Nontrivial Exercises

Effective Leadership from a Tech CEO … In Montana

I don’t mean to turn this blog into a commercial for the ScobleShow, but Robert Scoble has some simply fantastic interviews on his opening week and a half of his new show at PodTech. It would be a shame not to discuss and point them out.
The first show he released last Monday was of a video walk-through of an Internet printing company, Printing For Less.

As Scoble summarizes in the show notes:

This tour of Printing for Less is one of those times when you can see something special: a CEO, Andrew Field, who loves what he does and loves the employees who work for him.

Andrew Field shows us what it means to be a “working” CEO, to truly love your work, to really know your employees and to really know your business. What strikes me the most is how well he knows each person in the company (yes it’s probably less than 100 employees, but still it’s impressive). It’s obviously simply some key points he’s memorized about each person so he can have a conversation with them - he really does know and have a relationship with the people who work there.

The entire company is unique - from the specially designed building with radiant heating in the floors (it’s in Montana, remember) to the policy allowing employees to bring their dogs in the office, to the three monitors that every member of a certain function in the company has, to the autonomy granted to the production staff in regards to scheduling print jobs.

So many people are attracted to a small company atmosphere where they feel like they can really make a difference. However, small companies aren’t just great by default - it still takes work, purpose and great leadership to make them great.

Printing For Less certainly is the anti-corporate corporation, and hopefully will be a model that small and big companies can learn from.