I rode in a Smart car for the first time last week. At first I felt silly, especially when other drivers grinned with amusement as they passed by. Clowns in a clown car are no longer funny. Today a guy in a Smart car is.

On day two something totally unexpected happened: I forgot we were in a Smart car. Rather than some weird novelty, it seemed perfectly normal. The cabin was spacious. The car rode well.

Actually, now the other cars on the road looked strange. Why were they so large? Why did cars stick out six feet in front of the driver? Why did they drag around another eight feet of metal behind? It was an epidemic of automotive obesity.

Had I asked other drivers why their cars were so large they mostly likely would shrug. Isn’t this the size cars had to be?

Which is why I admire the Smart car — because it calls into question what is completely normal and suggest that it might be absurd. The world is full of normal absurdities.

The industrial food system is another. Our food, which could be grown from local sunshine and local compost, is instead grown in distant places with pesticides and fertilizers made from petroleum and natural gas. Meanwhile the sun beats down on our cities only to fall on ornamental grass and concrete. Food waste is hauled off to putrefy in landfills. Normal and absurd.

So was bus tracking when we founded TransLoc. Back then, bus tracking meant a dot hopping around on a map every minute. It seemed quite normal to everyone. But we wondered: why depict moving buses with stationary dots that hardly move?

When we made the dots move people were amazed. “You can see the buses moving!” they exclaimed. Yet the paralyzing power of normal didn’t end there: our ideas actually made some people afraid. Bus tracking was still largely considered secret intelligence for administrators only. “You want to let our riders see where the buses are? All the time?” It sounded dangerous.

Now, organizational transparency and real-time data are in vogue. One day, hopefully, local food and tiny right-sized cars will be too.

I’ve always marveled at the impressive array of buttons, switches, and dials in the cockpit of an airplane. It’s always left me in awe of the pilots who work them. Until the other day, when it finally hit me that the reason a cockpit is so cluttered is because it has no computer mouse or touchscreen.

Anyone sitting at a computer right now has more controls at their disposal than a 747 pilot — they’re just tucked away behind neat little icons, tabs, and menus in infinite virtual space. But what if you had a physical button, switch, or dial for every setting and function in every software program? You’d put that jumbo jet pilot to shame.

Imagine a mechanical control on your desk for all the software settings and functions you frequently use. Imagine a mechanical control for all the ones you never use. If you had one for every setting in Adobe Reader alone you could open an indoor climbing wall.

Fortunately, the interface demands of a personal computer are unlike those required to ensure an airplane’s up-time as it hurtles through the air. Good software lets us hide and ignore most settings. Great software doesn’t even need settings — it just works.

Now when I board a plane and glance in the cockpit, instead of thinking, “Wow… What skill! What mastery!” I think, “Poor guy. What a confusing interface.”

* A pilot friend told me that some newer planes do have touchscreens but, for safety, still have oodles of mechanical controls.

People at TransLoc like an open floor plan and being in a room with others. They also find that being in a room with others can be distracting when they’re trying to concentrate. Apparently we need collaboration but also solitude. Cross-pollination and isolation. What a paradox!

It’s a big problem that companies often waste lots of time and money trying to solve: putting each employee in an office, taking them out of offices and into one big room, putting people in cubicles, leaving people in offices but taking the doors off (true story), only to repeat the whole routine over again.

I used to ask people to just wear headphones when they wanted to concentrate but I knew it wasn’t ideal. Wearing headphones can get uncomfortable and music itself can be distracting.

Till one day it hit me that I’d spent time with a team who had solved this problem: Trappist Monks. Here you have a bunch of guys living in close quarters for the sake of community but who also dig loads of distraction-free contemplation too. Their solution is to designate periods of quiet time throughout the day.

When I ran the idea by everyone they all thought it was worth a shot. After all, it was free to try and we could start immediately. We then came up with the rules:

1st quiet period: 10:30 to noon.
2nd quiet period: 2 – 4 pm.

During those times:

We all got the hang of it pretty quickly and have stuck with it ever since. Everyone agrees that it’s an improvement.

Before this, I figured finding a balance between collaboration and concentration would require a cutting-edge floor plan, expensive remodeling and new furniture. While all that might help people work together differently it’s good to remember that people can also change by simply deciding to.

*One unexpected thing I’ve learned is that I often figure out the answer to my question while I’m waiting to ask.

A recent article says that when it comes to innovation, markets can only handle one small hop at a time. Make too many innovations at once and you won’t get enough people to follow.

One compelling example is HTML. It became prolific while a more robust web-architecture called Xanadu did not. Xanadu asked for too much change at once, yet people could easily follow what HTML proposed. So innovators take note — there’s a limit to how much change you should try to bring about in a single move. And the sweet spot is to make the smallest possible move that unleashes the most change.

TransLoc has a new couch — a nice long one you can stretch out on. We got it so our employees can nap.

Why? Because sleeping can be really productive. Often when I’m stuck on a problem I’ll take a nap and have a working solution dawn on me shortly after waking. I’ve actually gotten so used to this that I frequently assign myself problems before going to sleep.

Then there are times when we get tired and feel our energy bottom out. When that happens a person trying to do creative work is pretty useless and a short nap can be the fastest way to become useful again.

The reasoning is simple: Your mind is fatigued. What does it want? Coffee? No. To surf the internet? No. A tired mind wants rest. By having this couch people can rest when the mind is tired.

I admit that encouraging your employees to sleep when they need it may not be good for every company. It’s probably a bad idea if the work your employees do is especially boring or meaningless. Or if you harbor employees who hate their jobs but who don’t have the integrity to quit. In those cases you’ll have people taking naps, not because they’re offloading hard problems to their unconscious but because they are depressed.

There are ways to make money. There are ways to save the world. Then there are ways to do both. Those are the most interesting. They require more ingenuity than pure-profit or pure-charity endeavors. And by appealing to free markets instead of the government they can do more good, more quickly.

Profitable ideas that make the world a better place are less common than ideas for profit or world-saving alone. This graphic illustrates why.

By meeting two requirements instead of one we exclude a lot of ideas. We could add more requirements too, such as a third oval representing stuff you find interesting.

It’s important to understand that though the overlapping area is smaller it is still a large area. There are thousands of ideas lying there undiscovered, they just require more ingenuity to find. That’s why when aspiring entrepreneurs come to me with ideas just for making money, I usually shrug and tell them it sounds kind of boring.

The world needs a new breed of entrepreneur. One who won’t settle for profit at any cost. One who will bring a dose of self-sufficiency to the ranks of traditional do-gooders. Only then can we transition to a regenerative economy that puts economic growth back in its place, below human growth and ecological repair.

It’s long been a mystery to me just why I’ve never liked most management advice, even advice I’ve heard so many times that I thought it must be tried and true. Stuff like quarterly performance reviews, cash bonuses, etc. But this TED talk has helped solve that mystery.

Essentially it says that traditional carrot and stick motivation hurts, rather than helps, anyone doing creative work. Attempting to drive creative performance directly through monetary incentives makes people myopic and less creative.

The carrot and stick does, however, work if instead of creativity you need compliance with arbitrary rules. Or if you’re asking people to do a lot of boring work, then you actually need myopic employees.

But that stuff has never felt right around here because TransLoc isn’t about ditch digging — it’s about coming up with the most elegant technological solutions possible. Ok… there are boring things we all have to do — forms to fill out, tedious bugs to fix — but after getting a handful of that stuff out of the way it’s generally back to actually using our minds.

So what about money. Don’t we pay well? We do. But in talking to our employees I find that their salary is more of a technicality. It ensures they won’t feel pressured out of “financial responsibility” to go do work they wouldn’t enjoy.

None of this is to say that money is evil or that we should cap how much people can make. Profit can be a healthy indicator that you’re doing something of value; a natural side-effect of being creative.

In the same way a lack of profit can betray a lack of creativity, even among so-called “creative types.” Starving artists, for example, generally exhibit zero creativity with business models.

As Dan Pink says in the talk, if you want motivated people don’t tell them they’ll get a bonus if they’re creative. Instead give them as much autonomy as they can handle, let them do work that affords them an opportunity to master a skill, and let them do work that actually matters.

At TransLoc I think we’ve got three out of three. But now that this principle is no longer just a fuzzy sort of intuition but consciously and rationally understood, I’ll be doing my best to make sure.

I hopped on the bus the other day headed for the airport, paid my fare and asked for a transfer ticket.

“No where to transfer to,” the driver informed.

It turned out there was an odd two hour window during which there was no connecting bus to the airport. I was distraught. I always took the bus to airport just never at this time of day.

“Don’t worry. I’ll get you there,” said the driver, seeing my distress.

Soon his bus went off duty and rather than head for the bus yard he took me to the airport, which wasn’t too far away. He was cheerful and made good conversation the whole time. A while later I arrived at the airport in an out-of-service bus with a driver who would be home for dinner a few minutes late.

Sam is an example of the right person in the right job. And I told him so.
“I like people,” he explained.

This post is not an attempt to greenwash our company. There are, in fact, almost no green companies. Nearly all pollute more than they clean up, consume more than they restore, and waste more than they save.

Greenwashing is dangerous too. The planet needs us to change our lifestyles and greenwashing does the opposite by giving the impression that we’ve already changed.

At best there are companies who understand that they, and society on the whole, aren’t anything close to green and are beginning to do something about it. This blog will (among other things) chronicle our efforts to do something about it.

So what are we doing? For starters, we’ve moved our offices downtown where parking is bad but where mass transit is easy. We’re actually located right across from our city’s main public transit hub. The company doesn’t pay for our parking spaces but does buy us bus passes. As a result, more of us ride the bus and some have even moved downtown so they can walk to work.

Composting is another. We do vermicompost, which is a fancy way to say that we have a bin full of thousands of worms that eat food scraps, coffee grounds, napkins, and shredded paper. We also have an outdoor bin that handles the rest of our waste. And the resulting compost goes to nourish the crops of urban gardens nearby.

While all this makes us comparatively green it still doesn’t make us actually green, which is what the planet really needs. But it’s a start — stay tuned.