Dare to be different

Success comes to those who don't follow the herd. Followers never do anything but the average. That's fine if you want to be boring and just like everyone else. To stand out, you have to dare to be different. I've built up my company to a success by outside the box thinking and non-standard approaches. Here are a few examples:

Hub and Spoke Hierachy - The typical company is structured like an inverted tree with the boss at the top, varying level of managers at the branches, and the drones at the leaves. The problem with that approach is that underlings are delegated power and privileges. You never want to give any underling any sense of importance. I much prefer the hub and spoke organization scheme. The boss is in the center directly controlling all the nodes. That way no one develops a sense of importance and gets uppity. You have direct control over everyone at all times. This is also known as a "star" arrangement, which is fitting. You're the brains of the operation. Everyone else is just piddily satellites revolving around you.

Centralized Workflow - The trend these days is towards decentralization. Cloud computing, peer-to-peer gobbily-gook, distributed computing, etc. It's all bunk! It's the same theory as giving a bunch of monkey typewriters and expecting the collective to eventually bang out Shakespeare. It's much easier to control everyone when the workflow is centralized. I make everyone log into my computer where I can watch them working and give instructions on the fly. Who knows what everyone could be doing working on their own? Probably just wasting time on my dime. When everyone is under a watchful eye, they keep doing what they are told. Plus, there's the added benefit of not having heterogenous computing environments. When everyone has to work on the same system, they are all working on the same platform by default.

Internal Standards - "Industry standard" is just a nice-name for average piece of crap. Standard industry practices is another example mamby-pamby following the herd. That's why I ignore standard practices and implement company practices which make sense to me. Version control software? Unnecessary! It's a waste of time to install and who understands the cryptic crap the software does anyhow? It's much better to just manually make copies of the source tree with the date appended. Same thing with automated backups. I prefer having my employees manually make the backup at the end of every day. I feel more confident knowing that a human performed the task rather than it being an unknown automated task. GUI usability standards? Totally retarded if you ask me. If I think my design is usable, then that's the way it's going to be. Who the hell came up with the usability standards anyhow? Probably a bunch of desk jockeys who are only soaking up a paycheck with retarded suggestions. Project management software? Also a waste of time. Since everyone in my company is working on the same computer anyhow, they can all access the same Word document that I type out each day. Hell, even standard programming languages are a bad idea in my book. If an employee develops skills in an industry standard development environment under my tenure, that gives him a skill that he can take somewhere else. Well, I say not on my dime! We make sure to use proprietary internal development environments so that no useful software knowledge can ever be taken from the company and employees don't develop any useful skills that they can use at another competing company.

Turnover - Underlings come and go all the time. Some people yammer on about retaining talent and experience. Bull-honky! In a fast moving business, your employees are going to become stale and outdated quickly anyhow. You want high turnover to keep your talent pool fresh and to keep workers on hand who haven't burned out. The more people you have flowing through, the more you get done and the better your product. You have to take the borg approach: assimilate the talent, and then they no longer matter as an individual. They are just another drone. You've taken what they have to offer into the collective, so it no longer matters if they stay or go.