This post is a bit off topic, but as the President invokes Theodore Roosevelt, I’d like to take some quotes from my favorite TR speech, which somehow hasn’t lost any resonance in a hundred years.

Teddy Roosevelt

In the Arena

Teddy’s speech at the Sorbonne in Paris is most recognized for the much cited In the Arena paragraph:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

But that paragraph was just part of the speech’s greatness.

On Critics

President Roosevelt preceded the In The Arena sentences with this:

“The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism …  There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty … A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize … all these are marks, not … of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men … who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The role is easy; there is none easier …”

Mocking the French Military?

I loved this:

“The brilliant gallantry of the French soldier has for many centuries been proverbial.”

It was part of a serious point, not a cheap shot, and it was an overall very respectful speech. But I’d advise President Obama not to repeat that line.

On Character

“There is need of a sound body, and even more of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands character – the sum of those qualities which we mean when we speak of a man’s force and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor.”

“Education must contain much besides book-learning in order to be really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack of the great solid qualities. Self restraint, self mastery, common sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution – these are the qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside. I pay all homage to intellect and to elaborate and specialized training of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the assent of all of you present when I add that more important still are the commonplace, every-day qualities and virtues.”

I do like how Roosevelt makes the point about how character is more important than knowledge WITHOUT condemning the intellectual elite.

On Pacifism

“There are well-meaning philosophers who declaim against the unrighteousness of war. They are right only if they lay all their emphasis upon the unrighteousness. War is a dreadful thing, and unjust war is a crime against humanity. But it is such a crime because it is unjust, not because it is a war. … Every honorable effort should always be made to avoid war, just as every honorable effort should always be made by the individual in private life to keep out of a brawl, to keep out of trouble; but no self-respecting individual, no self-respecting nation, can or ought to submit to wrong.”

On Europe’s Demographic Problem

Roosevelt’s comments on France’s birthrate issue seems far more relevant today:

“The first essential in any civilization is that the man and women shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. … If the failure is due to the deliberate and willful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thralldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up riches, no sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues the greatest is the race’s power to perpetuate the race.“

On Property Rights

“In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property.”

On Idealism

“No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize. The impractical visionary is far less often the guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of the real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcoming, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better things. Woe to the empty phrase-maker, to the empty idealist, who, instead of making ready the ground for the man of action, turns against him when he appears and hampers him when he does work!“

On Inequality

“There should, so far as possible, be equal of opportunity to render service; but just so long as there is inequality of service there should and must be inequality of reward.

We may be sorry for the general, the painter, the artists, the worker in any profession or of any kind, whose misfortune rather than whose fault it is that he does his work ill.

But the reward must go to the man who does his work well; for any other course is to create a new kind of privilege, the privilege of folly and weakness; and special privilege is injustice, whatever form it takes. To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable, ought to have the reward given to those who are far-sighted, capable, and upright, is to say what is not true and cannot be true.

Let us try to level up, but let us beware of the evil of leveling down. If a man stumbles, it is a good thing to help him to his feet. Every one of us needs a helping hand now and then. But if a man lies down, it is a waste of time to try and carry him; and it is a very bad thing for every one if we make men feel that the same reward will come to those who shirk their work and those who do it.“

On Class Warfare

“Class hatred is bad in just the same way, and without regard to the individual who, at a given time, substitutes loyalty to a class for loyalty to a nation, of substitutes hatred of men because they happen to come in a certain social category, for judgment awarded them according to their conduct. Remember always that the same measure of condemnation should be extended to the arrogance which would look down upon or crush any man because he is poor and to envy and hatred which would destroy a man because he is wealthy.

The overbearing brutality of the man of wealth or power, and the envious and hateful malice directed against wealth or power, are really at root merely different manifestations of the same quality, merely two sides of the same shield. The man who, if born to wealth and power, exploits and ruins his less fortunate brethren is at heart the same as the greedy and violent demagogue who excites those who have not property to plunder those who have.

The gravest wrong upon his country is inflicted by that man, whatever his station, who seeks to make his countrymen divide primarily in the line that separates class from class, occupation from occupation, men of more wealth from men of less wealth, instead of remembering that the only safe standard is that which judges each man on his worth as a man, whether he be rich or whether he be poor, without regard to his profession or to his station in life. Such is the only true democratic test, the only test that can with propriety be applied in a republic.”

On Corrupt Politicians

“If a public man tries to get your vote by saying that he will do something wrong in your interest, you can be absolutely certain that if ever it becomes worth his while he will do something wrong against your interest.”

“If you will steal for me then you will steal from me.”

On Patriotism

“A man must be a good patriot before he can be, and as the only possible way of being, a good citizen of the world. Experience teaches us that the average man who protests that his international feeling swamps his national feeling, that he does not care for his country because he cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves himself the foe of mankind; that the man who says that he does not care to be a citizen of any one country, because he is the citizen of the world, is in fact usually and exceedingly undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the world he happens at the moment to be in. … if a man can view his own country and all others countries from the same level with tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust him, just as it is wise to distrust the man who can take the same dispassionate view of his wife and mother. However broad and deep a man’s sympathies, however intense his activities, he need have no fear that they will be cramped by love of his native land.”

It’s easy to understand why President Obama wants to challenge the first President Roosevelt. Much like Senator Obama in 2008, Roosevelt did a great job showing an appreciation of the values held dear by most Americans. Roosevelt praised intelligence while declaring character more essential. Roosevelt combined progressive themes with conservative ones.

On the one hand, Roosevelt called for courage and action. On the other hand, Roosevelt’s definition of character began with a focus on self-restraint.

I’ll close this post with the scariest and most powerful part of Roosevelt’s speech.

“There have been many republics in the past, both in what we call antiquity and in what we call the Middle Ages. They fell, and the prime factor in their fall was the fact that the parties tended to divide along the wealth that separates wealth from poverty. It made no difference which side was successful; it made no difference whether the republic fell under the rule of oligarchy or the rule of a mob. In either case, when once loyalty to a class had been substituted for loyalty to the republic, the end of the republic was at hand. There is no greater need to-day than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad citizenship, runs at right angles to, and not parallel with, the lines of cleavage between class and class, between occupation and occupation. Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his conduct in that position. In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious or antireligious, democratic or antidemocratic, it itself but a manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in the downfall of so many, many nations. Of one man in especial, beyond anyone else, the citizens of a republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic. It makes no difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to religious or antireligious prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own interest. The very last thing an intelligent and self-respecting member of a democratic community should do is to reward any public man because that public man says that he will get the private citizen something to which this private citizen is not entitled, or will gratify some emotion or animosity which this private citizen ought not to possess.”

I read columnists from the right and the left and I think their biggest disagreement right now is not about ideology; it’s about which side is trying to fix problems and which side is focused on assigning blame for failure. I think most of the swing vote in America today agrees with Roosevelt that our biggest problem is not that one (or both) sides is wrong, but that one (or both) sides is mostly interested in rent-seeking and finger pointing. And I think both sides are therefore going to spend the next eleven months trying to convince America that their opponents are only interested in assigning blame.

“I’m not a jerk like Jobs was. Which is the biggest reason why I’m just a moderately successful business guy, and not a super billionaire.”

Gene Marks, Forbes, Steve Jobs Was a Jerk, Good for Him, October 10, 2011

Steve Jobs

“Gene might have hit a nerve among managers who haven’t found themselves and are willing to try whatever the business press declares to be the flavor of the moment.

I can imagine headlines like “Are You Jerk Enough to be the Next Steve Jobs?” or “Want to Be Like Jobs? Be a Jerk!” or “Think Different: Like a Jerk!” or whatever will sell a book or magazine.

David Coursey, Forbes, Steve Jobs Was a Jerk, You Shouldn’t Be, October 12, 2011

“Those who have followed Apple closely throughout the years have heard dozens if not hundreds of stories of Jobs berating employees … Here’s the thing: the tech world could probably use more jerks.”

MG Siegler, TechCrunch, The Jerk, November 18, 2011

To celebrate a man’s accomplishments while overlooking his shortcomings is normally good, even noble, especially when discussing the recently deceased. But some writers are holding up Steve Jobs’ nastiness as something to emulate. To be clear, I’m fully on board with the idea that you should drive your people to excellence through honesty, high standards, and a commitment to greatness. But I’d like to call bullshit on the religion of Steve before people go further on the path of worshiping Steve Jobs’ dark side.

Power Leads to Asshole-ness, Not Vice-Versa

“Power is wielded most effectively when it’s used responsibly by people who are attuned to, and engaged with the needs and interests of others. Years of research suggests that empathy and social intelligence are vastly more important to acquiring and exercising power than are force, deception, or terror …

People with power tend to behave like patients who have damaged their brain’s orbitofrontal lobes … a condition that seems to cause overly impulsive and insensitive behavior. Thus the experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially-appropriate behavior.

Dachne Kelter, Greater Good, The Power Paradox, Winter 2007-8

There are many reasons for our image of powerful people being jerks. But apparently most of the evidence indicates that being a jerk doesn’t generally lead to being powerful; it generally gets in the way. It’s after assuming power that some people lose the modesty and concern for others that helped them achieve a position of responsibility and influence.

It Minimizes Others

“Often Jobs would suddenly “flip,” taking an idea that he’d mocked (maybe your idea) and embracing it passionately – and as his own – without ever acknowledging that his view had changed.”

Peter Elkind, Fortune, The Trouble with Steve, March 5, 2008

“As soon as people in Silicon Valley heard I was writing a book on the downsides of assholes, I had many people — I mean hundreds, and quite a few who were or had been very close to him — immediately start telling me Steve Jobs stories.

Bob Sutton, Work Matters, The Trouble with Steve Jobs: Asshole, Genius, or Both, March 6, 2008

[Following 11 suicides at Apple's Chinses sweatshops]  ”new measures were being secretly introduced at Foxconn to prevent the suicide scandal from worsening and damaging Apple sales globally. Astonishingly, this involves forcing all Foxconn employees to sign a new legally binding document promising that they won’t kill themselves. …

They sleep in cramped rooms in triple-decked bunk beds to save space, with simple bamboo mats for mattresses.
Despite summer temperatures hitting 35 degrees, with 90 per cent humidity, there is no air-conditioning. Workers say some dormitories house more than 40 people and are infested with ants and cockroaches, with the noise and stench making it difficult to sleep.”

Andrew Malone and Richard Jones, Mail Online, Inside the Chinese suicide sweatshop where workers toil in 34-hour shifts to make your iPod, June 11, 2010

“Our secret is teamwork. I do great teamwork.”

Fred, Scooby Doo

Decent people build up their friends, colleagues, and teammates.

To be fair, Jobs was apparently such a genius, and so driven to excellence, that may of his colleagues were willing to put up with the humiliations for the opportunity to join in his quest for greatness.

It Invades Your Life

Cause and effect is hard to determine regarding Jobs’ darkside. Three of his uglier moments outside of work:

• Made his daughter and her mother live on welfare, though he was already quite wealthy, for two years while he denied paternity.
• Proposed to his girlfriend twice. Each time she accepted, and each time he stepped back. He then asked his friends which of his girlfriends was prettier, and which he should marry.
• Drives his Mercedes around without a license plate and parks in handicapped spots.

You Become What You Despise

“The Steve Jobs who founded Apple as an anarchic company promoting the message of freedom, whose first projects with Stephen Wozniak were pirate boxes and computers with open schematics, would be taken aback by the future that Apple is forging. Today there is no tech company that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself, a testament to how quickly power can corrupt.

Apple’s rise to power in our time directly paralleled the transformation of global manufacturing. As recently as 10 years ago Apple’s computers were assembled in the United States, but today they are built in southern China under appalling labor conditions. Apple, like the vast majority of the electronics industry, skirts labor laws by subcontracting all its manufacturing to companies like Foxconn, a firm made infamous for suicides at its plants, a worker dying after working a 34-hour shift, widespread beatings, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to meet high quotas set by tech companies like Apple.”

Mike Daisey, The New York Times, About Nostalgia, October 6, 2011

The greatest curse of revolutions and revolutionaries is they generally become what they despised. Truly successful revolutions, the ones that replace not the individuals but the ideas, can only be brought about through discipline, patience, humility, self-control, and a commitment to a morality greater than ourselves. Steve Jobs was a revolutionary only in the tragic sense of the word, creating an empire of fear, secrecy, and domination that far exceeds IBM’s worst offenses.

It’s Not Worth It

“If you are a winner and an asshole, you still remain — at least in my book — a loser as a human being.  Put differently, if the journey is the reward, then why would any of us choose to travel with a companion who treats his fellow travelers like dirt? ”

Bob Sutton, Work Matters, The Trouble with Steve Jobs: Asshole, Genius, or Both, March 6, 2008

Even if being an asshole were good for business, would it be worth it? Because at the end of the day, you’re an asshole.

Conclusion: Emulate the Good, Reject the Bad

I’ll be honest. I despised Steve Jobs. I despised him for all the reasons I listed above, all the nasty things he did to others. I also despised him because he built an empire that had no room for anybody else. Microsoft and Google, for all their flaws, built platforms around which other partners could innovate. Ultimately IMO that’s why Microsoft won in the 80s and why I hope Google wins today. Steve Jobs seemed to go to sleep at night terrified that somebody else might make a nickle that could have been Jobs’. Since he was a Buddhist I hope he comes back as a worker in one of his iSweatshops.

But let’s put that aside.

Consensus is that Steve Jobs was a genius who led the creation of great products. Let’s learn from his commitment to excellence. Let’s celebrate his tribute to the crazy ones and the misfits who think differently, whether or not there was room for them at Apple. But let’s neither envy nor emulate his depravity.

PostScript

I’ve received a lot of feedback to this article. At the end of the day, it comes down to Gene Marks’ quote with which I opened this post

“I’m not a jerk like Jobs was. Which is the biggest reason why I’m just a moderately successful business guy, and not a super billionaire.”

Sorry Gene. The biggest reason you’re just a moderately successful business guy and not a super billionaire is because you’re not a creative genius, as talented in his field as Mozart and Michael Jordan were in theirs. It’s a perverse pleasure we take in telling ourselves and others that our morality is what separates us from the greats. It allows us to deny that our shortcomings may be primarily due to inferior talent, effort, or commitment.

Admittedly I’m biased too, because I don’t want managers emulating Steve’s dark side.

Was Steve Jobs great despite being a jerk? Was he was great because he was a jerk? Had he not been a jerk, would his company have created products that were worse? Or better? Was it worth it? And what lessons should we teach our children, and ourselves? What do you think?

[This post is part of a 4 part series on the key tensions in growing a high quality community-generated content site. It was presented at PubCon, Las Vegas, 2011]

I happened to pick up my (nearly) 30-year-old copy of In Search of Excellence while preparing my PubCon presentation on High Quality UGC.

A few points stood out:

• Commit to excellence. If your community is committed to excellence, and believes you are too, you’ll have a much greater chance of achieving high quality. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow have this. Most sites seem committed to just good enough. At best.
• There’s no “How To” manual for excellence. The authors point out that all they can do is provide success stories, insight, and inspiration. If you’re looking for “The 10 rules for creating excellence” look elsewhere (and good luck with that).
• Attract tiny contributions. They quote a study that 95% of people asked to put a big traffic safety sign on their front yards said no (unsurprisingly). But if they got them to put a small sign in their window, then half of those people later said yes to the big sign. I heard the same idea expressed at WikiMania. Contributing to Wikipedia is like a box of Pringles, they said, once you start you can’t stop. And ‘Edit’ was too high an initial barrier, so they instituted Article Ratings, mostly to get newcomers to make a tiny contribution that could lead them to larger ones later. (I hope it worked).
• Man is a social creature. Too many people believe the false dichotomy that you’re either a for-profit capitalist entity that focus solely on money, return on investment and the bottom or you’re a soft-hearted liberal who leans towards socialism. In Search of Excellence presented the case that free enterprise, for-profit companies thrive most when they focus on people (employees) serving people (customers). Community sites take this one step further with customers serving customers.
• I’ve recently read a slew of books (such as Predictably Irrational, Freakonomics and Drive) that cite the behavioral economics work that won Kahneman and Tversky a Nobel Prize in 2002. I was surprised to see that In Search of Excellence quoted Kahneman and Tversky 20 years before they were awarded the Nobel Prize. The main point is that if you start with the idea that man is a rational economic actor you’re going to have a very flawed idea of how to run a successful business.

You can reject In Search of Excellence’s argument that most businesses should focus more on people and their need for meaning and excellence. But if you’re running a community site you should probably give their arguments your full attention. You can’t use monetary or authoritarian management techniques. If you’re running a community site, you need to focus on giving your people the non-monetary rewards they need, such as respect, appreciation, and the opportunities to help others and to pursue excellence.

We’ve already been on the buying end of acquisitions ranging from the wildly successful (WikiAnswers) to the unsuccessful (Brainboost) to the aborted (Dictionary.com). Being on the receiving end has exposed me to a very different series of enlightening experiences.

We’re currently in Survivor Phase. The acquisition has been completed but the new organizational chart has yet to be set. To be clear, most people’s efforts today are focused on work, particularly in determining our goals and setting out to accomplish them. And yet in many cases the work takes place within a larger subtext of self-promotion, jockeying for position, and the occasional backstabbing.

Individuals (formerly known as teammates) perform tasks that they’d ordinarily leave for others. They box out competitors (formerly known as colleagues). They give ever so helpful feedback to key decision makers. They write snarky blog posts (I’ve heard).

There are some benefits the company gets from this audition period, including:

• The acquiring company gets a glimpse of how people perform under pressure.
• Work gets done faster than usual.
• There’s a focus and intensity that often leads to greater output.

However there are also downsides, potentially including:

• The glimpse as to how individuals perform while auditioning may be a very poor indicator as to how people perform day-to-day.
• The work that was done more quickly often needs to be redone correctly.
• Significant and often irreparable damage may be done to the relationships people have with each other and with the company.
• The people you most need leave; the people you least need appear to shine.

Acquiring Company Key Steps

For the acquiring company, here are some key steps to take:

1. Decide what your main goal for the transition is

Most specifically, which of these is your primary goal:

1. Build the best team to move the acquired company forward
2. Learn all you can about what the team does so you can take it over

In either case you want to learn all you can about the team, the technology, the processes, etc. But if you’re primarily focused on Goal #2 you’re unlikely to succeed particularly well on Goal #1. So start by deciding what your primary goal is.

The following steps assume that you’ve chosen Goal #1 as your primary goal.

2. Learn about your people

Obviously watching your people perform is an important step in evaluating them, but be careful about the following potential sources of error:

• As Heisenberg noted, in some cases you change a system significantly when you observe it.
• You may naturally end up evaluating not what people contribute to the team, but how well they communicate with you. So for example native English speakers may rise to the top.
• Beware of misplaced confidence gap. In Future Babble (an excellent book) Dan Gardner discusses how we’re naturally drawn toward highly confident people and away from people who better understand nuance and uncertainty, even though the latter group generally makes better decisions. Be careful.

If you want to build a successful team you’re going to need to talk to the team members and get their opinions of each other. Yes, you need to filter for bias. People are jockeying for position. Even those that have already booked passage off the island are biased by how much they like and respect their teammates. But talk to enough people, with the proper level of skepticism and caution, and you should get a good idea of which people most help the company. Make sure you’re talking to the rank & file and not just to managers. The nature of organizations is that subordinates understand their managers far better than managers understand their subordinates. For each person, pay most attention to the opinions of people who work closely with him or her.

3. Build your team

This part is a two-way street. As you hone in on who you want, make sure it’s mutual. You may want to keep your cards close to your vest and announce them to everybody all at once, but that’s likely a recipe for failure. Don’t forget that:

• You need to earn trust, build confidence, and create something great with your new team. You have to trust them for them to trust you.
• Now is the time to see if you can work with these people. If you can’t include them in the decisions regarding the team, they’ll assume (probably correctly) that you won’t really include them in other decisions.
• The last thing you want to do is to count on somebody who has little desire to be part of the team you put together.

4. Don’t take too long

This period can be traumatic and dangerous. The worst part is that some of your team members will feel they’re playing a zero-sum game against each other. You want your team members’ interests and desires to be aligned, so they’re focused on working together to build something great. You’d like to minimize the days spent trying to throw each other off the island.

Acquired Company’s Employees

If you’re in an employee of a company that just got acquired, here’s some advice:

• Sitting back and saying “I don’t play politics, if they don’t know how good I am then I don’t want them” is rarely the right approach. If there’s an upheaval potentially coming, figure out what role will best help you serve the company, find happiness and fulfillment, and advance your career. If you like your current role and are confident that it won’t change, you can ignore this. Otherwise, determine how you best want to serve the company and communicate that.
• Have a thick skin. These transition periods are temporary, and the new reality that settles in may or may not be great for you. Don’t throw yourself off the island because the transition period is rocky, or because you’d rather jump then be thrown.
• Be sensitive to the damage you may be causing others. You’re playing with other people’s lives, careers, reputations, and financial and emotional well being. Do the right thing. We may argue about what the right thing is, but make sure you’re thinking about it and making a decision, not just harming others through carelessness or selfishness.
• Remember that in addition to any ethical issues, hurting others often has a price. Decide whether or not you want to pay it.

Conclusion

The period between when an acquisition is finalized and the new organization chart is set can be both critical and traumatic. If you’re on the acquiring side, make sure building the ideal team is your primary focus, and that you’re moving forward quickly and intelligently to get the right team in place. Make sure you’re talking to the rank & file and not just to management to understand who really contributes what.

If you’re an employee whose company was acquired, consider how the landscape may be changing and where you may best fit in. Make your case. Be aware of how you’re affecting others. And take a deep breath and stand tall. This may be an opportunity to find the role where you can best serve the company and find happiness and fulfillment.

To sum it up, an acquisition is generally only as valuable as the team that will be moving it forward. Whether you just bought a company or are a member of a company that was just bought, do what you can to use this opportunity to get a great team in place.

Postscript: I’ve received feedback that I’ve exaggerated the amount of politics and positioning going on, whereas in fact most people are really just focused on doing their jobs and working productively with their teammates. I accept that. It’s the exceptions that stand out. Given how much tension in the air, the amount of teamwork and goodwill is actually quite impressive.

Last week I read Malcolm Gladwell’s essay The Talent Myth, saw Joseph and His Technicolor Dreamcoat (again), and pondered the Biblical Joseph vs Judah story that climaxes in this week’s Torah reading.

Start with Gladwell. He has fun with articles that celebrated Enron’s talent culture, for example lauding how managers were encouraged to poach each others’ star performers to their hot projects, often leaving damaging gaps elsewhere in the system. Gladwell argues that the very superstar-oriented tactics and culture for which Enron was lauded are the tactics and culture that brought them down.

Moving on to Joseph. The obvious first lesson is that Jacob’s favoring of the superstar destroyed the family. The family ejects the star. The star comes back and saves the family. The brilliant climactic scene (I’ve listened to it several times a year for thirty years and I still sometimes tear up) has the star and the representative of the family go after each other and come to recognize each other’s strengths and that they must move forward together. The superstar saves the family, and others. And then their father declares that the leadership mantle must pass not to the star but to the man whom people choose to follow.

The conflict recurs throughout the Bible. Joseph’s sons eventually set up a rival kingdom which leads to their destruction. Jeremiah writes of Joseph repenting and God declaring that he loves his mischievous child and will have mercy on him. Isiah declares that in the future Judah won’t constrain Joseph and Joseph won’t be jealous of Judah. In a portion Jews read this week Jeremiah is told to write the names of Joseph and Judah on two pieces of wood, combine them into one in his hand, and declare that the two will come together, under Judah’s leadership.

Judaism has strong individualistic and rebellious streaks, and a strong respect for systems and traditions. Jewish tradition has a bigger rebellious streak than most organizations (and certainly than most organized religions) but even so the individual is asked to find his or her place within the system.

Companies often have to struggle with the question of a perceived superstar who conflicts with the team. In those cases the key questions, in order of importance, are:

1. Does the individual make the team better?
2. Are the conflicts because of problems with the system that need to be fixed, where the tension is creative and necessary?
3. Is the person really a superstar or does he or she only appear that way because they exude self-confidence, or because nobody understands their work?

A superstar who makes the team worse should rarely be kept. But if the star is just creating a tension because he or she threatens the complacency and mediocrity, he or she should be protected. But carefully.

BTW, this is not a hard vs soft thing. Some of the biggest hard-asses are also the most liked. And sometimes people who aren’t liked still make the team better.

My only criticism of Gladwell’s piece is the title, The Talent Myth. The argument isn’t about talent, unless you define talent as that which superstars possess and others don’t. The argument is about whether you try to single out top individuals at the expense of maximum use of others’ talent.

Combining Gladwell, my personal experiences, and the Joseph story, I’m left with this:

1. Teammates: Try not to throw the annoying superstar out the window. Sometimes he saves the day.
2. Superstars: Don’t underestimate others. They can do great things together, or they can destroy you.
3. Managers:
   1. Don’t build up the annoying superstar to the point where they become impossible to deal with.
   2. Do not give leadership positions to those that can’t lead.
   3. Find manageable ways to allow dissenting voices and disruptive forces to contribute. But if the superstar makes the team worse, you have to let him or her go.

Those are my thoughts. What are yours?

Marissa Mayer led the user interface and web servers teams when she  joined Google in 1999. Her titles have changed through the years, and have included Director of Consumer Products and finally Vice President of Search Products and User Experience; but essentially from 1999 through last week Marissa was responsible for product direction and decisions on Google Search.

Marissa Mayer

The (first?) Google decade had a significant impact on how many Product Managers do their jobs, influenced largely both by the way Google worked and the realities Google and others created. Here were the key shifts:

1. Metric-driven product management: Google Analytics (and other Google tools like Website Optimizer) brought quality analytics to the masses. Google Ad Words also ushered in a new era of metric-driven advertising. Quite a shift from the old premise of “We know half of our advertising dollars are wasted. We just don’t know which half.” And Google, led by Marissa, popularized data-driven product management. Google didn’t invent these concepts, which have been used and misused since F.W. Taylor, Robert McNamara, and others. But metric-driven product management became far more sophisticated and widely practiced this decade, with Google taking the lead.
2. Support the network / value chain: Yahoo! worked much harder at keeping searchers on its site. Google is generally focused on sending users to the most relevant page on the Web. Google sits at the hub of a network of searchers, publishers, and advertisers. Google’s PageRank algorithm most benefits sites that are in the middle of a network, getting links from other trusted sites in the same space. It will be interesting to see if the battle between Google Android’s open network model and Apple iPhone‘s closed model plays out the same way as the Microsoft – Apple battle played out in the 90s. Sometimes I think some CEOs are kept awake by nightmares that they didn’t clean up every last nickel of profits from the network, and some other company in the value chain might be keeping a few bucks for themselves. Google has been good about building a value chain.
3. Minimalistic and focused: Minimalism and focus have helped set Google apart. Google’s principles include “It’s best to do one thing really, really well.” Google delivers relevant organic and sponsored results to a search. Yes, they do other things too. But never at the expense of delivering on their core mission.
4. Speed matters: The two things Google really brags about are the number of pages it successfully indexes and ranks and the speed with which it delivers its results. Google Search, Google Instant, and Google Chrome all differentiate themselves with speed (among other things). Google has told webmasters that speed is going to be a factor in search rankings, though its bigger effect seems to be in how often a site’s pages get crawled. Marissa said she thinks Google’s Orkut failed in the US because it wasn’t fast enough. At a recent search conference some panelists mocked how the .25 seconds saved by Google Instant changed their lives. The line was good for a laugh, but not much else. Speed matters.
5. Empowering the geeks: Google didn’t bring in a former marketing executive at a consumer goods company to do product management of their search product under the premise that a good manager could manage any business. They took a woman with degrees in Computer Science and Symbolic Systems from Stanford University. When I met with Googlers in Haifa a few months ago an engineering manager commented that most product managers were idiots at all other companies where he had worked but at Google the product managers were all smart and technical. Google brought back a rule from 3M, and let engineers spend 20% of their time on projects of their choosing. Even in the other 80% of their time, the products are loosely defined so the product managers and engineers can work together at working with the technology to meet the user needs.

Many caveats to this list, including that obviously Marissa doesn’t deserve sole credit for all these changes, and that Google’s success has a lot to do with superior technology, etc. And some of these areas like metric-driven product management were likely to get more attention this past decade because of the nature of the internet.

Still, during a remarkably successful tenure leading Product Management and User Experience at a phenomenally successful company, Marissa helped lead some serious changes to how many of us are practicing product management.

On a perhaps unrelated note, the more I read about things like Aaron Sorkin’s claims of frightening misogyny surrounding the founding of Facebook, the more I smile thinking of Marissa and Google breaking through the Beauty and the Geek dichotomy.

On a final note, I think the announcement of Marissa’s new job was poorly timed. Bing and Facebook were about to announce a partnership and Google was expected to announce a poor quarter. So on the day of the announcement, some thought Google’s best days were behind it and that Marissa was being taken down a notch. Two days later Google issued its earnings release which was much better than most analysts predicted. Marissa’s job change comes with Google still showing tremendous strength in search.

Image courtesy of No Stupid Answers

A lot of passionate & negative reaction to Penelope Trunk’s Women Don’t Want To Run Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children in TechCrunch this past weekend.

And yet I wonder to what degree people agree on some of the core issues. Let me attempt a restatement of her core argument:

Penelope Trunk

More Men Than Women Sacrifice Family, Friends, and Values for Chance to Star at Work

Do we agree on that?

Now I could go on for paragraphs with the caveats. Not everybody sells out their values. And to some degree work is a way that we serve our family, friends, and values. This effect may be strongest with the VC-funded Web 2.0 startups and therefore overstated on the internet.

The caveats make the article more dull and less provocative, so smart publications like TechCrunch often leave them out. And without the caveats the article is obviously overstated and therefore attracts negative feedback (generally a good thing for TechCrunch).

But can we pretend that Penelope put the right caveats in and consider these excerpts?

• “The women I know who [start a startup while raising young kids] have lost their companies or their marriages or both. And there is no woman running a startup with young kids, who, behind closed doors, would recommend this life to anyone.”
• “I’m a magnet for high-powered women with stay-at-home husbands. And when the men aren’t listening, the women always tell me that their men don’t pay enough attention and they (the women) are really running the household. … So even the most child-oriented men are not as child-oriented as their wives.”
• “Women want a lifestyle business. Women want to control their time, control their work, to be flexible for their kids. This seems reasonable: Women start more lifestyle businesses and men start more venture-funded businesses.”
• “We use social service funding to tell impoverished families that it’s important for dads to spend time with their kids. But what about startup founders? Is it okay for them to leave their kids in favor of 100-hour weeks? For many founders, their startup is their child.”

These are strong claims. Are they true? Should we do something about it?

One of the successful entrepreneurs whose blog I often read is Rae Hoffman, who wrote about how she defines success:

“[success is] about living my life in a way that makes me happy and on my terms.

It’s being able to rent a cottage for a week to bring my friends and my children on vacation and being around at 2 p.m. in the afternoon [with my kids] …

[Success] is all about being able to ENJOY my life, time with those I love and being able to share my success with those I care about. …”

Now that may all sound like an obvious definition of success, but I think most men have a harder time thinking that way. Rae’s column was in support of a similar definition offered by another woman, Lynn Terry. Maybe I’m just naive and when women write these things I believe them and when men write them I don’t even notice. But it seems to me that more men than women try to maximize money and power because they’re consumed with the idea of being the best at something and are too stupid to understand that money and power should be optimized in some larger equation.

Summary & Final Thoughts:

• Over-generalizations make articles more compelling but also objectionable and threatening. Sometimes.
• Startup culture often involves seriously compromising our other obligations, opportunities and values. Men are generally more likely to take the bait than women.

What are your thoughts?

In Bad Advice Yelled Loudly Is Still Bad Advice Lisa Barone took on Forrester and AdAge’s call for most businesses to wait before spending resources on FourSquare and its competitors:

Peanut butter

“I’m not going to lie, it seems absolutely ridiculous to me that anyone in this space would advise marketers take a “sit and wait” approach to any new marketing application.”

A few years ago Yahoo!’s Brad Garlinghouse penned the Peanut Butter Manifesto, nicely captured and decoded by Kara Swisher. Here’s its essence:

“We want to do everything and be everything–to everyone. … We are scared to be left out … I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.”

When I was 24 I completely shared Lisa’s optimism and enthusiasm to just do it, and her disdain of those who took a wait and see attitude. I’ve changed sides. I more regret the things that we did that we shouldn’t have than the potential opportunities that we let pass by. Because success requires focus and focus requires saying No to all but the best opportunities.

Many people find my view stodgy and depressing. Maybe the 24 year old me would have killed himself if he knew what he would become.

People admire action more than restraint. Many Met fans hate Carlos Beltran not because he struck out, but because he struck out looking. Managers call for bunts and hit & run plays because they’d rather hurt their teams by acting than help them with restraint. OK, that’s not quite right. They lack the discipline and humility to understand how often restraint is the right move.

Restraint is difficult, underrated, and unappreciated. Master it anyway.

Where do you stand? With Lisa? Or with peanut butter?

Image courtesy of genbug.

I was privileged to spend an evening at Google Haifa with:

• Yossi Matias, Head of Google’s Israel R&D center
• Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Products and User Experience
• Noam Nisan, Google research scientist
• Some Googlers demonstrating some of their products (Sadly I didn’t catch their names — anybody who knows them, feel free to chime in)

The understated descriptions for Yossi, Marissa, and Noam are from Google’s page for this event, and remind me of Danny Sullivan introducing Matt Cutts by saying that “Matt is a senior engineer at Google. Which is all you need to know about him.” Dr. Matias is a former air force pilot who published over 100 research papers and holds 20 patents. Dr. Nisan is an expert in algorithmic game theory. Marissa Mayer has led product management efforts on Google search products since 1999 and was the youngest person to ever make Forbes’ list of most powerful women.

What most stood out to me was Google’s approach to product management.

• A Googler mentioned that Google has never been good at starting with a business plan and building the technology to address those needs.
• The same Googler mentioned that meetings are usually short at Google because Google’s product managers were all very smart & technical and understood the issues right away. He contrasted that to the other companies in which he worked where he said most product managers were idiots.
• There were 4 rooms where Google engineers were holding court, describing the products they were working on and answering questions. The passion and pride were impressive.
• Dr. Matias discussed how Google doesn’t have traditional product management. In addition to Google’s famed policy of letting engineers spend 20% of their time on pet projects, they have a large role in defining the features on which they spend the other 80% of their time.
• They don’t have any project managers. He said they don’t use Gantt charts, by which I think he meant they don’t use any scheduling tools. They do have deadlines, but the deadlines don’t seem to be driving the pace of development.
• Within engineering, the team leadership positions are fairly fluid. One person will lead one project, and then a different member will lead the next project.
• It’s largely geeks working together to design and develop products and features that they want to develop and use. Their passions, skills, and professionalism drive the pace.

They were trying to recruit developers, so they may have been playing up the sides that sound like developer heaven, and perhaps showing off their happiest and most passionate developers. It did all sound great, but it’s important to understand some of the harder things that make this work:

• Test-driven development. They had papers put up in the bathroom educating about test-driven development’s importance and best practices.
• Multivariate testing environment exporting boatloads of data.
• Data-driven decision making.

In this sense Google is the ultimate engineering organization. Their product development process seems built on the metaphor of the compiler. Developers are given more say to develop what they think will work because ultimately their creations have to pass this super-compiler, which checks not just for syntax errors but also whether or not the code breaks some other functionality or harms some business metric.

As a product manager, I’ve been repeatedly humbled by our own data-driven systems. It’s our nature to assume we’re usually right. Maybe you are. Testing has proven to me that I’m not.

Google’s Udi Manber told Business Week that they ran 5,000 experiments last year, and probably have 10 experiments for every successful launch.

On a perhaps related note, at SMX Advanced Bing’s Yusuf Mehdi pointed out that Bing’s mission was to help people accomplish their tasks, while Google’s mission was to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Bing focused on people, Google focused on data. One quick data point: Googling “Google’s mission” got me directly to what I was looking for. Binging “Bing’s mission” got me nothing, so I’m quoting Mehdi from memory. Focusing on people sounds like a great idea, but focusing on the information may actually be a better way to give people what they want.

Peter Drucker spoke of “management by objectives and self control.” Google takes this a step further by giving testing and data a central role in management. I wonder if most engineers would rather be managed by a compiler or by a person. It’s nice that Google has icons like Marissa Mayer to put a human face to it all. Google’s system is admirable, IMO, and probably quite efficient. Still, it may be best that Google’s product managers are generally engineers by training. This approach may be best suited for us tin men.

More about Google and its competitive environment:

• Google & The Facebook Fantasy
• Microsoft, Mehdi, and Matt Cutts
• The Google Definition Link and Answers.com

Kanban Board

Medical ethics begins with the principle primum non nocere, Do No Harm. It’s the first rule of management too. Not because harm caused may or may not be worse than harm not prevented. But because it is so common for managers to do more harm than good.

A recent study by Nielsen Co. found that

“Companies with less senior-management involvement in the new-product process generate 80% more revenue from new products than those with the highest levels of senior-management involvement …

“While we don’t dispute senior management’s strengths and good intentions, they are often too quick to get involved in the creative process, especially when things are not going well and their mere presence can stifle free thinking …

“When senior managers do get involved, he said, there’s a ‘tendency to hip shoot. They come in, throw a grenade, and it slows things down.’”

(hat tip: Larry Kramer).

Management, like government, is a tricky job. It’s necessary, and yet it frequently harms more than it helps.

I just came back from a vacation, walked into a Kanban meeting, and was amazed by how my team was functioning. I know they function like that all the time, but the vacation let me see it with fresh eyes.

But such a scene always leads to some introspection. There’s always that self-doubt and pain in the ego when seeing your people functioning perfectly without you. And I have too much dissonance here to see this objectively, so I’ll state my claim and let you decide.

Managers’ first job is to not interfere with their team. Be ready to step in when needed, and provide help when called on. Have other critical tasks that you can do so you don’t feel the need to interfere or save the day. But when in doubt, step aside and let your people do their jobs. Make sure they get the credit they deserve. Don’t sap their enthusiasm or step on their toes. Give them the control and authority they need to enjoy their jobs and to succeed at them. Help, guide, encourage, support. Take pride in how successful they are without you. But first: do no harm.

Image courtesy of alq666