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Encouraging Professional Growth with the “Career Development Manager”
Atomic’s most valuable resource is our people (whom we call Atoms). It’s our goal to provide them with meaningful work, pay a fair salary, live our values in how we treat them, help them learn and...
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Sacrificing Robustness for Expediency – A Story about Fragility
“A plan that’s too dependent on any one person is too fragile.” Derek Sivers Pairs of people working together make a project or situation more robust. We knew this, and yet somehow we forgot. It was an...
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Atomic Ownership, Part 5: Distributions
The Atoms of Atomic Object at our recent internal conference, AtomicCon. Why own shares in a company with a goal of being 100 years old? You definitely shouldn’t be hoping for a big payday when the...
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Inheriting A Team Successfully by Managing for Growth
As leaders within organizations, we rarely get to start our own team from scratch. We receive teams as they were formed. Often, we have limited ability to change the makeup of these teams effectively....
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Atomic Ownership, Part 4: Financing employee ownership
Having decided to take the bold step of becoming an employee-owned company, written up a prospectus, determined a valuation, and heard “yes” from seven interested employees, I now had to figure out how...
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An Infinite Game – How we schedule teams without losing our minds
A few years ago, when I was new to software consulting, I attended my first resource scheduling meeting. Resource scheduling is the act of assigning team members to start projects on a specific date....
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Outgrowing our structure – How we navigated 6 phases of growth at Atomic
Things had been going extremely well. You’re growing, succeeding. But now… You can’t quite put your finger on what’s wrong. You’re feeling out of control. You had a grasp on things, but now you don’t....
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Atomic Ownership, Part 3: Valuation
Once you’ve decided to sell shares, the most practical question — and to everyone involved the most important — is that of valuation: What’s the company worth? I spent a year researching this question,...
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Why we don’t “delight” our clients – and what we do instead
Every company knows how important a great customer experience is for success. And yet, there are still plenty of nightmare stories where customers are treated poorly—by airlines, cable providers, and...
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Why should Atomic exist for 100 years?
Atomic has the goal of being the first 100-year-old software consultancy. In a business environment where software consultancies are succumbing to the ebb and flow of industry demand, this is an...
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Showing hospitality during software development
According to Danny Meyer, hospitality is “the single most powerful business strategy that doesn’t get taught enough in business school.” While hospitality is obviously important to a great restaurant...
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Atomic’s purpose: to be a company where work matters
We’ve said for the last six years that Atomic’s vision is to be a 100-year-old firm. Our vision has helped us make decisions and invest for the long-term. It guides my work as CEO. It plays well when...
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Elevating & distributing “glue work” flows out of our core principles
Glue work is stuff that needs doing, but falls outside of a job description. It can be critically important, but isn’t any specific person’s responsibility. Spending time on glue work has the...
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Atomic Ownership, Part 2: How the Atomic Plan & our ESPP work
This post is the second in a six-part series on Atomic Object’s ownership and the non-ESOP approach we took to gradually shift from a founder-owned to a broadly employee-owned company. The focus in...
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Lessons learned from a decade of non-ESOP employee ownership
In 2007, when Atomic Object was six years old, I decided I wanted to broaden our ownership base to include employees. In 2009, we executed the first offering of the Atomic Plan, a homegrown approach....
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[VIDEO] Bo Burlingham on Exiting Your Company Regret-Free
I’m a long time from leaving the company I started. There are problems to solve, things to learn, and new opportunities every day. Atomic Object is still very much my “hell, yeah”. But after reading Bo...
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The case for detailed time tracking, part 5 – Growth
How do you know the amount of work you can responsibly take on at the individual, team, or company level? Are you investing time in yourself and your company for growth in capacity and capabilities?...
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Bringing your whole self to work
Do your employees bring their whole selves to work? Can they? Can you? If not, you’re in a lose-lose-lose situation. The first loss is the employee’s—spending half your adult waking hours hiding or...
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The case for detailed time tracking, part 4 – Sustainability
Have you ever felt fatigued and found yourself telling others how much you are working or how a particular work responsibility is draining? Have you had a co-worker or key employee unexpectedly come to...
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Understanding the seasonal impact of vacation time on revenue
We’ve long observed that Q4 tended to be a heavy-hitter on paid vacation time, but I was surprised by the distinct seasonality pattern I found in our data. In our software development consultancy, time...
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