story idea: write about Zingerman's and Open Book Management

[vielmetti]

Zingerman's is a deli and a mail order food business based in Ann Arbor that practices Open Book Management.

http://www.zingtrain.com/open-book-management

"So what is Open Book Management? A radical approach to running a business, Open Book management is about empowering every single employee in your business with the tools, education and data they need to act (and take responsibility) like owners."

Again, this could be a long piece or a series of pieces with interviews and everything, but my initial proposal is a basic who/what/where/when/why approach drawn from their marketing materials and from published articles about them, 300-500 words in summary form.

[Dispatches]

This is the kind of history I would start with, tho I wouldn't have known where to find it.

I suppose for OCI Chad might want a pilot piece that draws on historical examples (the two Ed has posted look great to me) and then ties in the OCI itself, with a critical summary of similarities/differences including current tech and economic circumstances.

Is that what you're thinking, Ed?

[vielmetti]

Some more sources materials, these from Crain's in 2010: http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20100117/free/301179994

Yeah, I'm thinking that there needs to be a series of discoveries of "this company has done something similar to what we are talking about, and has thrived because of it"; or the counterpoint, "has not thrived and here's why". With some research I think you can plant yourself in the middle of an unusual but working tradition of how to run companies with some degree of openness, and then have Chad write the piece that says "we're like this but different".

When I dig into the Zingerman's story I get a lot more stories and a lot of Ann Arbor references, which is handy, because I'm here.

[chadwhitacre]

Yeah, I'm thinking that there needs to be a series of discoveries [...]

This past year I read Maverick (@pjz's fault), about a Brazilian company called Semco, which is another relevant historical instance. Mondragon is another I've heard mentioned.

I think essentially we want to build a resource and a playbook. I envision a catalog of practices (such as "Open Book Management"), with references to companies that practice them and reports on their experience. Writing about companies who haven't yet joined would make a natural entry point for inviting them—why shouldn't Zingerman's be on the list?

One way to think about what we're doing is Crunchbase for open companies. We should crosslink stories with companies with practices. I want to be on a company page and have links to the open practices they follow and stories to back this up and fill out the picture.

[ityonemo]

Semco is more of a 'flat' company along the lines of Github and Valve - or rather the other way around since Semco came first. Another example is Morning Star (tomato) packing company in California. One way to look at it maybe goes back to the distinction between transparent and open that we discussed elsewhere; that open is more about participation and transparent is more about information... So these companies are more open in the participation sense, but not necessarily 'open' in the outward-facing transparency sense (although they do have to be inwardly transparent in order to function). I think these are both good ideas - and there are likely to be companies or individuals that just don't work under those paradigms.

It may be worth thinking about if "open" is going to be the "intersection" or the "union" of these ideas.

[timothyfcook]

I like the Zingerman's story. It nicely brings together both transparency (sharing information freely) and openness (empowering anyone to act and "own" the company).

[chadwhitacre]

There does seem to be a distinction between internal and external transparency. I guess I've been thinking primarily in terms of external. Buffer, for example, got way more interesting to me when they announced salaries externally than when they were just sharing them internally.

If we are going to try to build a more or less comprehensive database, then defining our scope is important, and external transparency/openness suggests itself as a criterion.

[timothyfcook]

Definitely. External is our main focus. Of course internal is interesting as well.... but external obviously trumps it.

[chadwhitacre]

I suppose for OCI Chad might want a pilot piece

@Dispatches Some kind of launch announcement would make a good first post, I think. I suppose that's it's own ticket ... #35. We could include historical background, but how deep do we go? As mentioned at https://github.com/opencompany/opencompany.github.io/issues/30#issuecomment-31289128, I'm drawn to more frequent, shorter pieces that criss-cross the same themes from different angles. We can go back and gather them into a longer whole when we get to the book. ;-)

I envision someone landing on a short piece giving a concrete example of a surprising business practice at a particular company at a particular time, and then having abundant links out from there to follow the thread where they may: through time, related practices, other practices at the same company, within the same industry. That sort of thing. Especially since we're bootstrapping and each have limited time to give, it seems wise to go for more smaller chunks than fewer big ones. Eh?