The Way I Work - Parte 3

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Tres personajes bastante distintos.
Van:

Paul English | Kayak.com

After that, I eat breakfast and then drive my son to school. He's 14, and my daughter is 17 -- she has her own car. Driving my son to school is really important to me. Sometimes, if I have a business trip, I'll drive him to school, fly to California for the day, and then take the redeye back so I can take him to school the next day. 

The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look at me like I'm smoking crack. They say, "Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?" If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they'll actually stop what they're doing and fix the code. Then we don't have those questions anymore. 

We have four monitors in the office where you can see real-time streaming information about the site -- how many visitors, how many click throughs. It also displays the last customer e-mail that came in and the photo of the employee who answered it. So you're walking by and you see, "Oh, Dan just answered a question." We developed our own customer support software. One of the things it does is randomly select an employee response to a customer and send that response out to the entire company and to all of our investors each day. It keeps us on our toes. 

I spend a lot of my time on recruiting. You could ask anyone in my office, "What are Paul's priorities?" and they'll say: "It's team, No. 1. Then customer, then profit." I really want to create the ultimate, most exciting dream team that's ever been created in software, and I focus on that every day. I love to ask people, "Who's the smartest person you ever met? The most creative person? The fastest?" Someone might say, "This guy I met in Ohio 10 years ago, but I think he moved overseas." I'll track him down. 

When I am hiring, I try to get people to accept the job before I tell them about salary or title. I promise to make that person dramatically more productive, and that working for Kayak will be the most fun job he's ever had. I need two things in return: a promise to strive to be the absolute best you can be. And that you will be an energy amplifier -- someone people are excited to work with. 

The only way 100 people can ever build a larger company than one that has more than 8,000 people -- that's what Expedia has -- is by hiring Olympic-quality, unbelievable all stars of technology. My favorite metric is revenue per employee.

Kathy Ireland | Kathy Ireland Worldwide

I usually wake up anytime between 4 and 6:30 a.m. My first meeting of the day is with God. I have my prayer time, my reading time. Sometimes I'll go in the other room if my husband is still sleeping. I like to start out my day with the Lord, basically. It really sets my day off in a good place, so I can be more patient with people and better handle whatever comes up.

Caterina Fake | Hunch

My schedule is completely random. I work on whatever instinctively feels like the right thing at that moment. I don't do things at set times unless I'm trying to coordinate with someone. But I'm one of the most productive people I know. When you work on stuff you want to work on, when you have the energy to work on it, productivity becomes kind of effortless. 

For me, a productive day is when my colleagues and I have built something or sketched something or created a prototype. We've thrown down ideas for what could be a successful product. Even if we've just walked it through as a thought experiment, that's very gratifying. There's too much emphasis on productivity in the factory, Ford-assembly-line sense of cranking something out and not enough emphasis on having ideas. 

I think it's a sickness in business to always try to do more things in less time. I try to spend more time. People read all this information and think they've accomplished something, but what have they really taken in? 

Sometimes I feel like checking off all the little things. Mail this letter. Respond to this e-mail. Sometimes I want to figure out the entire strategy for 2010. 

Interaction should be constant, not crammed into meetings once a week. You just turn around in your chair and bounce an idea off one of the other 10 people in your office. Keep the floor plan open so people can talk to each other. 

At Hunch, we don't have meetings unless absolutely necessary. When I used to have meetings, though, this is how I would do it: There would be an agenda distributed before the meeting. Everybody would stand. At the beginning of the meeting, everyone would drink 16 ounces of water. We would discuss everything on the agenda, make all the decisions that needed to be made, and the meeting would be over when the first person had to go to the bathroom.