I miss the customer in this.
I've given the same advice in this format
Customer > Company
Company > Team
Team > Self
Company, Team, Self
31–40 of 64 posts
Re: Company, Team, Self
#32This feels like pretty typical capitalist rhetoric on the surface at least. Ignoring income - Do you go to work to make the company you work for more wealthy? Or do you go to work to enjoy what you do and make friends? Or do you go to work to learn new skills and better yourself? - In which order do you place the statements? (Yes, it's a false trichotomy.) Unless you're the company founder or a major shareholder I wo…
> health > family > work 100% agree. I would've flipped the thesis of the post in reverse order: yourself, your team, your company.
I agree, but it's more complex than both of those. If something matters to you, but matters a lot more to the company, it's probably a good idea to do what's good for the company. And if it matters a lot to you and not much to the company, it's probably right to do what you want.
When things meet in the middle it means you have to take lot of other things into account, too, to make the decision.
These hollow 1-way maps don't ever give good advice.
Re: Company, Team, Self
#33I loved this paragraph: > People are complex, and they get energy in complex ways. Some managers get energy from writing some software. That’s great, particularly if you avoid writing software with strict dependencies. Some managers get energy from coaching others. That’s great. Some get energy from doing exploratory work. Others get energy from optimizing existing systems. That’s great, too. Some get energy from spe…
But it's not just about people being different. It's also about how not everything people do has to be valuable to the customer. It can be valuable in the sense that the person stays in the organisation for longer if they get to do it. This realisation hit me when I was in a heated debate with my (then) product manager about what did and did not provide value for our customers. Then suddenly he said, "I'm pretty sure…
The thing that brought the same idea home for me is the idea that optimization is a destructive process. A business is a complex thing with many, many variables influencing its success. If you truly optimize "customer value" then you must give up everything else. A much more nuanced approach is to do what you did, and balance off various values against each other. Unfortunately this is very difficult to measure or "logic," it requires appreciating things like complexity, uncertainty, and indirection. But ultimately it produces better outcomes, and I'll take a manager who thinks like that over one that doesn't every time.
P.S. Recommended reading on this topic, "Obliquity" by John Kay is excellent.
Re: Company, Team, Self
#34It's always about incentive misalignment. As an employee thinking Company first will improve the bottom line for the company. As an executive thinking company first may well eliminate me as an employee. Why should an employee put the company interests above their own with that incentive alignment? The company should work to make the company's interests serve the individual interests of the employees
I think the idea in the article is something like - by thinking company-first you can arrive at better outcomes for yourself in the long run. It's not about self sacrifice. Certainly all the good gains in my career happened as a consequence of achieving big things for the company, which I wouldn't have landed with me-first thinking.
“Certainly all the good gains in my career happened as a consequence of achieving big things for the company, which I wouldn't have landed with me-first thinking.”
You did me-first. You just had situations where what was good for the company was good for you too. If you repeatedly did what was good for the company but never got anything for yourself you would probably stop. A lot of people are in a situation where what’s good for the company doesn’t give them any reward or is even negative (lose their job, more work).
Re: Company, Team, Self
#35“It was very frustrating to me that the correct answer to most prioritization and architecture projects was obvious”
Lost me there. People that think they know everything are the easiest to trick.
“People are complex, and they get energy in complex ways. Some managers get energy from writing some software”
No. We get energy from food.
“folks will accomplish more if you let them do some energizing work, even if that work itself isn’t very important.”
Cited himself. No proof of claim.
“ fun project is prototyping a throwaway service in a new programming language, then hmm, maybe that’s fine. But if you put it into production, then your energizing detour is going to be net negative on energy generation after other teams are pulled in to figure out how to support it. Honestly, don’t worry about the other rules, just make sure to follow this one.“
I think you should fix your deploy pipeline. Prototypes don’t belong in production. Now, if that started a prototype and team decided it had to go to prod, then it’s a good decision. They had their reasons
——
I gave up. It’s hard to take it seriously. Obviously the self is always more important.
Anyway, the main issue is you have two midwits purple-prosing past each other.
Circumstances change. Shit happens. There is no such thing as “the right way”. Or correct. You pick the lesser of two evils and do your best.
“still believe it’s the correct advice, and I continue to see managers who fail because they are missing this perspective. However, I’ve also seen some of the best leaders that I’ve worked with burn out by following this advice too loyally.”
Then by definition it’s not “correct” because it can fail and fails spectacularly.
Re: Company, Team, Self
#36It's always about incentive misalignment. As an employee thinking Company first will improve the bottom line for the company. As an executive thinking company first may well eliminate me as an employee. Why should an employee put the company interests above their own with that incentive alignment? The company should work to make the company's interests serve the individual interests of the employees
I think the idea in the article is something like - by thinking company-first you can arrive at better outcomes for yourself in the long run. It's not about self sacrifice. Certainly all the good gains in my career happened as a consequence of achieving big things for the company, which I wouldn't have landed with me-first thinking.
Contrary to that, some of my biggest achievements have been things I've done on my own for companies that the company didn't realize it needed. Things that I've done to make my job easier continue to make other people's jobs easier to this day. Nobody asked me to do those things. The business would have continued regardless. But these things I did to make my job easier have payed dividends in the long run.
Re: Company, Team, Self
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the idea in the article is something like - by thinking company-first you can arrive at better outcomes for yourself in the long run. It's not about self sacrifice. Certainly all the good gains in my career happened as a consequence of achieving big things for the company, which I wouldn't have landed with me-first thinking.
“Certainly all the good gains in my career happened as a consequence of achieving big things for the company, which I wouldn't have landed with me-first thinking.” You did me-first. You just had situations where what was good for the company was good for you too. If you repeatedly did what was good for the company but never got anything for yourself you would probably stop. A lot of people are in a situation where wh…
Yes and I think the advice in those situations is "leave" - nobody (smart) is suggesting you go company-first in those cases.
Re: Company, Team, Self
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is something I really struggle with. I think this difference of perspective is one of my greatest strengths, but in the last few places I've been I ended up burning out trying to get others to see the same things. Have you got any tips or advice for getting better at "persuasive education" or inspiring others to see the same things?
It's not just you who struggles with this - it's a very hard thing to do even for those who do it a lot. The number one barrier is just recognizing that it's a thing and you can work on it and do consciously (and sounds like you did that, so that's already huge!) In fact, what distinguishes executives is their experience, ability and willingness to get others to see and rally around a problem or goal - which is why I…
Yeah I mean this is great in theory, but in practice it's very very hard.
Suppose I were to ask you to explain to somebody non-technical why your application shouldn't have 12 different databases. It's incredibly easy to provide hand-wavey claims about inefficiency, but non-technical people are rightly skeptical (after all for every good idea there are 10 developers claiming a complete rewrite in XYZ will 2x everything).
How can you really provide hard evidence that an application with 1 database instead of 12 will be easier to develop in? Are you going to have devs write code for both cases, and show how many fewer lines of code it is? Are you going to take a dev survey? You can provide your word that certain production bugs were caused by this, but that's again presuming this individual believes you.
Even if you could really spell it out in detail, it's likely they wouldn't have the patience to listen. A chess grandmaster could probably spend an hour explaining a crucial chess move to me, why couldn't an engineering problem warrant over an hour of explanation?
I find completely irrelevant details (how distressed you are by the problem, your race, your last performance review) often have an outsized bias on how persuaded people are.
Re: Company, Team, Self
#39Company, Team, Self is backward, but not in the way you think.
It's backward because it's advice given to employees, when it needs to be given to be given to management.
Employees will and should do self-interest. It's the EXECUTIVES's duty/problem to ensure that they make workers' self-interests clearly aligned with Customers/ Company/Team/Self.
It's an interesting exercise to consider how to make it in an employee's self-interest to perform actions that prioritize the company's interest over the team. Of course managers have a perverse incentive here to prioritize a narrative that the team is always excelling in all ways, and thus may have an incentive to penalize/fire employees who put the company ahead of the team (e.g. by admitting the team's project is useless/redundant/poorly-defined).
I'm shocked by how few executive understand that their managers are a great threat to their company, because they have a huge vested interest in promoting dishonest narratives about the needs/successes of the company. The larger the management chain, the more likely a BS-er is in that chain.
Re: Company, Team, Self
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is something I really struggle with. I think this difference of perspective is one of my greatest strengths, but in the last few places I've been I ended up burning out trying to get others to see the same things. Have you got any tips or advice for getting better at "persuasive education" or inspiring others to see the same things?
It's not just you who struggles with this - it's a very hard thing to do even for those who do it a lot. The number one barrier is just recognizing that it's a thing and you can work on it and do consciously (and sounds like you did that, so that's already huge!) In fact, what distinguishes executives is their experience, ability and willingness to get others to see and rally around a problem or goal - which is why I…
#3 is nearly impossible in practice, because your audience will not sit patiently and entertain you while you do this. In nearly all cases, they will derail your explanation and bring in all sorts of tangential issues that may not even be relevant. Threading through this will require more energy than everyone is willing to spend, so someone will find a way to cut the conversation short. They might also be upset because they feel like you think they're slow, whether or not that's true and no matter how nice your delivery is.