SpringSters - Working Bunch

The wisdom clouds were spread over the PSPL campus in Erandwane for the second Pune Barcamp. SpringSters were there to share the good work that had been done at MangoSpring over the past six months. Two SpringSters presented at the event: Isha spoke about Cometd and the I, the Happiness Manager, spoke about…well…Happiness - why happiness is so important to an organization, and here at MangoSpring, we think it is an important part of something we call Organization 2.0.

While I will leave it to Isha to talk about cometd in her post , let me fill you in on what we think Organization 2.0 is all about and how we put it into practice at MangoSpring.

When we look at a traditional organization, what strikes us first is that when people become managers and HR mangers, they start focusing on processes. It seems that companies have built processes on top of processes in an effort to get things done. At MangoSpring we have adopted a minimalistic approach to these policies and have come up with a very small set of guidelines for all SpringSters. These guidelines are part of every SpringSters daily tasks – small or big…leading to what we call Organization 2.0.

We learned a lot from our own past experiences, debated what we hated and what we liked, picked-up some nuggets of wisdom from books like “Good to Great” by Jim Collins and “Maverick” by Ricardo Semler.

• Trust makes Organization 2.0 work, not control over everything and everyone. We believe that our people are as concerned about innovativeness, timeliness and quality of our products as we are.
• We believe in complete openness and transparency. We believe in promoting an organization where everyone knows what everyone else is doing – we call it a “naked organization”. To help with this, we built a tool, called Taskbin. With Taskbin, among other things, everyone can see what’s on everyone else’s plate (including CEOs). We liked it so much that we decided to make it a product of it’s own so that other companies can benefit from it (www.taskbin.com).
• We are BIG fans of the happiness philosophy. We believe that happy people are good to have around you and they impact you positively. They get more work done and they get things done faster. Being happy at work means enjoying and loving what you do and having fun while at it!
• Lastly, organization2.0 requires that we are very picky about who we hire. The right people are passionate about what they do and will collectively take the organization in the right direction. At MangoSpring we are very fortunate and have done extremely well in getting the right people onboard!

To sum it all up - there’s a lot of debate happening on why Organization 2.0 will work or will not work. We were very happy to share this at the Pune Barcamp. It works very well for us and let me tell you…it is so much easier and nicer than the traditional way of doing things.