In the discussions following the change of leadership at Linden Lab, quite some commentators claim that it is time for the company to grow up. The company philosophy “Tao of Linden” is said to be revolutionary but alas not suited for a company which wants to grow and which possibly has IPO ambitions.
I just did some reading about this “Tao of Linden“. It is fascinating stuff, and I am not that convinced it is a recipe fo disaster. The Tao in Chinese culture is a gentle way of thinking, which prefers to let nature have its way instead of imposing by force other solutions.
More concrete, the Tao of Linden stresses collaboration. Instead of having an external management force imposing stuff on people, staff members are supposed to manage themselves. People have to listen to others, but also have to take into account their own ideas:
At Linden Lab, you are expected to choose your own work, you have to decide how you can best move the company forward. This isn’t always easy, but it can be very rewarding for you and it is a huge win for the company. This doesn’t mean that you can’t ask someone else what to do – it means that you are responsible for choosing who to listen to! You are responsible for listening well and broadly enough to choose wisely.
At the same time, the Tao of Linden Lab asks to tell everyone what you are doing, how well or how bad things go.
Set weekly goals and report progress to everyone. Regardless how big what you are working on may be, you can always break it down this way. Give it a try.
Other aspects like the “Love Machine” make sense in this context. Wikipedia explains:
employees are encouraged to use positive reinforcement as an incentive using an internally-developed “Love Machine” application that enables employees to publicly reward and praise fellow employees for specific tasks completed. The “love” that is sent ultimately translates to a financial incentive at the end of each quarter and is used as part of an employee’s evaluation.
Linden Lab also utilizes another internal tool, known as the Distributor, that enables all employees to distribute “points” to projects that they deem to be worthy of development and resource support. Each point has a financial value that is based on each quarter’s financial performance. As a result, key stakeholders in the projects with high point values receive a distributed monetary payoff at the end of the quarter for successfully completed projects, so the same Wikipedia entry learns.
I guess more details about how this principles actually work out in everyday work are available in the book “The Making of Second Life” written by former Linden Lab employee Wagner James Au, but I have to admit I still have to read that book.
Wagner James Au however gives some insights on the recent developments on the blog GigaOM. It seems a defining moment for Philip Rosedale was his Burning Man experience. Wagner James Au:
It’s become my firm belief that this lack of progress stems from Philip’s (likely unconscious) desire to recreate the Burning Man experience in SL. (As a new user, you’re generally dropped into a desert of the unreal, and only get anything out of Second Life if you reach out to the creative, often eccentric community already there.)
And he also explains in this context the Tao of Linden:
The spirit of Burning Man is also arguably discernible in his “Tao of Linden” company philosophy, in which employees choose their own tasks — as opposed to, say, tasks that might grow the user base. With Rosedale in a more ancillary visionary role, and a more experienced day-to-day, managerial CEO in place, that’s likely to change things, surely for the better.
I still wonder whether it is possible to have such a rich virtual world and such freedom and yet make the whole experience “easier” for newcomers. Maybe open-ended virtual worlds (as opposed to well-defined gaming environments) are more difficult to “sell”. I am not sure at all that a more experienced manager and less revolutionary work methods will make it possible for Second Life to repeat the growth performances of the past.
What this means for Linden Lab is maybe yet something else. Linden Lab as the developer of platforms for virtual worlds is not exactly the same as Second Life as such. It remains very much to be seen what impact a change of management style will have on Second Life and the residents of Second Life.
Roland Legrand