Innovation in Blueprint Research & Design

For those who read this blog, some of you know that I currently work for a consulting firm called Blueprint Research & Design (new website design coming soon!). It’s a great place to work, especially because of the people and company culture. And apparently, our B Corporation audit agrees.

But as I’m about to start my full-time job at Blueprint, I’ve spent some time reflecting on my past summer there and what I hope to accomplish there in the future. During the summer, I feel like I didn’t get to know my fellow consultants that well, partly due to my own shyness and insecurities and partly because I didn’t know if I had a future with them. But now that I’ve signed on with them full-time and might work there for more than a year (I’m deferring my law school applications to next year so that I can apply to JD/MBA programs the following year, which gives me a little more than a year and a half), I feel that I want to contribute as much as I can to this company and really start my career here.

So I started thinking about what my ideal Blueprint experience would look like. And right off the bat, I started thinking about working from home as much as I can. Since I was little, I have always dreamed of a job with flexibility and one of Blueprint’s strengths is how much it allows its employees to work from home, which allows us not only to save time and money, but also be more efficient with the time that we do use to spend on work. Every job I’ve had since graduation has allowed me this flexibility, which has been especially great for me. Unbeknownst to most of my employers, I have been working for them while continually dealing with chronic health issues (I’ll pick up on the econ/legal theory behind the ADA later and explain why I disagree with the legislation). Unlike what passes as “normal” these days, I can’t sit at a computer too long since I have a fractured back, nor can I type on a keyboard or use a mouse too long (tendonitis/shoulder problems – though you wouldn’t be able to tell from the amount that I blog and write emails). But despite these problems, of which my employers were most likely unaware, I’ve been able to deliver results by being efficient with my time and my workspace (large monitor at home with vertical mouse and Wacom tablet).

So being the consultant that I am, here’s a visualization of why I believe working at home is so much better for both the company and the employee:

In my particular case, there is also the added advantage of being able to live at my parent’s place in San Ramon and save on the commute time and rent (if I had to go into the office everyday, I would probably have to get a commuter room in SF). Interestingly, more generally, increased telecommunication usage allows people to live in farther and more cheaper areas since the total costs of commuting from these areas decrease (the thought of working in China while making my US salary has on more than one occasion crossed my mind).

But sometimes you need to go into the office anyway, because there’s simply no replacing face-to-face communication. Anyone else see the flawed assumption in that argument? Answer: Not all face-to-face communication requires going into the office. For a fixed investment of under $50, you could buy a webcam like the Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX for every individual (though like me, I’m sure others at the firm may already have a webcam sitting somewhere). And as an additional company perk, you could in theory justify paying every employee’s Internet bill using pre-income tax revenue as a business expense, though I’m not too sure on this one and would have to ask a tax expert.

Part of me is hoping that as a result of recent economic events and high oil prices, businesses will finally learn how to be more efficient in their operations and adopt IT communication as a way of being green and decreasing costs. But webcams and videoconferencing aren’t the only innovations I have in mind.

While in China, I heard about a huge thin client order in India, where a school was able to give computer access to its students at a margin of the cost it normally takes in the US, where often times each terminal is an actual computer. The principle behind thin client computing is simple: instead of giving everyone who has access to a computer an actual computer, you can give that person a terminal that hooks into a server. Software costs are also cheaper since instead of buying everyone a copy of Windows XP, you can buy one copy and everyone can access it from his or her terminal so long as it isn’t being used by someone else. Right now we have one rickety computer in the hallway that runs Microsoft Vizio, and if we had a thin client running, we could purchase one copy of the software, put it on the server, and everyone would be able to access it from their terminal. And thin clients are also green-friendly since they reduce energy costs as well.

I wonder what the NPV of the costs or savings of a switch to thin clients might be and I’d like to do a study of the financial and social return and get one of the other B Corps like Give Something Back or The Green Office, both of which specialize in office supplies, to start promoting thin client adoption.

But there’s an incentive problem here too. If I’m assigned work by the company and have no free time to engage in these kinds of projects myself, that would mean I would have to work on this after hours. If there’s no guarantee that I would be financially rewarded for the time I spent investigating possible areas of efficiency, my efforts could have a potentially negative expected value. In the worst case, I might propose the idea, the idea gets rejected, and I’m admonished not to waste my time. A more likely case might be that I propose the idea, I work on the project independently and perform due diligence, and if it makes sense the firm adopts the idea and saves money.

Here’s where things get tricky. As someone who’s paid on an annual salary, in theory I have an economic incentive to do the bare minimum that keeps me my job (except I’m also applying to grad school and will need a recommendation eventually and more generally, I like to think that I can contribute more to my work and am not limited by my salary). But the point is, for companies who don’t have clear performance objectives or rewards for innovation, there is little incentive for employees to innovate. What if you had a great idea that improved the bottom line? Whoopee. As the individual with the great idea, you may not see the benefits of that idea being implemented since it might accrue to the equity stakeholder instead. And according to the same B Corporation audit I mentioned earlier, employee ownership of the firm is one area we could improve.

This is why lots of technology companies continue to offer stock options to their employees – one of the many ways companies try to provide incentives for innovation. However, it’s also true that company performance may not be correlated with employee performance – which is why some investment bankers are still getting bonuses in a bad market – or at the time a person joins, the company’s stock may be overvalued – which is a significant problem for lots of people who joined Google recently. The point is, to encourage innovation, there are other ways of compensating employees that puts in place some system that correlates employee performance with bonuses besides stock options.

I do believe employees should be compensated for the work they do above and beyond the call of duty and it will be interesting to see whether and how we at Blueprint will institutionalize and structure performance bonuses. But all told, I’m excited to go into the office sometime this week or next and start my first full-time job. =)