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In 2002, Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, two wet-behind-the-ears Australians just out of university, borrowed $10,000 on their credit cards to start a software company. They anointed their venture with a bold name—Atlassian, after the Greek titan Atlas, who bore the world on his shoulders. And they set about creating a company to compete against some of the big names in enterprise software. At the time, their venture seemed loony. Today, it seems inspired. Through its combination of great computer code and smart business practices, Atlassian now rakes in about $35 million per year—and employs nearly two hundred people in offices in Sydney, Amsterdam, and San Francisco.
But like any good entrepreneur, Cannon-Brookes walks through life beneath a cloud of perpetual dissatisfaction. He’d seen successful companies stagnate and wished to avoid that fate for his. So to spark even greater creativity among his team, and to make sure Atlassian’s programmers were having fun at work, he decided to encourage them to spend a day working on any problem they wanted, even if it wasn’t part of their regular job.
This offbeat off-day gave birth to several ideas for new products and plenty of repairs and patches on existing ones. So Cannon-Brookes decided to make the practice a permanent part of the Atlassian culture. Now, once a quarter, the
company sets aside an entire day when its engineers can work on any software problem they want—only this time, “to get them out of the day to day,” it must be something that’s not part of their regular job.
At two P.M. on a Thursday, the day begins. Engineers, including Cannon- Brookes himself, crash out new code or an elegant hack—any way they want, with anyone they want. Many work through the night. Then, at four P.M. on Friday, they show the results to the rest of the company in a wild-and-woolly all- hands meeting stocked with ample quantities of cold beer and chocolate cake. Atlassian calls these twenty-four-hour bursts of freedom and creativity “FedEx Days”—because people have to deliver something overnight. And deliver Atlassians have. Over the years, this odd little exercise has produced an array of software fixes that might otherwise never have emerged. Says one engineer, “Some of the coolest stuff we have in our product today has come from FedEx Days.”
This isn’t a pay-for-performance plan, grounded in the mechanistic assumptions of Motivation 2.0. It’s an autonomy plan, nicely tuned to the alternate strains of Motivation 3.0. “We’ve always taken the position that money is only something you can lose on,” Cannon-Brookes told me. “If you don’t pay enough, you can lose people. But beyond that, money is not a motivator. What matters are these other features.” And what a few future-facing businesses are discovering is that one of these essential features is autonomy—in particular, autonomy over four aspects of work: what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and whom they do it with. As Atlassian’s experience shows, Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T’s: their task, their time, their technique, and their team.
Task
Cannon-Brookes was still dissatisfied. FedEx Days were working fine, but they had an inherent weakness. “You built something in twenty-four hours, but you didn’t get any more time to work on it,” he says. So he and cofounder Farquhar decided to double-down their bet on employee autonomy. In the spring of 2008, they announced that for the next six months, Atlassian developers could spend 20 percent of their time—rather than just one intense day—working on any project they wanted. As Cannon-Brookes explained in a blog post to employees: A startup engineer must be all things—he (or she) is a full time software
developer and a part time product manager/ customer support guru/internal systems maven. As a company grows, an engineer spends less time building the things he personally wants in the product. Our hope is that 20% time gives engineers back dedicated stack time—of their own direction—to spend on product innovation, features, plugins, fixes or additions that they think are the
most important.6
This practice has a sturdy tradition and a well-known modern expression. Its pioneer was the American company 3M. In the 1930s and 1940s, 3M’s president and chairman was William McKnight, a fellow who was as unassuming in his manner as he was visionary in his thinking. McKnight believed in a simple, and at the time, subversive, credo: “Hire good people, and leave them alone.” Well before it was fashionable for managers to flap on about “empowerment,” he made a more vigorous case for autonomy. “Those men and women to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want
to do their jobs in their own way,” he wrote in 1948.7 McKnight even encouraged employees to engage in what he called “experimental doodling.”
“As an entrepreneur, I’m blessed with 100% autonomy over task, time, technique and team. Here’s the thing: If I maintain that autonomy, I fail. I fail to ship. I fail to excel. I fail to focus. I inevitably end up either with no product or a product the market rejects. The art of the art is picking your limits. That’s the autonomy I most cherish. The freedom to pick my boundaries.”
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