Life at AOL – military expenditures

J. Michael Arrington (born 13 March 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and founder of TechCrunch, covering startups and technology news blog. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna (Ba economics, 1992) and Stanford University (JD, 1995) and practiced corporate and securities attorney in two law firms: & rejoined O'Melveny Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich. ? Read More

I've said this before, but work in AOL-this is my first experience in "big" companies. I watched, mainly with amusement as the Dilbert cartoon come to life around me. Some politicians and bureaucracies are useful (I'll think of some examples, just give me a second).

Some of them hilarious (forced to drink event). Some of them are really annoying. For example, every few weeks I get an email titled "AOL business conduct training" required "As a new employee, you are required to complete one hour of teaching Web standards of business conduct (SBCs)." the only problem is that I need to have access to the AOL network to complete training, and they never gave me access to the information barrier between me and the company.

But there is one odd policy that really stands out. AOL absolutely crazed on the interrogator. Our CEO Heather Harde is the burden involved in obtaining expenditure approved by the pain. But I also dealt with my share.

Last night, for example, I clean up my desk. I have the envelope, I keep business expenses when my AOL, issued the credit card was turned off for the day was the hotel bill for travel. Some expenses, taxi and Bill restaurant. I looked at them, thoughts on the process for making these expenditures and then having to defend them via phone call (Heather will probably save me from this, but there goes an hour of your time). So I did a good thing. I chopped this income is about $ 1500 – because it's not worth the pain.

Part of this process – at least at one point if not now, was a third-party firm costs is subordinate to the direction that would assign you a case number and ask you to do things like send the actual boarding passes to them to protect the flight costs. Sometimes we can't get our writers for business trips of how difficult it is to be reimbursed.

Then today I was talking to someone at AOL, in particular, and he raised his own trouble with reimbursement. I asked why the company is so crazed about it.

Enter Gregory Horton. This guy was head of HR at AOL 10 years ago, when the company was still part of time Warner. His story is amazing. He explicitly create dummy Consulting Corporation and AOL accounts $ 100000 per month for did work. In General, the company lost more than a million dollars for Horton, or so the story goes.

From Horton AOL has nearly ten years of draconian through cost-recovery policy.

This is one of those points of friction in the company, must be eliminated. To find and punish the Hortons. But let your loyal employees break. Don't make them feel like criminals trying to get legitimate expenses approved and paid in a timely manner. In the end it's just have set themselves a competitive disadvantage against nimbler firms.

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