The Golden Rule & Golden Rule Jones

I recently read a description of Samuel Milton Jones, who was born in 1846 in North Wales. He immigrated to the United States and ended up starting an oil company where his management style was clearly well ahead of his time.

"Golden Rule" Jones developed a reputation for being a fair and honest businessman that paid special attention to the needs of his employees. As the story has been told, he only had one rule to govern the behavior of his employees and that was the Golden Rule - "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Simply, straight forward. He instilled this philosophy into the culture of the organization. In fact, he went well beyond what employers at that time were doing.

He instituted an 8-hour work day which was well below the norm of 10 hours. He gave employees vacation, paid holidays, insurance and held company picnics. He even took it a step further to meet the needs of his employee's families - he built a park and a playground - again unheard of at the time.

At this point you're probably trying to figure out why I even mentioned this. Well, as the story continues he also did away with bosses and timekeepers. There's the connection. He set up an environment in which his employees understood the values and principles of the organization. This allowed the employees to manage themselves and their time. They were connected, they were committed and they knew what was expected. Given the Golden Rule as their guiding principle, the employees implicitly understood the expected behavior. Jones established a culture and environment that allowed his organization to work in ways very different than other companies of his day.

We strive to achieve similar behavior and culture on our agile teams. We want the team to understand our values and principles governing and guiding our behavior.  Over one hundred years ago "Golden Rule" Jones understood the culture and environment we strive to achieve on our agile development teams today.