[yukichan]

I feel like many men sometimes aren't aware of how little they help around the house with chores and taking care of the children, so I am proactive and plan stuff with my wife. I don't wait for her to ask me. That isn't dysfunctional.

There's also a lot of process in families. Some you can automate now, like paying the bills. Some processes are routines. Getting up, getting our child dressed, walking her to school, picking her up, taking her to her after school activities. Doing her homework with her.

There's also process with checking things around the house. Checking the fire alarms regularly, scheduling dentist appointments, making plans for seeing family. These are all processes.

The whole original article came off as ignorance and out of touch. As someone with an academic background in Anthropology and Sociology the author doesn't seem to understand what culture is or how hierarchy and unbalanced power relationships in the office place work. It's not a very sophisticated treatment of the topic in any regard. And in that vein, my opinion is that as long as the times are good and you're not hiring a bunch of dickhead managers your culture will be fine. If you take your culture to mean don't hire old people because they don't play the video games your 20 somethings do then your shit is fucked. In the end, when things go bad in the business, culture will sour.

[rpdillon]

There's a difference between process and discipline. A lot of what you're describing is discipline: you have an internal compass that keeps you oriented on the stuff that matters: helping your wife with the house and kids, doing home maintenance, and taking care of periodic tasks. Basically, you make a to-do list and execute on it.

Process, at least in the corporate context, is about a bunch of stuff you do regularly to check on whether on not the stuff that matters is being attended to. Getting your kid dressed is not a good analog to the 'process' that is being referred to in this sense. Process is a tax on hiring people that don't have that internal compass, or on operating in an environment that stifles that internal compass. If the to-do list isn't there, isn't being followed, or doesn't work in some other way, process exists to find out that there's a problem so everyone can sit down and talk about what to do to fix it.

Put simply: you're defining a culture in your household that is healthy. It's exactly what the author hopes for in a company, and that's not process, it's discipline.

[nostrademons]

Process isn't about stifling the internal compass, it's about making sure that everyone's compass aligns. I've known many engineering teams where individually everybody is incredibly smart, hard-working, dedicated, and focused on what matters, but what matters is different to every person. As a result, the team got nowhere. Process is essentially shared discipline: it's getting everybody aligned so that when they focus and work hard, they get somewhere as a group instead of undoing each others' work.

[eldude]

I'd be really curious then to get your opinion on a new managerless structure I've been developing. My contact info's in my profile if you're interested.