Inside the multi-million dollar video streaming giant, Hulu, CEO Jason Kilar has gone to extraordinary lengths to subvert his own power: he has no office, has a makeshift desk partly built from empty boxes, and personally takes each new hire out to lunch to learn what he or she thinks the company can do better. “You will not attract and retain the world’s best builders in a command-and-control environment,” Kilar tells Fast Company.
Last weekend, Hulu and fellow Internet prodigy, Groupon, were honored at the WorldBlu Live conference for their unusually strong commitment to worker empowerment. We sat down with these web successes to understand the driving philosophy, small-team orientation, and straight-up weird employee morale boosters that lie at the foundation of their innovative products.
Part Philosophy, Part Intuition
“We assume that people are fundamentally good and people are responsible adults,” says Groupon CEO Andrew Mason. “The policies we have reflect those beliefs.”
While most organizations craft exhaustive rules for bad apples, Mason says “The cost of creating bureaucracy and red tape that assumes the other 90% of people are also bad is creating rules that encourage people to live up to the edge of those rules.”
So instead of bottom-line sales goals and minimal call number requirements with no underlying rationale, agents get access to their departments’ real financial progress so they can craft their own sales strategies for improving it.
