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Ricardo Semler, author of the book Maverick. He said that only two things grow for the sake of growth: businesses and tumors.

Jason Fried is a founder and CEO of 37signals, a software company based in Chicago. Fried also treats 37signals as something of a laboratory for innovative workplace practices--such as a recent experiment in shortening the summer workweek to just four days.

If you’re a short-term thinker you’d think so, but we’re long-term thinkers. We’re about being in business for the long haul and keeping the team together over the long haul. I would never trade a short-term burst for a long-term decline in morale. That happens a lot in the tech business: They burn people out and get someone else. I like the people who work here too much. I don’t want them to burn out. Lots of startups burn people out with 60, 70, 80 hours of work per week. They know that both the people or the company will flame out or be bought or whatever, and they don’t care, they just burn their resources. It’s like drilling for as much oil as you possibly can. You can look at people the same way.

This works because as much as we might try to mask our inner intentions and emotions, the language centers in our brain broadcast our inner secrets in subtle ways. Like a poker player’s ‘tell,’ the character and frequency of the words we use reveal a lot about our inner psychological states. Liars tend to avoid talking about themselves in the first person. Depressed and suicidal people speak a lot more about their bodies and health than happy people. By assembling a team of the world’s fanciest psychologists, linguists, programmers, and bartenders, we have put together behavioral models that allow our system to detect lies, narcissism, depression, and senility ten times better than any jackass in a suit can on CNN.