The Love Machine
Posted on March 16, 2006
Filed Under management, yahoo | Comments
Last week Prabhakar and I presented some of Yahoo’s past and future strategies to a bunch of Benchmark Capital portfolio companies at their recent shindig in Half Moon Bay. Prabhakar presented his compelling vision for Yahoo Research (which I’ve seen umpteen times before but excites me anew each time.) He also touted some excellent recent hires (including an exciting one that I’m sorry I can’t talk about because it’s not announced yet.) He covered the joint Yahoo and O’Reilly developed Tech Buzz Game. This game is a “fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends.” Very intriguing concept, worth checking out if you haven’t yet.
One of the highlights of the day was giving Philip Rosedale a ride home to San Francisco which gave us a solid 45 minutes to catch up. I’ve been friendly with Philip since he was CTO of RealNetworks (a long time ago) and have stayed in touch and watched as he and team have developed SecondLife. What’s happening in SecondLife is mind-blowing and almost too much to get my head around. I’ll take every chance I can get to talk to Philip and glean what insight I might from someone who is literally a “pioneer in cyberspace.” (I’m quite deliberately using this vintage ‘96 colloquialism cuz it fits so damn well. Forgive me.)
Once we were cruising up Highway 92 back toward civilization, I asked Philip what ground-breaking unconventional management techniques he applied at Linden Lab (makers of SecondLife) certain this would be be good fodder for the ride… I wasn’t disappointed and he told me about a few…
The first is “The Love Machine.” The Love Machine is a simple way for Linden employees to give and receive “love”… where “love” in this context is work-related appreciation. It’s a page on their intranet with three fields, “From”, “To”, and “Why” (an 80-character free text field.) That’s pretty much it. People can (and do) give “love” to each other. It’s a way of saying “attaboy” or “thanks” or “I noticed.” There’s visibility into all the love you’ve both given and received. What’s interesting about this is that “love” is not only a morale builder, and a way of getting peer feedback, but is directly tied to money. (Philip mentioned that given Linden’s stage as a company right now, this variable bonus is relatively small… but will grow as Linden grows.) Philip also talked about “Taskzilla”, a mod of Bugzilla that basically allows for transparency and collective prioritization around the company’s focus.
Against the backdrop of Prabhakar’s Tech Buzz Game, we talked about a scenario where employees acquired “whuffie” (or cred) within the company not because of a title, or a degree from a good school, or from their ability to schmooze with those that hold and confer the power, etc. but rather from empirical demonstration that they can make strategic decisions that are net beneficial for the company. Imagine upon entering the company, every employee is granted 1000 “shares” of decision currency. You can spend your currency by buying into (or out of) various corporate issues in an open marketplace (a la Taskzilla.) Decisions are forensically judged to be good or bad by the employee community itself, and dividends paid out to those that got it right. Imagine the hallway conversations:
- “I went ‘all in’ for the broadcast.com acquisition, so I’m basically decision-bankrupt…” Or
- “I made a killing by endorsing the Overture acquisition… I could basically single-handedly end the operations of Yahoo Germany if I wanted to…” the QA engineer said smugly.
Puh-lenty broken about the above scenario, and not suggesting this scheme would work, promoting it as viable, or any such thing. (I’m feeling increasingly required to make these disclaimers on this blog as I continue to get misinterpreted and quoted out of context.) As an example of the many, many ways such systems can unravel, check out Business 2.0’s reference on how Microsoft’s attempts to establish a “meritocracy” have devolved into a popularity contest. (Though note that the Microsoft system is not democratic and is closed-door… The hope is that cronyism can be at least partially mitigated through large sample sizes and more transparency.)
I once had a manager who said, “Plan for the day when the salaries of all the company’s employees are found sitting on the printer. It’s only a matter of time before it happens.” Ironically, plan as one might, I’d guess that list is sure to piss off nearly everyone irrespective of how it’s designed. It’s also not clear that “minimizing employee angst” is the right objective function for this optimization anyways.
So I’m just saying… fun stuff to think about. A fun thought experiment… And interesting to contemplate how the next generation of enterprise software might allow for more and better metrics by which to acquire subjective measures of an employee’s contribution. Right now, so much of this is anecdotal, tedious, and perfunctory. “It’s review time people, so please fill out your self-assessment, your peer reviews, review your direct reports, etc. and submit by next Wednesday.” Something like The Love Machine provides a perpetual feedback loop that is easy, fun, instantly gratifying… and meaningful (to a degree.) Note Philip doesn’t base an employees entire salary on this data… just a small discretionary spiff. Love gets you icing, not cake. The Love Machine should be primarily a measurement tool and not have the quantum effect of changing the system it’s measuring. Though you wouldn’t want people gaming the system too much in order to acquire Love, if the Love Machine tipped the culture toward becoming more conscientious, more aware and connected to how one’s contributions affected others, etc. - that’s probably not a bad thing.
Tacit is an example of a company that’s doing extremely cool social engineering within the enterprise. By installing a proxy next to your mail server, they passively monitor email traffic and can autogenerate a “yellow pages” for your company that can answer questions like “Who’s our resident expert on sockets-based networking protocols?” Putting (for now) the huge privacy and policy issues aside, this is pretty friggin’ cool. One of the things that’s interesting about it is the implicit harvesting of this information (vs. requiring me to fill out a skills survey or profile.) “Expertise mining.” An aside: I think Tacit is one of the coolest names for a company I’ve heard, partly because it captures so well what they’re about. They’ve got a bunch of a-list investors (including Esther), but the company has been around a while and has yet to realize its potential. Hope they can put the pieces together and make it work. Their CEO David Gilmour is a seriously bright (and nice) guy.
Cameron innovated around this idea recently (and is threatening to do more on Hack Day) but sadly I can’t say any more publicly.
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18 Responses to “The Love Machine”
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I too have been watching Linden Labs and 2nd Life for a long time.
A thosand years ago (or so it now feels) I was the person who convinced Jeff, TK, Tim, Filo and Jerry to get into the casual games business. If I were still running Y! Games, I’d be lobbying hard to do something with these guys.
A possible danger with systems like Tacit, or any kind of formalized technological system for tracking expertise (or strategic wisdom or whatever), is that you may end up inducing people to maximize whatever you’re measuring rather than what you imagined those measures were representing. For instance, if employees knew that their Tacit ratings influenced their bonuses, they may spend lots of time crafting superfluous emails which contain the right phrases to trigger the ranking algorithms. Simpler systems like the Love Machine seem less susceptible to this kind of thing, since humans are judging the input and they tend to be far better bullshit detectors than computers.
This: “I made a killing by endorsing the Overture acquisition… I could basically single-handedly end the operations of Yahoo Germany if I wanted to…” the QA engineer said smugly.
is going to make me laugh all day long! thank you.
The Love Machine is also the name of a hit Jpop song by Morning Musume (known throughout the blogosphere for the clip where they had porkchops on their heads).
From: Abu Hurayrah
To: Bradley Horowitz
Why: Excellent job with your focus on socially-mapped ideas for progress, data mining, & establishing relationships.
(I couldn’t resist)
I do see one obvious weakness with the Love Machine, and that would be an abuse of the system, as Ryan has hinted-at above. In order to maximize their “lovingness”, they may just blanket the corporation with empty love, and the system is no longer usable. Imagine the Love Machine being used for veiled insults.
How could this be automatically seen as abuse, and not as faux-love? To the system, John’s river of sarcasm would seem to be a fjord or love…
I did see the “buying shares of a proposal” idea as absolutely fascinating. To avoid abuse and favoritism, there would have to be some reasonably fair & appropriate way to really relate the value of a project to the return on shares. It would greatly encourage innovation but also careful planning. Maybe allow “shares” to be cashed-in as bonuses. But, what if someone makes a catastrophic decision? Can they get, say, 10 shares within every payperiod, and then invest them as they see fit?
But already, I can see how office politics can plan in, just like the real stock market. Certain types may try to get OTHERS to invest in their idea, and then they artificially inflate the value of this project to the entire team, and suddenly now everyone wants to make the project, which may not be all that amazing, “successful” just to maximize their own return.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It’s interesting, to say the least…I’ll take 100 shares of that…;)
What we need from you, Bradley, is a way to ensure that when we empower people, we don’t empower them for evil. How can you measure that?
If you’re confused about what is evil & what is not, just ask me, and I’ll clarify.
Oh…The things we do for love (famous and sad song)
Hey, Bri,
Things we do for love is by 10CC and it’s not so famous, but still very poigniant.
And what’s with all the buzzword bingo in these comments. I’m hoping these are firmly tongue in cheek ramblings or else I’ll have to strategize on how to optimize my approach to these eventualities.
[…] And then I read Bradley Horowitz’s post on a way to turn the Whuffie concept from Cory Doctorow’s book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom into reality. Horowitz’s description went like this: “Imagine upon entering the company, every employee is granted 1000 “shares” of decision currency. You can spend your currency by buying into (or out of) various corporate issues in an open marketplace (a la Taskzilla.) Decisions are forensically judged to be good or bad by the employee community itself, and dividends paid out to those that got it right” […]
I thought that many of the ideas mentioned above were of interest. At least in the UK, work email accounts are the property of the company as is their contents.
If people are using them in an unsuitable manner it wouldn’t take a system like Tacit to get them. I thought that it was an interesting idea, the main concern is that people may email a lot about an area but know very little: not that I would imply that this could include business development, sales, marketing or PR people in any way, shape or form.
Finally ideas like Taskzilla and the Love Machine reminded me of an article I read about how anybody at MIT could delete the contents about someone else’s account. I think that they have elements of greatness about them because they capture the fundemental truths of what motivates people to work. BUT, they also brought home to me how important employing the right people in the first place is, in terms of skills, the colour of their character and their level of fit with the rest of their team.
You mentioned the Tech Buzz Game. I wasn’t aware of it a month ago when I wrote up a simple site www.twocrowds.com, a social predicting website. There is no restriction that a prediction be tech related or anything else at all. Entirely free format.
The greater the number of people that agree with a prediction, the higher it bubbles up. A reality check for ‘weighting’ the probability of a prediction being true is done by calling Yahoo’s news API to see how many hits a prediction returns, the simplistic assumption being more hits => more likely.
It’s been fun watching the predictions - most folks think Apple will release a phone next! Give it a spin if you have some time.
Will watch your blog for more about Yahoo’s research and findings into such non-traditional ways to find and disseminate information.
Thank you.
[…] I started on Bradley Horowitz’s blog (this post, where I’ve commented in the past), which linked to this site (a socially-networked trend predictor of some sort) which made reference to the term CAPTCHA on this page, which I proceeded to look up on Wikipedia from a link on that page, which in turn referenced the entry for “reverse Turing test“, which has a link to a guy’s blog entry about how he feels he’s failed the Turing test. […]
The Love Machine is a great idea. I’m very intrigued with regards to how exactly a usage guideline was contructed towards this tool.
Nice to meet you Bradley.
Timothy.
Putting (for now) the huge privacy and policy issues aside, Sony’s DRM trojan could also be labelled “pretty friggin’ cool”.
Silver Ninja,
I assume by this you mean that it’s virtually impossible to factor out the the privacy and policy issues… But I don’t think your point holds. Sony’s DRM trojan is self-serving spyware foisted upon unsuspecting consumers for the sole purpose of limiting their use of media.
Technologies like Tacit return value back to the users who engage with the system. (This is hugely different than the CIA spying on email and profiling users (hypothetical example of course.)) A system like Tacit’s can and should be completely disclosed and entirely opt-in, both wholese and on a granular per-email basis.
I’m deeply concerned about the privacy and policy issues and therefore wanted to explicitly table them precisely because I felt they deserved so much attention… I wasn’t brushing them aside as if they didn’t matter…
Bradley
I think key to the whole privacy issue is what information people feel comfortable sharing for these kinds of purposes - this is why the “Privacy Policies” of each website are important - we should know what we’re giving up when we utilize a service.
Unfortuantely, there is a growing culture that has accepted exchanging their private information for savings, rebates, & additional services. This increasing comfort has some serious consequences when it comes to the potential for abuse.
In addition, some people may not recognize what is significant when it comes to privacy (e.g., the success of phishing schemes demonstrates this).
This is why services should be very clear about what they are collecting and how they’re going to be using it. But, of course, this is also forcing companies to read into the future and/or disclose trade secrets. So, having said that, maybe I should just return back to my hermitage & play Minesweeper on my overclocked abacus.
All the in your post make it pretty much illegible. I bet it is a problem with smart quotes, or pasting from Windows (with it’s weird character set).
Here is a discussion that might help:
http://www.alexking.org/blog/2005/05/12/wordpress-breaks-copy-paste/
All the lyrics you want at http://www.lyricshunt.com
In theory, the Love Machine is a great idea. In practice, it has been an abysmal failure, at least from the perspective of customers of Linden Lab. I have an incredible amount of respect for Philip Rosedale, but this management style is just not working to grow Second Life in a healthy way. You have developers building pet projects and patting each other on the back, while in the meantime the whole system is coming apart at the seams. Things like bug fixing and scalability enhancements are not fun and flashy. LInden Lab needs to worry more about customer love than employee love. As it stands, they are alienating their most loyal customers under the prospect of their being endless amounts of new people who will join (since they are obsessed with catching up to World of Warcraft at all costs). Criticism and feedback and being squelched by closing down their discussion forums and overmoderating their new blog, so everything seems peachy when in fact SL feels like taking a ride on the Titanic - grand and exciting, but ultimately doomed. SL is also a ship of dreams, but that iceberg isn’t budging.