Under New Management
Posted by Pete Robbins on Nov 13th 2019
“The glue that binds a company culture is that the work must be meaningful for its own sake.”
I read 20-plus books a year, and I wear my nerd badge proudly, but it’s rare that I recommend books to friends. It’s uncommon for one to touch me enough to do that, and even if it hits home I live in fear that if the recipient of my recommendation doesn’t feel the same way about it, one or both of needs to reassess that friendship. This week, I get to ignore those inhibitions.
Of the many books that I devour, most are nonfiction, but I generally avoid both business books and self-help books. Most members of both groups, in my experience, tend to be heavy on empty buzzwords and light on practical advice. They don’t speak to me. The book that I’m now recommending, however, is indeed a business book – Ben Horowitz’s “What You Do is Who You Are,” which examines how different businesses and organizations build appropriate and successful cultures. Horowitz is an influential Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and while I very much enjoyed his previous book, “The Hard Thing About Hard Things,” this one spoke to me more directly.
Perhaps its resonance is attributable to the fact that I recently wrote about the “winning culture” at B.A.S.S., before I even knew that Horowitz had written on the topic, but I don’t think so. I think it was because his examples are so dead-on, so universal, and so well-explained, that you don’t have to be a CEO or wannabe CEO to have them apply to your important decisions. Indeed, to the extent that each of us is the CEO of our own lives — a hokey construction, I’ll admit — we are making management decisions every day. Many of them are not simple. Oftentimes we don’t know the correct answer, even after the fact. If you don’t have an established “culture,” they’re even more difficult.
Reading this book forced me to think about my career as a writer. While I have easily internalized a “code” and “culture” that has led to a great deal of personal satisfaction and some success, there are also decisions I look back upon less fondly. In particular, I can think of three projects/partnerships that did not live up to my expectations and thus I classify them as failures. In one, my partner and I received some intellectual stimulation and a modicum of acclaim, but no compensation and no longevity. In another, I received significant compensation, but no intellectual satisfaction or pride of authorship. In the third, I suffered a great deal of angst, but was compensated fairly, and most importantly was able to maintain or improve my relationship with my partner after the project’s dissolution.
Three partnerships, three “failures.” My conclusion prior to read reading “What You Do is Who You Are,” is that my best route going forward is to avoid one-on-one partnerships. After reading the book, however, I can see that it’s not that simple. I could have either avoided the projects altogether or found a way to maximize the good and minimize the bad. That comes with establishing culture up front, making the right “hiring” decisions and managing workload and expectations. Even if I don’t take full or partial blame for the projects’ dissolutions, I can see that there were “management” failures along the way that I could have avoided or tamped down.
My next project will be a management guide for myself, outlining a set of goals and best practices for my writing that I’ve never articulated before. I probably will not share it, except with a few close friends and mentors, who I fully expect to call me out on any residual b.s.
Your next project should be to read this book and apply it to what matters to you.
