This post is several years old, but I feel the need to re-post as recently I have watched as several start-ups cut their kitchen budgets and then wonder where all the engineers were at lunchtime. People, people...what are you thinking? If you are considering cutting a food, coffee, beer, soft drink or potato chip perk at your start up...pause...read this and then............DON'T DO IT!!!
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In an eye-opening
survey conducted several months ago by the Boston Consulting Group, a leading
business think tank, three out of four top executives from 68 countries said
they planned to increase research and development spending this year. Fewer
than half of the 940 respondents, however, thought the increases would produce
the necessary profit or competitive advantage to justify the expenditures.
Why such a
disconnect? Perhaps it’s because they’re spending too much of their money on
the wrong things: technology, rather than Twinkies.
My experience
tells me that the rapidity with which an enterprise creates value is directly
related to how well it stocks the company kitchen. The lower the nutritional
value of the food choices, the greater the intellectual property produced.
I have spent time
in a variety of industries: software, hardware, compression technology, storage
technology, outsourced manufacturing and digital media. What they all have in
common is this: They all run on junk food.
During my career,
I have spent hundreds of all-night sessions alongside my entrepreneurial
colleagues as we prepared for market launches, product launches, term sheets,
due diligence reviews, tape outs, quarterly results, auditors and IPOs. I don’t
remember ever ordering in anything nutritious when the heat was on.
When engineers,
scientists and technologists have to stay up all night, they don’t reach for
No-Doz they reach for Cheetos.
It’s always a
sign of decline when a company slows down on junk food purchases. Many CEOs and CFOs deny the value of the
kitchen. It is an easy expense to control or cut when money gets tight. It
seems like no big deal. People can bring food in or buy their drinks from a
vending machine. They will understand that investors don’t want the company
“wasting” its limited resources buying snacks for the staff.
But the purpose of
junk food is not just to give the team a little blood sugar bump at 3:00 pm. When
you stop supplying fun food, morale and productivity decline.
As soon as your
supply of Twizzlers and Diet Coke runs out, so do your people. They leave the
office to go home or go out to eat. And when people leave, even for a short
lunch break, you can lose the rhythm … the hum of execution … to say nothing of
that esprit d’corps that comes with foraging for Pop Tarts at 2:00 am or the
creativity that accompanies your third Red Bull and fourth bag of Nacho
flavored Doritos in an hour.
I once worked for
a start-up computing company that grew to $7 billion in annual revenue during
my stint. In the early years we brought in doughnuts every morning. As time
went on the doughnut bill got to be pretty outrageous. So we cut back to doughnuts
only on Wednesday mornings. Funny thing, our product launches began to stretch
out. We were not moving as fast as we once had.
When I asked the
vice president of engineering what had happened, he said, “You cut back the doughnuts!
My guys used to get in here by 8:00 am every day to get their favorite doughnut
before it was gone. Now they come in around 9:00. I have 600 engineers in this
organization and I lost about 600 man hours per day because you stopped the doughnuts!”
Why should junk
food have this effect? Can a doughnut really motivate folks to come to work
earlier? Sure. It’s simple: People eat stuff at work they would never be caught
dead buying and never allow themselves at home. It is compensation for long
hours. And wholesome food really doesn’t cut it.
No one goes to
the community kitchen to fix themselves a salad and then go back to work. People
do not bond over broccoli spears and cottage cheese. When you go to the kitchen
at work it’s to find something fat or fun or naughty and a colleague to share
it with. Forget fresh fruit; it is the forbidden fruit that cranks up the
volume among entrepreneurial enterprises.
Junk food in the kitchen
is designed to keep your most important asset at work.
Do I really
promote enticing employees to spend too many hours at work and eat junk food to
boot? You bet. Junk food is the enabler of an unbalanced lifestyle and an
unbalanced lifestyle is crucial to success, especially at start-up companies.
Maybe we can seek
balance and nutrition after the company starts producing $500 million in annual
revenues. Until then, pass the Pork Rinds and Beef Jerky (I’m on Atkins).
