I had asked one of my friends to get some potato salad, since I had provided the venue, bought and prepared all the meat and supplied free juice and soda, too (it was a B.Y.O.B.). He never came through. Imagine, if you will, founding a production entity with friends, then delegating a critical task to one of these individuals. Imagine he doesn't come through, and the production is jeopardized as a consequence. What do you do?
Generally speaking, "management" is not "friends" with the workforce, and this is why. Familiarity breeds contempt, even in the most informal of contexts; with an increase in responsibility comes and increase in consequence, and it becomes too risky to foster excessive accessibility between PHBs (yes, that would be you, intrepid entrepreneur) and grunts. I think the key lies in being friendly, but maintaining that clear sense of distance and difference.
When employees do what is expected of them - and when you give them every necessity to maximize that likelihood - then a genuinely genial atmosphere emerges, and better work is done. But it remains the responsibility of the management/administration to assign tasks according to demonstrated ability (I knew my friend was often unreliable, so I made sure his task was non-critical), to set reasonable deadlines and to accept the following maxim: everything good is a result of their work, every failure is your fault. (If you had a bad worker, you should have fired him before he endangered your overall production.)
I attended a Careers in Media Seminar on Wednesday. It didn't tell me a whole lot that was new, but I did find out that my university has a Small Business Development Program, where I can run my business plan by the staff and receive feedback as well as resources to shore up my deficiencies. I'll be visiting on Monday and share what I learn - or don't.
Flakes are a subsection of humanity who have an undeveloped ability to schedule anything, mostly due to a combination of immaturity, narcissism, and an undeveloped empathy lobe in the brain.
The worst part is that flakes are either oblivious of how they're treating those around them, or they think they're cute in a "Stimpy" sort of way.
Best I can recommend is to avoid them until they grow up. If you insist on associating them, relegate them to a "never trust them to do anything" level.