On Tim

“Excellence Breeds Success”

I have this memory of this message being on Tim’s desk. Tim had an entire career in the Marines, and I was lucky enough to work (indirectly for him) at Arise for a few years. This may be my misunderstanding of the situation, but it seemed like with Tim, and the Medal from Vice President Al Gore, and the framed patent for Starmatic, all those people and things went away - on to other places or stuck in a closet, in exchange for new values ($$$).

I think he really looked out for me, and helped me grow. He didn’t need to, but he did.

That’s about as positive as this post is going to get.

“Excellence Breeds Success,” and a change in the value system both get to the point of this post - culture. Maintaining it through change and ensuring your values are aligned to your culture.

What would you say the opposite of “Excellence Breeds Success” is?

How about writing into your job description that you are looking for “overconfident individuals” or “individuals capable of willful ignorance,” or the ever-pervasive “applying independent judgment”. Maybe 2 out of 3 of those don’t make it in, but they are implied in action and inaction. Sometimes it feels like the job description calls for the poorest performers, or even rewards it. As a leader, if you do not trust your team, delegate to your team, use both observations and data to maintain the spec of your team, and keep your value system in check a new culture will take over.

That new culture could be like the blob monsters that attach themselves to people in the 2012 film “Branded” - this sticky, thick, dirty, smelly muck that sticks to everything they touch.

So, if you accept something enough, it becomes a part of the culture. You need to correct it, you need to get in front of it, and acceptance can be as passive as “you still have a job.”

These undesired, yet culturally endemic behaviors most often observed are overconfidence. I’m guilty of this. You need to listen to your customers, and you need to play back what you hear. Learn from their feedback and listen to it as well. You are not the expert of your customer, but you are (or should be - otherwise why bother) the expert of solving the customer’s problem.

What about willful ignorance? Information is not given, it is taken, so take it.

Where do you end up in this culture? Well, imagine building something and being forced to watch it fall apart, and along the way you try real hard to help, and that help is for nothing because in the end, it’s … not what you thought it would be. Along the way you are told you are the problem, and meanwhile, leadership is asleep at the wheel as the culture shifts until it’s too late.

Culture makes or breaks a business.

There’s another challenge in culture - that’s when your organization grows beyond a single room. A divide is formed in a well-established organization where one group (the newer group) was rewarded with near entirely fun projects. Probably good for those folks, eh? What about the advance team? The blood, sweat and tears team? Relegated to janitorial duties.

This is why decisions matter and hindsight is rarely right (How To Decide by Annie Duke dives deep into this).

This is also why identifying an issue early on (back to observations and data), recognizing and ACCEPTING that it’s a problem, and seeking help for it is so critical. But asking for help is cognitively challenging - you are fighting a fire, after all. This is where leadership shows value, and as a leader you need to watch, you need to delegate on behalf of others, and you need to set timelines. Any of those slip, and it becomes an escalation with a pre-planned playbook - do not fall prey to the lens of optimism.

Probably a handful of Nine Inch Nails lyrics to describe the situation. Also some choice quotes from Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, and even Casino, but none of those are appropriate for a semi-professional blog :)

I’ll leave on a positive note: Each morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.