2003-04-05 SvsG Emails
20:01 from Nick
| Message-ID: | <3E8F7C4F.5090106@redhouse.com> |
| Date: | Sat, 05 Apr 2003 20:01:03 -0500 |
| From: | "N. Staddon" <n@redhouse.com> |
| To: | bubba@redhouse.com |
| Subject: | Some thoughts |
I've been noodling over our conversation, and one thought has come out so far. (More to follow, I suspect.)
Just to recap the relevant bits of conversation, as I understood them:
We were talking about philosophies of how credit is assigned for work. You advanced the philosophy of "yeah I killed it, but I'll eat last", which seemed to equate roughly with the idea of doing whatever was needed just because it was needed and not requiring that credit be given -- which apparently further equated with not wanting to itemize individual efforts you might contribute to the greater joint enterprise (be that family, business, or whatever).
This philosophy would work well if you were willing to do all the work and/or receive none of the credit. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that's why you're in this business.
Therefore, you must be expecting to do some of the work and receive some of the credit.
The next question would be, how much work are you expecting/willing to do, and how much credit are you expecting in return for that work.
One answer I think we discussed was the "50/50" answer -- we each do about half the work, and get half the proceeds.
The problem with this answer is that I don't agree that you do 50% of the work, based on my understanding of what the totality of the work is that needs to be done and the portion of it that I end up doing. (See, for example, the breakdown of vbz.net tasks I wrote up last year and emailed to you.)
So then we're stuck in a situation where I don't agree with what you want, but you have no evidence to present towards influencing my evaluation. We are in a stalemate; we each have the choice of either going against our own best judgement, or bowing out of the argument altogether by quitting the partnership. This is obviously an unstable situation which must be resolved.
My recommended solution is (and has been) that we reach agreements about what would be fair credit/compensation for tasks that each of us might do, and then proceed to document what we each actually do (and have done) so as to ultimately arrive at what credit/compensation we should each receive for work past and present. Start with the principles and then work gradually towards the specifics.
If you have another solution, I am open to reasonable alternatives.
All for now,
N.
