Insight into who you want on Your Team

The Monuments Men book has a quote by General Dwight Eisenhower that are words of wisdom.

This is a long road we have to travel. The men that can do

things are going to be sought out just as surely as the sun rises

in the morning. Fake reputations, habits of glib and clever

speech, and glittering surface performance are going to be

discovered and kicked overboard. Solid, sound leadership . . . and

ironclad determination to face discouragement, risk, and

increasing work without flinching, will always characterize

the man who has a sure-enough, bang-up fighting unit. Added

to this he must have a darn strong tinge of imagination—I

am continuously astounded by the utter lack of imaginative

thinking. . . . Finally, the man has to be able to forget himself and

personal fortunes. I’ve relieved two seniors here because they got

to worrying about “injustice,” “unfairness,” “prestige,” and—oh, what the hell!

 

— Supreme Commander General Dwight

David Eisenhower in a letter to

General Vernon Prichard, August 27, 1942

Writing for Your Friends Makes More Friends

A year ago I wrote a post on why I write.  Orwell says that we write for Sheer Egoism, Aesthetic Enthusiasm, Historical Impulse, and/or Political Purpose.  I think there is another reason to write. 

Many years ago I sat next to my dear departed friend Olivier Sanche for the first of many dinners.  One of the people at the table said Dave has a blog.  Olivier said he loves to read blogs.  Can I give him the url for mine?  I gave him my card.  Surprised he said this is you.  You are the writer for the Green Data Center Blog?  I read it every day and I send links all the time to my team.  Months later Olivier and I were chatting and I mentioned a post I had written, and he clarified, “Dave, I read everything you write.”  When I would meet with others on his team we would have speed conversations because they had been reading what I was writing and we were discussing the actions to take.  Sometimes, well many times my head would spin because I needed to remember my past posts, recall them, and then slip back into the conversation.  It is kind of embarrassing that you can’t recall what you had written over the past couple of weeks. :-)

To this day so much of what I write is what I would want to say knowing Olivier would read my posts.  This style, writing for my friends feels natural, and it has many other benefits including making new friends is many times easier as people feel like they know me.

Who are my friends who I think of?  It’s been 34 years in the tech industry.  My friends are all over - Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Intuit, Apple, Dell, Intel, media companies, PR companies, data center companies, construction, cloud, software. 

Will I stop?  I don’t think I can as long as I have friends who remind me of something I wrote a month ago and how useful it was.  Heck I have people tell me a post I wrote a year ago is helping them educate users.  My memory gets really foggy trying to remember posts over a year old. ;-)

 

A World of Friends in the Data Center Industry

I was talking to a friend who has taken on a new job.  Today movers are coming and tomorrow he will get on a plane.  He’ll be working as a data center analyst and we have had a good time discussing ideas.  In the past I’ve introduced him to some other friends who are forward thinkers, and we have discussed some new ideas.

One way to judge a person’s abilities is by their friends and who they hang out with.  The good ones have good friends.  

Making new things is hard, but much easier if you have good friends.

I can’t help but think of one of my favorite moments in any Pixar movie, when Anton Ego, the jaded and much-feared food critic in Ratatouille, delivers his review of Gusteau’s, the restaurant run by our hero Remy, a rat. Voiced by the great Peter O’Toole, Ego says that Remy’s talents have “challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking … [and] have rocked me to my core.” His speech, written by Brad Bird, similarly rocked me—and, to this day, sticks with me as I think about my work.

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy,” Ego says. “We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.”

Catmull, Ed; Wallace, Amy (2014-04-08). Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (Kindle Locations 2257-2265). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The Flaw of Perfect Executives Who Make No Mistakes, Mistakes are not Tolerated at this Company

Rarely will you find Executives Talking about the Mistakes they have made.  Ed Catmull has a talk at Stanford where he talks about mistakes made.

So many executives take the strategy of I am at the top and will show you what perfection looks like.  We should all strive to be perfect like I am.

In a fear-based, failure -averse culture , people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the opposite will happen. How, then, do you make failure into something people can face without fear? Part of the answer is simple: If we as leaders can talk about our mistakes and our part in them, then we make it safe for others. You don’t run from it or pretend it doesn’t exist. That is why I make a point of being open about our meltdowns inside Pixar, because I believe they teach us something important: Being open about problems is the first step toward learning from them . My goal is not to drive fear out completely, because fear is inevitable in high-stakes situations. What I want to do is loosen its grip on us. While we don’t want too many failures, we must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future.

Catmull, Ed; Wallace, Amy (2014-04-08). Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (Kindle Locations 1750-1758). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

This sets up a culture where mistakes are not tolerated.  No one is perfect.  We all make mistakes.  So what do you do?  You learn to hide your mistakes and/or make sure others get the blame for mistakes.

When you push for something innovative you are constantly making mistakes.