Explicit downsides to aspirational virtues // Seeing the trade-off // Clearer culture design
What an absolute delight to read 📕What You Do is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz. It’s been years since a business book gave me so much joy and value.
For me, the big meta-lesson is that, from a company culture/values perspective, every virtue exists in natural tension with an inescapable downside, and you ought to think about both sides together.
Want to move fast? Okay, you can do that if you’re willing to break things. Need to guarantee stability? That’s fine too, but now you can’t move quite so quickly.
At my company, for example, we designed our whole way of working in service to the aspirational value of: reducing urgency, reducing interruptions, and allowing all of us to spend more time doing deeper, calmer work. Sounds great!
Of course, the implicit trade-off is that we’re slow to check our messages, and that it’s practically impossible to quickly pull time and attention from anbody else on the team. So by optimizing for individual deep work, we’ve sacrificed on collaboration and responsiveness.
** (Conversely, a company that values prompt responses to inbound questions is implicitly accepting the costs of frequent interruptions and less deep work.)
What’s wild is that we never even thought about that trade-off. We made this huge, culture-defining decision without even understanding the cost that we were paying for it. *Because we were only looking at the aspirational side of the coin.*
Do you aspire to go above and beyond in solving every single customer’s individual, edge-case problems? That’s amazing! And it’s going to slow you down (and/or signficantly increase your development costs). Do you want to reach scale as quickly as possible? Also amazing! But that focus will mean allowing some percentage of your early users to become frustrated and disappointed by your product. Wait, that sounds terrible! But by accepting that consequence, you’re giving permission to your team to ignore the noise, to focus on the core use case, to nail it, and to scale it.
When Bezos said, “We are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time,” he was giving an explicit nod to the normally invisible cost of the key Amazonian virtue of making bold bets backed by long-term thinking. Sounds great! But there will be plenty of times when the analysts and stock market are going to hate it. Are you okay with sailing through that storm?
When we look only at the aspirational upside, we are lying to ourselves.
For example, I want our team to be undistracted, uninterrupted, and to enjoy as much deep work as possible. But I also want our paying community members (i.e., authors) to know that we’re going to show up every day for them, no matter what, and help them with whatever they need. Those two goals are in tension. (The stopgap has been for me to personally bear the burden, but that can’t last forever.)
So I think a better way to frame these questions is something like:
What percentage drag are we willing to add onto product development in order to deliver incredible everyday support to our community members?
And then, to ensure there’s no bias in the framing, flip it:
How much delay and inconsistency are we willing to add into our community in order to maximize our speed of product development?
And you know what? I don’t know the answer!
But it’s a damn good question, and it points toward a conversation that I very much want to have.
(Note: there’s so much breadth and value in Ben’s book – I took nearly a hundred pages worth of notes and takeaways, spending more than 20 hours on my first read-through of it. And I expect to spend at least as many hours again to return to, internalize, and action it. So don’t take this post as any sort of summary – it’s just a little riff on one small piece, and you should read the real thing.)