move the company forward. Fun is often the glue that holds the members of a team together.

* With extremely low unemployment in the high-tech world, it's truly a sellers' job market. Jeff Bezos kept his employees tied to Amazon by giving them early stock options that vested over time. But today, competitive salaries and options are a given in most markets. What isn't a given, though, is quality of life -- on the job and off -- and a lot of people are choosing their employers accordingly. Fun could be the difference between keeping and losing your top performer.

Now that you know why you should make your workplace more fun, let's take a look at how to do it. Having fun will make your company -- as a business entity and as a group of individuals -- healthier, stronger, and better prepared to meet the challenges you face every day, and that you'll continue to face as your business grows.

Celebrate everything
Get out of your ivory tower.
Show 'em how to have fun.
Encourage individual expression.
Encourage team expression.
Integrate fun into your corporate identity.
Integrate new employees quickly.
Make your company family-friendly.
Pursue nonoffice passions and encourage your employees to do the same.
Go for group exhaustion. Every once in a while a project will come up that is an absolute killer.
Rotate your stars. Part of having fun is the feeling of refreshment.

For more ideas on fun in the workplace -- and to share your ideas -- visit www.10secondmanager.com/fun.

Excerpted from the book, The 10-Second Internet Manager -- Survive, Thrive & Drive Your Company in the Information Age. Copyright 2000 by Mark Breier. Reprinted by permission of Crown Business. All rights reserved.