At the risk of pounding the Jobs-is-dead meme too hard, this reminds me of a good story I read recently about Steve Jobs:
Jobs tells the VP that if the garbage in his office is not being emptied regularly for some reason, he would ask the janitor what the problem is. The janitor could reasonably respond by saying, "Well, the lock on the door was changed, and I couldn't get a key."
An irritation for Jobs, for an understandable excuse for why the janitor couldn't do his job. As a janitor, he's allowed to have excuses.
"When you're the janitor, reasons matter," Jobs tells newly minted VPs, according to Lashinsky.
"Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering," says Jobs, adding, that Rubicon is "crossed when you become a VP."[1]
We can go back further than that. Hal Geneen was the CEO famous for expanding ITT into a multi-national conglomerate using rigorous metrics-driven management. His favourite saying was,
“Managers must manage.” As in, your job as a manager is to overcome the obstacles, not to use them for excuses. What do you manage if not the impediments to success?
So true. It reminds me of working on a project and there are so many times when some piece of the stack that we didn't write is acting up. You want, so bad, to say "well, we can't do this because X has a bug in it". But then you remind yourself that your users don't care why your product doesn't work, just that it does. And you spend some frustrating amount of time finding a work around.
Amen. I have lost count of the number of times where I saw engineering teams taking the full blame for failure where it was middle management dropping the ball with regards to dismissing the massive engineering risks engineering have found with third-party components, vendors, etc.
When morale and motivation is in the pits, don't expect miracles or heroics to save the day.
It would be a huge challenge to work in that environment, but also hugely rewarding when you find success. Or hugely crushing when you find failure.
But I really appreciate Jobs's sentiment here: you're an Apple VP, which means you can marshall resources to solve problems. If you can't fulfill the title, someone else will.
If you want to truly experience the crossing of the rubicon try starting a business with your own money where success or failure is squarely on your shoulders. Where there are no do overs and the money lost is not other people's money. And you don't get a chance to pivot to something else with a pat on the back as a great learning experience. And back to living with your parents.
I'm currently going through that & it's been a hell of a ride.
I'm (barely) profitable and things are really looking up, but there were (and still are) some pretty dismal moments while bootstrapping with my life's savings.
But remember that you will still fail, and if your not, your not pushing the limit enough. It's ok to fail, but the next answer is what can you do to solve it with the resources you have, not to stop at an excuse.
This post reads more like the author trying to come to terms with his own tortured, confrontational, win/lose outlook on running a company. It also reads like a case of passive/aggressive venting on a portfolio company CEO who is driving him nuts, or the aggregate of several such cases.
In any case, this is not useful advice. And patently untrue. When the chips are down, people do care, and people help out, if you explain the challenges you are facing and the odds you are up against. Not least of all, "your mama".
The article also strikes me as a misinterpretation of the quote and the exchange between owner and coach. I would read it differently... the coach is at his wits end, calls the owner for advice, and the owner doesn't merely say "nobody cares"! He says "just coach your team". Meaning, don't worry about all the things you thought you were going to do (with the team roster you thought you had) and just hang in there, stick to your core strength (coaching) and do your best to make it work.
No wonder the author has anguished posts on his blog like "What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology" wherein we read such gems of wisdom as "It’s like the fight club of management: The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown." Not really. The first rule is relax, don't take yourself so damn seriously. Actually, there are no rules. Isn't that why you became CEO?
People infected with attitudes like this suck all the life and joy out of doing business. It's not all about people standing around yelling "no excuses! yo' mama don't care!" at each other. Carrying around excess psychological freight like this only slows you down, makes you hate yourself and the industry, etc. If there are problems, you deal with them. Often times, solving problems means figuring out the parameters of the difficulty, putting all the resources you can against the problem, and then going and finding the right people who care to help you out with the rest.
I like this. I think there's a common fallacy where people want to think that other people are more selfish and uncaring than they are. Maybe it makes it all seem more explicable?
But it's not true. Humans haven't managed to colonize the whole planet because we're so mean to each other-- that doesn't even make sense. The physical universe is impartial and uncaring; people have succeeded primarily because, most of the time, we aren't.
We have access to such great information sources these days, we hear so much about war, crime, and poverty, it's easy to forget that we actually live in the most peaceful, prosperous times that mankind has ever seen. It's so easy to get ahead for a little while by screwing the other guy, we forget that the only reason any of us exist is because a relatively short time ago, and ever since, some apes realized that if they just put aside their differences and worked together for a little while, they could conquer the world. And they were right.
A little bit of trust, humility, and respect for humanity goes a long way. Have a problem? Tell your mother. She probably can't do much to help, but she'll care, and that is way more important than people think.
I think this is great advice for a CEO's emotional well being. But it isn't true. I know I care a ton about the challenges our portfolio companies face and I know many other stakeholders who do too. Capitalism isnt uncaring
Sounds like some good tough love for CEOs (and everyone else really) who care too much. That's probably most of them, and a whole lot of employees, investors, and even customers too.
IMO the why matters, but only for a moment, and then the "what are you going to do next?" has to become the focus. That way caring so deeply doesn't become unproductive -- you grieve the pain of mistakes and unfortunate outcomes for no more than a minute or two ("and this too will pass") and then keep moving. Startups are like sharks, if we stop moving we die.
This is great advice that applies to life as much as to work.
Just changing the last three words of the last paragraph gives:
"All the mental energy that you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. It’s best to spend zero time on what you could have done and all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares, just LIVE YOUR LIFE."
If it's your own team/project/company, odds are very good that it's not the things you're doing right that are in the way, it's the things that you're doing wrong, or that are going wrong. A systematic analysis of failure modes ("5 whys" in Scrum) is going to help.
Education is learning from other people's mistakes. If the it's another organization's problems or failures, then learning from them is a great way to avoid making the same mistake yourself. When forwarding the recent AmEx information disclosure story to my team, I added the question "do we have a '?debug=true' feature?"
comp.risks has been one of my go-to reading sources for a few decades. There's a reason for that.
To point on the story: identifying causes (and corrections) for injuries has been a big part of professional sports in the past decade. Moneyball is a story of doing highly systematic analysis of what it takes to win (and avoiding the mistakes leading to losses), in a manner any scrappy startup can appreciate: not enough money.
And much of the story of early industrial organization (and risk management) was taking a statistical approach to production (and loss) and realizing that though both were based on stochastic principles, this did not mean that the conditions or outcomes were unmanageable.
He's not saying you shouldn't care, he's saying nobody else cares what the reason is. Nobody is going to give him a win just because his best players are out.
Sure they care. Sports fans are easier on a coach if they know he's got an injured team; customers are easier on businesses if they know the reason their product isn't working is due to an independant third party.
I can't control the weather, earthquakes, the financial system, or other cars on the highway.
I can take actions to protect / advance myself and my interests, particularly if I've got a deeper understanding of what's going on and why.
Don't buy or rent in flood zones, slide-prone hillsides, or fill. Keep my sleeping area free of objects that might fall on me. Drive sanely, buckle up, get a car with airbags, keep a defensive distance between myself and other vehicles, avoid vehicles that appear to be rolling risks (unsecured loads, generally poor maintenance, cell phone usage, erratic driving patterns). If stocks look to be at a long-term high and are at a period of decades of continuous growth (as they were in the late 1990s), odds are good that gross appreciation is going to be minimal (as it has been from ~1999 - 2011 ... and counting). If peak oil is true and its implications bear out, living closer to where your life happens (work, home, recreation, shopping) is going to be more sensible than having a 100 mile daily commute.
If a company consistently appears to base its actions on the interests of its OEMs and business partners, rather than its end-users, shun its products (Microsoft, among many others).
Sure, you could just not care. But applying some reasonable intelligence to the process offers benefits.
It's helpful to operate on the assumption that others don't care. Shouldn't mean that you should adopt that approach yourself.
This is a great lesson in capitalism. When you're the boss, nobody gives your partial credit for good attempts. Either the team succeeds and everyone is happy, or they don't, and the boss takes the fall.
Taking this a step beyond the intended message (of football and business), this shows an interesting dichotomy in education in jobs. In many countries (example: Japan, France) school is results based, with admissions based soley on rigorous exams. The real world is softer based more on credentials and connections than results. Compare that to the US... Being a good football player (or trombone player) can help you get into school, but the real world is much less forgiving.
Our economy has tough times, but the unforgiving cruel world helps us stay strong.
"This is a great lesson in capitalism. When you're the boss, nobody gives your partial credit for good attempts. Either the team succeeds and everyone is happy, or they don't, and the boss takes the fall."
Perhaps in pure capitalism & small business, but what with the era of large salaries & golden parachutes often those who mislead aren't really "punished". There is also plenty of CYA & scapegoating in the professional world along with a lot of people who eat it up.
This should not stop at the CEO level, it needs to apply to every job within the company, at every level.
Nobody cares about your excuses, whoever you are. Everyone's job involves goals, milestones and deadline. If you are performing you deserve commensurate rewards, if you are failing nobody should care to hear your excuses - only what could you fix and perhaps why you believe you deserve another chance.
The performance of the CEO and overall company performance depends on everyone pulling their weight. If the CEO does not enforce accountability throughout the entire organization, he/she is heading for failure and nobody would care about their sorry fate!
Most employees have a very different mindset. It seems that a company composed only of people who understand and follow the 'nobody cares' principle would be a perfectly operating entity where everyone always smoothly goes in the right direction, but I'm not actually convinced that's possible. 'Nobody cares' personal philosophy is very much correlated with alpha personalities, and you can't have a team where everyone is an alpha - they'll rip each other apart with conflicts. It's very tricky to balance this well - I'd like to see how different leaders do it in organizations of different sizes.
The incentives at a typical corporation are also not setup to encourage "nobody cares" attitudes. Employees are paid whatever the results are, unless they do something egregiously bad. They have every incentive to care about their effort and motivations - that's what they get fired for - and no incentive to care about results. That's diametrically opposed from an equity-owning cofounder (who basically can't be fired, unless the board forces them out) but doesn't get paid anything unless the company succeeds.
You could argue that this is the reason why anyone would accept a salaried employment position. In a well-run knowledge organization, employees have just as much freedom as startup founders do. The difference is risk assignment: under an employment agreement, the employer assumes the risk (and reward) that the product may fail despite the employee's best efforts, while in a startup, the founder assumes the risk that the company may fail for reasons outside his control. (The incentives issue actually falls out of this as a form of moral hazard.)
Note that the alternative of paying everyone by results doesn't always work either. Many financial firms use this approach. The problem is that realistically, in a decent-sized organization, people don't have a measurable effect on outcomes, and results will be dominated by randomness anyway. If you pay for results but results are not under the worker's control, you end up incentivizing risky behavior, because the worker's upside is potentially unlimited but their downside is generally capped at "everything they own". This was the problem at Enron, LTCM, and many hedge funds in the financial crisis.
Is this meant to be taken as advice or something? Because it's useless advice. He could have at least said something like, "Be prepared for the day when all your assumptions about how to proceed are upended and you are left with nothing. Be mentally prepared to be broadsided by fate. Be operationally prepared to rebuild from scratch. Be prepared to get a carton of Tums and make the tough decision that gives you a bloody ulcer."
I think you completely missed the point. The point is this: nobody cares why you failed, just that you failed, so put your energy towards finding a way to turn it into a win rather than coming up with an excuse for why it all fell apart.
Jobs tells the VP that if the garbage in his office is not being emptied regularly for some reason, he would ask the janitor what the problem is. The janitor could reasonably respond by saying, "Well, the lock on the door was changed, and I couldn't get a key."
An irritation for Jobs, for an understandable excuse for why the janitor couldn't do his job. As a janitor, he's allowed to have excuses.
"When you're the janitor, reasons matter," Jobs tells newly minted VPs, according to Lashinsky.
"Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering," says Jobs, adding, that Rubicon is "crossed when you become a VP."[1]
[1] http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-05-07/tech/30043798...