I love to follow Tim Ferriss’ lifestyle and blog. Who wouldn’t? Well, perhaps I shouldn’t go overboard, some of might not be able to. I mean he is still single, no kids (the we know of) and pretty much does what he wants when he wants, where the majority of us are still tied down to a location, person or family. Anyway, before I get carried away on a tangent, when I checked out his blog today looking for some excerpts from his book, I was happy to see a great new post about implementing 4HWW in corporate environments.

Tim uses Best Buy as a corporate example and I was amazed to read how they implemented a strategy based upon the experiences of a new 24-year-old hire instead of a old, grizzled and wizened CEO. What Best Buy implemented is called ROWE or Results-Only Work Environment. Developed by Carl Ressler and co-developer Jody Thompson.

An excerpt from Tim’s interview:

In a ROWE, each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. Currently, there are two authentic ROWEs—Fortune 100 retailer Best Buy Co, Inc. and J. A. Counter & Associates, a small brokerage firm in New Richmond, WI. At both organizations, the old rules that govern a traditional work environment—core hours, “face time,” pointless meetings, etc.—have been replaced by one rule: focus only on results.

…productivity has gone through the roof…

and

On the personal side, ROWE has transformed people’s lives. We’ve heard stories about ROWE saving marriages, allowing people to be better parents (and opened the door for some to actually be parents), get in shape and give back to their community.

That’s pretty powerful stuff. I would think that adopting this way of running a business probably pads the bottom line too with saving money on training rehires and the fact that work will actually get done as opposed to “pretending” it’s getting done.

For the full text of Tim’s entry, click here.

From around the net: Get Your Blog On! There’s a Post on Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger that thought was quite interesting. He basically talked about a couple things, Emerging New Trends In Blogging and Common Traits Of Successful Bloggers.

Rowes was talking about new Bloggers getting started today, and comparing [...]

Source: Internet Marketing | Steve Renner » Internet Marketing Strategy And Services

I found a really great resource today on site scalability. There’s a huge amount of information and you might want to have a few hours free to get into it. I will have to save it for another day when I have the time to read.

From the website itself:

We started High Scalability to help you build successful scalable websites. This site tries to bring together all the lore, art, science, practice, and experience of building scalable websites into one place so you can learn how to build your system with confidence. Hopefully this site will move you further and faster along the learning curve of success…

Stumbled across this service for people who write mobile web applications. From their about page:

Zong is the only web service that enables you to create and launch mobile services in 10 countries in under 10 minutes and generate revenues from each transaction.

Read more here.

… and I feel like such a heel. I just saw my cat Snoopy go up the back deck stairs so I thought he might like to come back inside. Got up to let him in the back door, and he comes trotting back down the stairs, turns the corner and he’s got a chipmunk in his mouth. <sigh>

I say to him: “I can’t let you in with that buddy. I appreciate the gesture, but it’s not coming inside.”

He meows with the thing in his mouth, with such a look on his face. We stand and stare at each other a minute. Me wishing I could let him in with it and make him happy, him thinking, “WTH? I caught this for you mom!”

So I closed the door on him and he stood there a little while longer then walked away back up the stairs to leave it on the deck instead.

<sigh>

Update: He’s come back down the stairs and decides to leave it at the back door before he comes in. Wise choice. Now I have to get rid of it before the dogs decide to eat it.

Was reading my Friendfeed email update today in between FTP’ing masses of files up to my servers, and came across this great blog post from Chris Nixon. It’s only because he was following Robert Scoble, whom I was following that I found it in the first place. I no longer primarily use my Google Mail interface anymore, having moved back to Outlook, but I thought all you Gmail and Google Hosted people might find this useful.

Tools to make your Gmail better

BlueDragon released their open source version recently.

What is BlueDragon? In short:

With three different versions to choose from, BlueDragon offers unmatched flexibility for the deployment of ColdFusion® Markup Language (CFML) pages with native technology platform integration on the operating system, web server and database of your choice.

Download the open source version here.