A Look Inside Virtual Company MoveOn.org
May 15th, 2007 (2:30pm) Dian Schaffhauser 5 CommentsTweet This
MoveOn.org is a poster child for virtual companies. Its staff is entirely distributed. It holds no scheduled meetings. And when it decided to gather for a retreat, it did so virtually.
In a panel during Software 2007 in Santa Clara, CA, MoveOn co-founder Wes Boyd shared his organization’s approach to operation, including how they held a six-hour virtual corporate retreat on the phone.
Boyd and co-founder Joan Blades determined that MoveOn would remain tiny. It started with a couple of employees in the San Francisco area and used outsourcing and volunteers to launch its growing number of political campaigns. The advantage to that approach he said: “We could mount them and tear them down within a few months.”
The organization capped itself at 20 paid people, because, he said, “We wanted to remain nimble, remain small.”
Staff members rely on the usual mechanisms to stay in touch with each other: IM, email, phone. Everybody works from home, because “we figure that once people start clustering in a physical location, it’ll become unstable. The inside people will [become] the corporate headquarters. So we have no two people in the same location.”
MoveOn holds no meetings, he said. “Almost all communication is ad hoc. You ping somebody, have a quick call. [That leaves] people time to do work, which is exciting.”
Their virtual retreat meant six hours on the phone. How did they pull it off? The group held 45 minute-long phone conversations on a conference call with 15 minutes in between for breaks. It held breakout sessions on other conference lines. It used Google spreadsheets for polling.
“When you meet in person, you don’t focus on the process. But if you’re on the phone for five hours, you have to focus on process,” Boyd said.
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This is definitely the workplace for the future, and my dream for my own companies. This way I can employ the best coder in europe, the best designer in us, the best administrator from asia, etc.
Now we can rule the world!
But seriously, unless there’s a need to have a physical office, which I can’t think of a reason why. Don’t do it!
What kind of companies do you run Paul? I can imagine new businesses in this model but hard to imagine for traditional ones like a barber shop or a restaurant.