Cake Wednesdays

James Aylett, Tuesday 1st March, 2016

When I was at Artfinder, one of the rituals we developed by accident was cake Wednesdays. What started as ensuring we had cake for important milestones, such as our first anniversary (when we launched, for reasons I can no longer remember we celebrated with liquorice pipes and Brunel expressions), eventually became a competitive challenge of attempting to out-do previous weeks. Someone baked or brought a cake, and the company shared status and updates across teams. And we ate the cake.

I’ve talked about this occasionally since then as accidental (as in unintended) but welcome culture, something that just emerged from the personalities around Artfinder at the time. I’d never urge anyone to do exactly the same, because these things have to grow organically from the team. However I was delighted to discover recently that someone else independently invented cake Wednesdays! I hope they’re still doing them.

More recently, while I was consulting for Scoota and completely independently of me, one of their summer social activities was a GBBO-style competition. Sadly not on Wednesdays, so they don’t get to join the club.