If You Treat People Like Children…
For most businesses, a set of policies grows over time. Whenever something bad happens, you create a rule to make sure it doesn’t happen again. By the time a business gets really big, it’s usually developed a byzantine list of policies to address things that probably weren’t going to happen again anyway. The guys at 37signals suggest a different approach.
Some of the leases I signed in college were victims of this same phenomenon. Because of a problem they had experienced with one tenant years ago, a lease I signed included a clause saying that I would never have any candles lit on the property for the entire year I lived there. (Birthday cake, anyone?) Everyone knew this was absurd. The employee who handed me the lease even pointed out that they didn’t really expect us to never light a candle. The fact that they included such a trivial (and largely unenforceable) clause in the contract made me question what else in the lease didn’t need to be taken seriously. Sure they included legal gobbledygook stating that if one part of the lease turned out to be worthless, then everything else would still stand. I’m not a judge, though. So what I walked away from that lease signing thinking is that these people expect me to ignore some of the rules. I know they had an expectation that I would instinctively know which rules belonged on the list to take seriously and which belonged on the list to only break behind closed doors. I wonder if our lists were the same?
