No, not the kind that qDot tinkers with. I’m actually not talking about Philip Rosedale’s new venture either.
Much has been made of Linden Lab’s Love Machine, and I’m left a bit baffled as to why, exactly. Maybe it’s the name. The last four out of five companies I worked for had a Love Machine system, though it was called something else, and frequently had the word ‘quality’ in there somewhere.
The idea of one is pretty straightforward: When another employee helps you meet your targets, get your project done, or generally makes life easier for you, you make a note of it. When quarterly reviews come round, all those little kudos factor into your evaluation.
It’s a great system for startups, but generally pretty cruddy for businesses that have left the startup phase.
You see, in a startup, everyone’s been hired because of bunches of skills that they bring into the enterprise, but what’s really going on is that everyone’s doing pretty much everything. You can be negotiating supplier contracts, answering the phones on the main switchboard, painting the toilets, ordering coffee, or packing/unpacking boxes. Or all of these. In the same hour.
There’s a lot of things that makes a startup succeed, and one of them is the concentrated awesome of the staff. Literally everyone has an impossibly large list of things to do, and not enough time to do them in. Everyone mucks in and does anything and everything they can. As time passes, roles will become more clearly defined, and more staff start working. A lot of them are keeping an eye on where they can help, or looking for some. Most of the company’s communication happens around the coffee machine or out back where the smokers go.
This is great and fertile ground for a Love Machine system. You want to see who is giving that extra for the team, because frankly they’re you’re best assets – as long as you don’t mistake them for the ones who work on everyone else’s targets but their own.
As you move out of startup mode and into a more structured corporation, the Love Machine mechanic starts to get a bit less useful. In a structured corporation, that sort of boundary-crossing behavior leads to massive inefficiency. The more structured you are as a business, the less you want that sort of crossover (though transfer of knowledge can be very useful still in technical departments).
As a mid-size enterprise, that fuzzy, chaotic startup-style of thinking (which made you a success in the first place) is no longer what you want to have, and showing up in the Love Machine can be a sign that your job just isn’t properly specced and sized.
Nyuk, nyuk.
I love you you discreetly name names without name names.
lol, when i first saw the title of the blog entry i thought you were gonna talk about tele-dildonics! Xp
Of course the concept of a “Love Machine” is invalid. It quantifies office politics but does so without an objective basis. It utterly relies on honest objective input but has no basis for ensuring that input is either honest or objective.
That’s quite a valid and common criticism, yes. In smaller startups, it’s harder to game without being caught out. As the company grows, it becomes increasingly easy to influence results without being detected.
@Tigro Would you have preferred a post on teledildonics?
not if it meant this one wouldn’t have been done, i enjoy your articles about busyness and social interactions and stuff
Ahh… quarterly performance reviews in startups… *drifts into a cloud*