Last night I listened to another outstanding econtalk podcast that featured host Russ Roberts interviewing Wafaya Abdallah, a small business owner who runs a hair salon in Maryland.
Abdallah’s hair salon is unique in a number of clever and insightful ways: To foster teamwork, the employees are paid a salary instead of per appointment; everyone gets a bonus if the salon hits target numbers for the month; stylists with an empty chair work on promotions or decorating or other tasks; during downtime at work they read books like The Alchemist and The Five Dysfunctions of the Team for knowledge, inspiration and conversation topics with clients; two to three stylists interview prospective employees rather than just Abdallah herself, and so on. It sounds like an incredibly well-run and sucessful business that operates with a different incentive structure than many other hair salons.
One thing stuck out for me as a software engineer. Check out this exchange around the 15-minute mark of the podcast:
Roberts: Do you have weekly sessions where you talk things out?
Abdallah: It's informal. But we do have daily huddles, which are kind of pre-day meetings, inspiration, rah rah, cheerleading, here's our goal, how are we going to get there, here's what everyone needs to know; and then we have monthly meetings.
Roberts: How long does the daily meeting last?
Abdallah: Maybe 5 minutes? So that's basically where you are, trying to inspire them a little bit.
These quick, informal daily huddles are very similar to the daily status meetings used by agile/extreme development teams! Glad to see that the rest of the world is catching up to software engineering! Or more likely, that software engineering finally adopted the effective practices of other successful businesses...
