The way to take responsibility
Don’t demand authority.
Eagerly take responsibility.
Relentlessly give credit.
- Seth Godin, on The quickest way to get things done and make change
A few months ago, I reached the point in my job as Product Manager when I became the go-to person if anything related to the product broke. All the complaints came to me. I felt constantly under the gun for things beyond my control.
This was very hard to take. I was constantly caught off guard. To be clear, the product generally works tremendously well. But minor things always come up. I felt like a deer caught in headlights whenever someone raised an issue. Because I cared so much, I took every complaint personally. Not that I felt that I was being insulted per se, but I felt personal grief (as a colleague once said) over the product’s every minor failing. It was very difficult to bear.
At one point, I considered distancing myself and trying to learn to not care. If I cared less, it would be easier to swallow, easier to let things roll off my back. Easier to not feel my stomach clench up every time someone came by to tell me some aspect of the product wasn’t working.
I also got defensive. Totally natural response. Emotionally, in my head, the first reaction was to defend myself. But I didn’t even build this thing! I didn’t know this was going on. (Then I felt guilty - how could I not have known this was going on.) This is not even my customer. (But it is my product.) I can’t even fix any of it. Someone else has to go into the code and fix it. Why isn’t that person being blamed.
Then came the hardest part. I needed to take all of this frustration that was being thrown at me, and I had to swallow it and filter as much of it as possible (which will not be enough), and I had to turn around to the engineer and ask in cheerful spirits if he would please fix this bug, it’s important to our customer.
(In really difficult cases, I had to work through the engineer’s protests and persuade her that this was a good investment of her time.)
Good times.
It was only in the last couple of weeks that it dawned on me that my dad’s job as manager must be like that. All the time. This is the crux of management. You are responsible for everything, even though you don’t actually do anything. But if you want this role, you must take responsibility, regardless of whether or not you think it’s your fault. It is always going to be your fault. So take responsibility. Take it willingly, take it eagerly.
As for feeling like you have no control, that is not an acceptable response. The way to earn authority is to exercise it before it is bestowed upon you. Take responsibility first, act with authority, get things done. Eventually if you keep doing this and do it well, official authority will follow. But by that time, it won’t matter to you. You won’t need official authority to get things done.
And when the bug is finally fixed by the engineer, give away the credit. Give away all of it. That, too, is an act of authority. That, too, is part of the responsibility.
(How’s that for working in public.)
What actually matters in goal setting
The engineers on my product team asked why I didn’t defend their interests in our quarterly goal setting meeting. This is presumably part of my job as Product Manager. (This is funny to me, since it’s the only time they have ever accused me of not defending them. Whether they like it or not, I have far more frequently erred on the other side.)
The senior leadership exec was doing his job of raising our goals. All the numbers were being adjusted upward. By “adjusted” I mean ratcheted way up. We have been here long enough to know he does this every time. This time, as with all previous times, a couple of the engineers tried to convince him that these goals were impossible.
I would agree, except for this:
Two quarters ago, the leadership set a revenue goal that I thought was a major stretch. To give you a sense of magnitude, I think most people would agree that any goal that requires more than a 100% increase is intimidating. But we blew through that target. In fact, we blew through it with a month left to go in the quarter.
Last quarter, encouraged by our success, we set what we all believed was a genuinely bold goal ourselves, only to see the leadership raise it far beyond (what I considered) reasonable reach. The number was so ridiculous that it made me nervous to think about it seriously, so I turned it into a bit of a joke. When we made major decisions or shifts in the way we operated, I would say, “Oh yeah, we need to hit that $X revenue goal.” In the end, we missed the ridiculous goal but came surprisingly close to it. We are likely to pass it fairly soon, if we haven’t done so already. The joke, oddly enough, became inspiring because it was a Big Hairy Audacious Goal.
With this track record, we’ve pretty much lost all credibility for our claims that certain goals are impossible. We have done “the impossible”. A slightly bizarre, mostly good problem to have.
So this time I didn’t step in to argue down the numbers.
First, we have consistently lost this argument over numbers with the leadership. We can persuade but cannot control what number they want. Similarly, they have limited control over whether we reach that goal. They cannot force us to reach it, if it really is beyond reach. Ultimately, we build what we build.
Second, the number doesn’t really matter. I mean, it does matter in terms of training our motivations. A very high goal trains us to raise our ambitions. On the flip side, if we set a more humble goal, it’s not like we’re going to reach it mid-quarter and go take a vacation for the rest of that quarter. We don’t operate that way.
Third, we were in broad agreement with the direction of the goals. These were priorities we had selected. We believed they were the most important goals for our product at this stage. So regardless of what the numbers were, the work wasn’t going to change very much. Our team was going to put its best foot forward in the direction of the goals.
I have no idea if we’ll reach these goals this time. I never know. But I’ve learned that that’s part of the point. If you can see a clear path to your goal, you’ve set the goal too low.
Connecting online to offline
For these two weeks back home, I’ve scheduled lots of meals (when one is in Singapore, one eats) to catch up with friends. These are typically with Singaporean friends I’ve known since my school days. This is the first time that most of these meals are with people whom I’ve gotten to know in the past year. A couple of you I’ve only met once in person. One of you I have never met in person. We have only had a very long Skype call.
I suppose our circles have evolved. I have taken more introductions since b school and since joining the startup community. The more introductions you take, the more you want to do, the more you receive. A virtuous cycle.
I have been fortunate enough to meet most of you through very good email introductions. The first degree friends who did the introductions knew why we should get to know each other. There is context, there is some kind of essential common ground. There is something valuable that could be exchanged. That something valuable is most often each person’s perspective (on startups, on bondbreaking, on whatever). Not all introductions are created equal. With weaker introductions, that something exchanged is information. With very good introductions, that something exchanged is friendship. In the best cases, a kindred spiritness.
In all these instances, our offline interactions have been enhanced, sustained by our online presences. I think about the friend I am meeting for dinner. We have only met once in person for maybe 10 minutes in a group setting, had one long Skype conversation. But through all our other mutual reading of blogs and tweeting and email exchanges, I feel I know him well enough that I would be glad to use my social capital to recommend him to anyone. (And I also feel close enough to demand that he bring an autographed copy of his new book to dinner!)
I would go so far as to argue that there are meaningful parts of online interactions that cannot be replicated offline. When you read someone’s blog for instance, you get to hear a version of what they sound like to themselves and how they want to be heard by the world.
Emails, long pensive personal emails, achieve a similar effect. I once had a friend call me and he said he wanted to pick up the phone and call because he was tired of how emails felt so impersonal. I thought to myself, no, that’s just because you don’t understand how good emails work. I love a great 2-hour catch up phone call, but don’t dismiss email. A good, thoughtful email gets closer to how that person wants you to know them when they are presenting themselves, edited and uninterrupted. There is communication and then there is communication.
I’m not about to suggest that online interactions are better than offline. Of course not. I do think it’s simplistic to insist that all offline interactions are “better”. I don’t know what “better” means. You can’t build the same connection across different media. But that’s the whole point. A smiley face :) is a poor substitute for how it feels to have someone beam at you in person. But there are tones of a lighthearted Twitter exchange between friends that cannot be replicated in an offline conversation. You cannot speak a URL.
The point, to me, is always the connection.
The internet doesn’t change what we as human beings need to feel connected to each other. It’s just another tool, another medium. Our psychological and emotional needs for connectedness are the same as what they have been for thousands of years. The internet, if you get how to use it, is connection enhancing. The very opposite of isolating.
People who want to connect will find a way to do so meaningfully in any medium. On this trip, I am glad these online interactions can go offline. And I’m sure we’ll pick them back up online. Seamless. It’s wonderful.
Matching your job to your leisure reading
“Every time I switch jobs, I learn to read a different section of the papers.”
-@chewinglum
That’s a one way to do it. I’ve done the exact opposite. I’ve matched my job to my leisure reading.
Two years ago, I found myself reading a whole bunch of social impact books. Three Cups of Tea. The Blue Sweater. Half the Sky. Etc. Couldn’t get enough of it. I figured, if I’m going to spend all my time thinking about social impact issues, I might as well try to work in that field. I went after impact investing.
A year and a half ago, I got hooked on TechCrunch and VC blogs and my Twitter stream of tech reads. When I wanted to procrastinate b school homework, I’d consume tons and tons of that stuff. It also made me really want to work for a startup.
When I started recruiting for startup jobs earlier this year, I could now do the same thing but feel productive. The funny thing is, I just felt like I was procrastinating all the time. Getting to procrastinate all the time is a great feeling.
I once chatted with a classmate who really wanted to work in VC and told me she keeps up with the latest tech trends by reading TechCrunch. The problem with this is that she’s keeping up. Her competition for these jobs read, eat, breathe all things startup for fun. To the people who love this stuff, TechCrunch is less like the Wall Street Journal and more like People Magazine. In a field where there are people driven by love, it is very hard to trump love with brute force.
Not all leisure reading habits can be turned into jobs. And success in any field requires some serious hard work and discipline at some point. But where you waste your time can be a pretty good indicator of where you should use your time.
Doing work of social value
Building on a previous post about staying involved in social impact…
**
Over Sunday’s conversation, I was expressing - I guess the right word is - guilt over not taking up a save-the-world job post graduation. I’ve spent 2 years talking about social impact and telling everyone I care and that they, too, should care. But when it came down to it, I went with the other thing I spend all my time on - the internet. I am super excited about starting the job soon. And… I feel slightly guilty about it.
It’s not that I’ve stopped caring. I still care - a lot. I still spend my time figuring out how I can inhale more of the internet and how I can make a difference. The two intersect in many cases. Or maybe I am subconsciously paying attention to where they overlap, because I’m trying to find an answer to the guilt.
The Guilt of Not Doing More
The guilt is that I cannot say that the job I will be doing, as thrilled as I am about it, has the same social impact as say, going to work for a non-profit that brings clean water to people in Africa. I feel bad that I just don’t feel that motivated to solve problems for the very bottom of the pyramid. I think these issues are highly important and I care, but I don’t find these issues half as interesting as… as how we can get better information retrieval on the internet. How can I claim to care, if I don’t act that way.
My friend challenged me on this point. “Why do you think that everyone has to dedicate their lives to serving the poor? The world is not necessarily better off if everyone did that.”
Hmm.
Broadening the Umbrella of Social Impact
My friend’s remark gets at the other angle I’ve been trying to turn into a coherent argument. There are many ways to create social impact. It is not clear that the work that has the largest impact, that is the most socially valuable, necessarily involves directly helping the poor. The lack of profits does not equate to social impact.
Saving the World vs. Changing the World
The field of technology presents incredible opportunities to change the world. Here, in Silicon Valley, the innovations are more often than not targeting the very top of the pyramid. Not just first world, middle to upper income users, but the early adopters, the alpha and beta testers whose tastes determine what makes it to the rest of the pyramid.
The Top of the Pyramid
What we do at the top of the pyramid matters. Many of the great life changing products for the bottom of the pyramid were adapted from something at the top. The mobile phone wasn’t invented to help the bottom of the pyramid trade agricultural goods or send money. Facebook and Twitter were not created to help oppressed people launch revolutions. But these technologies have delivered incredible value. They have had, I would argue, at least as much social value as a social enterprise that brings water to ten thousand people.
The Social Value of Building a Business
And it’s not just inventions. The act of building a great business around a technology is one the other powerful ways to deliver social value. A great business makes it possible to disseminate that technology to millions or even billions of people. A great business makes it possible to do so at scale, in an economically viable way. The fact that something valuable can be spread and enjoyed widely - surely that carries social value.
The world is not better off if we all directly tried to serve the poor.
The Social Value of Opera
Let’s talk about something that by my guilt-driven logic should be considered a total waste of resources: opera. I love that opera exists. It is a highly niche interest. It appeals to a tiny, tiny audience. It is ridiculously expensive to produce. It is economically unsustainable even at those high ticket prices. It relies on large donations to survive. And yet, when I’m at the Met Opera, I have that feeling. I want to be nowhere else in the world. I marvel that something so sublime can exist. Each performance represents some kind of pinnacle of human achievement.
Opera has no value to the bottom of the pyramid. But I want to live in a world where opera exists. Along with art and poetry and people making solo treks to the North Pole and people trying to perfect a cup of drip coffee and people delivering happiness in shoeboxes.
Don’t you?
Our Social Obligation
Despite all that, I can’t shake the conviction that we shouldn’t lose sight of how we can help the poor, the oppressed, the less privileged.
I think back to that passage from In the Plex about Google doing good. It’s not just that story. There are so many others of how they were well aware that their engineering and business decisions could make people’s lives better.
There is that part in the book about entering China, and in the end being defeated by stronger political forces and withdrawing. But even then, the business decision was made alongside the socio-political ones. In contrast to say, pharmaceutical companies that claim “it’s just business” and ignore their power to deliver life-saving drugs to developing countries, Google made a real effort to engage with the issues head on. Failed for various complex reasons, but tried. If you had the power to further free speech for a billion people, would you acknowledge it. What is your obligation.
I think that’s the crux of it. There are many decisions we make with our work, our hobbies, our energies, our money, our attention that can make people’s lives better. Or not. There is often an implied choice. There is unobvious potential that sits there. That’s the edge I keep coming back to. How do you, wherever you stand in the world, make a social difference?
Craigslist-style social proof
Last summer and this summer I’ve successfully used Craigslist to find apartments to sublet, first in New York and now in San Francisco. When I’m plunking around Craigslist, I’m usually frustrated at how awful their search is and how unhelpful the site is in general. How can this dinosaur still exist! And yet there is something about the human filtering process of reading through postings, consisting of unformatted text and sometimes pictures written by nameless people, that oddly enough works. These filters have worked pretty well for me:
1) Can they spell and write in coherent sentences?
2) Do they take nice pictures of their apt?
3) Do they share enough information to demonstrate that they are both trustworthy and trusting?
Reality seems to match online perception pretty well. The person who can’t spell or punctuate does in fact appear disheveled and disorganized in real life. He makes you wonder if he’ll pay rent on time. The person with the amazing decorating taste is in fact neat, pleasant, and helpful when I have questions while subletting the place.
All this without pictures or real names or social proof! Sites these days are built around profile pictures and upvotes and stars, but the simplicity of Craigslist still has filtering value. Ask people to present themselves as they are with minimal tools, and knowingly or not, they do.
I’m sure there are better ways to solve the housing search issue. But as we add bells and whistles to establish social proof, the present-yourself-as-you-are premise remains surprisingly valuable.
How to interpret Yelp ratings
Yelp has transformed my travel dining experience. Its geolocation feature has made it possible to do no research beforehand and still end up eating great meals for almost every meal on a trip. Yelp has made it possible to drive through a tiny town in upstate NY of 2,000 people and find a good local joint. Yelp has also made it possible to entertain a dad’s request for decent pho even in a town like Monterey.
Here’s what I’ve learned from using Yelp to navigate my meals for my last couple of trips:
1. Stars are just a first cut, you must read reviews. If reviewers say “everything here is awesome”, that’s a bad sign. It probably means the reviewers aren’t very discerning about food. Naming specific dishes that were excellent is a great sign, especially if a lot of people agree on the same few dishes.
2. Negative reviews give you a sense of what a bad case might be like. Complaints about one specific server should be forgiven. A complaint that the food sucked because that reviewer ordered the vegetarian plate at a steakhouse is not bad sign. That’s a good sign! The steak is more likely to be really good.
3. If it’s a small town and reviewers are rating an ethnic restaurant, discount ratings by 1 star. You need a large and diverse enough population for ethnic restaurant ratings to be accurate.
4. If the restaurant is running a Yelp promotion, discount ratings by 1/2 to 1 star. A particular restaurant was running a free clam chowder promotion. All anyone talked about in reviews was the free clam chowder. If you read the reviews carefully, you’d see that a few reviewers were not swayed by the freebie. They mentioned that the non-clam chowder dishes weren’t up to par.
Other notes:
- As @waaramaa noted, Zagat + Yelp works even better.
- Nothing quite beats a recommendation from a friend with good taste.
- For the record, Ad Hoc’s Monday night fried chicken is amazing. I am a sucker for regular foods executed to perfection, and that fried chicken was exactly it. That meal took a lot of advance planning. It’d be good to have tips on reservation strategy on Yelp. (Or is there an app for that?)
A book trade for spreading ideas
As I am packing up to move, I’ve been inspired by two friends to give away some of my books, as well as share my reading list. So I sent out this note…
**
Dear friends,
I am trying to travel lighter (through life), so I want to give away some of my books. Take a look at this list.
List 1: These are books I am happy to give to you to keep. In exchange, I ask that you send me a postcard from an interesting location. :) Most of my save-the-world books are on this list because I believe these ideas should spread.
List 2: These are books I am happy to lend. These books remain currently important to me. You just need to mail them back to me in California. If you get too lazy to mail back, you can buy me an Amazon voucher so I can buy the Kindle version. :)
**
It is interesting to see what I’ve accumulated over the last couple years vs. what I want to keep now. I feel like I want to give away the save-the-world books; I feel like I want to keep the tech founding stories.
The nature of the book is changing, as Seth Godin and Kevin Kelly point out. If I move again in a few years, I probably won’t be able to do this giveaway. Since starting to buy my books in Kindle format a few months ago, I have become hooked on the idea of carrying around my entire library on any electronic reading device I own / in the cloud. I want to store and retrieve my books the way I can my emails or my Instapaper articles. I would like to Greplin-ize my library.
The only thing I’ll miss is being able to give away books this way. But I’m sure we’ll have this digital rights management thing figured out. My bet is that books - these containers for ideas - will become easier, not harder, to share. People will find ways to spread ideas.
- In the Plex, Steven Levy
One can marvel at the advances they’ve made in human computer interaction that makes things like this possible, but what impresses me is that the company built a culture that makes it important to care about such outcomes. Someone thought to use the powerful technological tools they had developed for good. It’s such a tiny, specific use case, and there are so many better and bigger examples (e.g. disaster response), but I am really touched by the social impact angle of this small story. I marvel at how they’ve built underlying values into the company to make such things possible.
Imagine if Wall Street thought this way!
The book is a great read. I’m really enjoying it - at the expense of finals and sleep.
Taking on Amazon in 1999
From NYT, Feb 26, 1999, Amazon.you:
So the next time your broker tells you that this or that Internet retailing stock is actually worth some crazy multiples, just think for a moment about how many Lyle Bowlins there already are out there… For about the cost of one share of Amazon.com, you can be Amazon.com.
- Thomas Friedman, as tweeted by Paul Graham
Two thoughts on this:
1. I remember being a highschooler and having my uncle ask me, “Do you understand this internet thing? How can Amazon selling books online be worth so much? Where is the real business? How can you sell things without stores?” Or something like that. I actually have trouble paraphrasing it now because we take e-commerce for granted. These days, of course, you’d buy books and shoes and diapers online. But back then I remember thinking, I have no idea.
I accept that we are all wrong sometimes. But it still amazes me how hard it is to imagine a reality vastly different from our present. Behavioral changes and perception changes that we think are impossible? All of that can happen.
2. Despite how easy Thomas Friedman made it seem to compete against Amazon, it’s actually really hard. Not just to take on Amazon but to start a company. It remains really hard to start any company. The fact that Amazon has held onto its lead and has gone on to deliver many wonderful things to the world (e,g. Kindle) is testament to the power of great management and leadership.
Building a great company is one of the toughest challenges you can take on, but it seems to me also one of the greatest things you can accomplish.
