2. People who are workaholics are likely to attempt to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at the problem. If you’re dealing with people working with anything creatively that’s a deadbeat way to get great work done.

4. If all you do is work, your value judgements are unlikely to be sound. Making good calls on “is it worth it?” is absolutely critical to great work. Missing out on life in general to put more hours in at the office screams “misguided values”.

Anybody who’s worked in a tech startup for more than a few years realizes that what gets built is far more important than how much heroic sacrifice it takes to build that thing. Asking up front “hey, why are we building foo from scratch rather than using the open-source foo library can turn months of heroic work on really cool code into weeks of deliberate, pace work on really useful code.

Encourage and facilitate the use of public space and mobility in the office. Provide laptops, reliable wireless connectivity, and comfortable and centralized public spaces and employees will do the rest: spontaneous creative collaboration, informal “pickup” meetings, fostering interpersonal relationships, etc.

This is what I think the Center does well.

But in all seriousness, I think Calacanis’s redefinition of the term “workaholic” in his second edit of the original post to mean “someone who loves the work” is just right. The problem and the cause of so much of the debate (including that on the 37signals blog) is that “workaholic” is a such a value laden term. There’s no doubt, however, that having employees who believe passionately in the mission of the organization and are willing to throw all of their energy, creativity, personality, and camaraderie into furthering its goals are essential to a dynamic digital humanities center. Fortunately, we have many of those kinds of people working at CHNM.

37 signals says you should fire the workaholics.