My father, Stan Feld, is a retired endocrinologist. He wrote a beautiful blog post yesterday titled The Therapeutic Magic Of The Physician Patient Relationship: Part 1. In it he tells the story of almost flunking out of first grade in the Bronx. The punch line:
“There is no question in my mind that this approach to medical care and the therapeutic effect of the positive physician patient relationship saved my academic life.”
I’m left handed so I can completely relate to this story – I had an incredibly difficult time learning how to write legibly, although my parents (and teachers) were much more appropriate in how they chose to approach it. My dad’s story, which is a powerful story for any parent to read, has several deep lessons it in, including ones around trust.
“The simple way to put it is medical care has and is being commoditized and dehumanized. These attributes are the common denominator to patients’ complaints about the medical care system in 2008. I cannot justify or condone physicians’ behavior.
Our healthcare system has to change. It must support the humanizing elements or the patient physician relationship. It has to nurture mutual trust rather than distrust between patients and physicians. A healthcare system that supports distrust, physician and patient penalties and adversarial interrelationships does not permit this princely profession to offer the kind of care physicians are capable of.”
I read my dad’s post yesterday before I wrote Valuing Competence vs. Loyalty. While they address completely different contexts and circumstances, if you squint you’ll get the common thread between them both. That thread is trust.
Today’s lunch time conversation was about valuing competence vs. loyalty. In some organizations, loyalty is the most important attribute while in others competence is valued over loyalty.
I have a different take on the distinction – I view competence as the most important attribute while assuming loyalty. Loyalty is a binary factor for me that is a superset of trust. In the absence of “loyalty” (and trust) nothing else matters. But a “loyal incompetent” is also worthless to an organization.
In my first company, we valued competence. We were intensely loyal to the people that worked for us and as a result many of them had long tenures with us. We were inexperienced in evaluating “competence” in certain situations so we definitely had folks around that were “less competent” for a while, but we usually (but not always) figured it out over time. Often, we were able to help them either become “more competent” or adjust their roles to play to their strengths, but sometimes we just missed. I learned a lot from that, especially when I reflect back on it and some of the struggles we went through.
The company that bought my first company had a split personality. There was a subset of the senior team that valued competence highly and demanded loyalty. If you were competent, they were equally loyal to you (it was a “bidirectional loyalty.”) There was a different subset of the team that was equally powerful from an operating perspective and located in a different geography where the leader valued loyalty over competence. He had plenty of “average” people on his team, but they supported him regardless of the situation. You can imagine some of the entertaining situations a guy like me got in – where I had huge loyalty to the gang that valued competence but not much to the gang that valued loyalty. Yeah – it was confusing. I learned a lot there also.
Over time, I’ve developed what I think is a pretty good personal framework which is analogous to the “no assholes rule.” At this point in my life, I don’t want to work with people I don’t like. For me, “like” covers a lot of ground, but fundamentally I have to trust and respect them. For me, trust and respect is driven by competence, but assumes a bi-directional loyalty. I then implement my own filter which I call the “fuck me over once rule.” Everyone gets to fuck me over once. When I find myself in a fucked over position, I confront the person. If we reconcile, there’s one more chance. If not, we are done.
It’s similar to how I think about the CEO’s of the companies I’m an investor in. I’m 100% supportive of the CEO until the moment I’m not. I view my position as working for the CEO – doing whatever he thinks I can do to help him and the company succeed. I’ll always give direct and open feedback. If I ever reach the point where I don’t have 100% confidence in the CEO, the first person I talk to about it is him. I try to be as clear as I can about what isn’t working from my frame of reference and am mutually willing to hit the reset button (e.g. go back to 100% support, recognizing my concern). If things don’t improve (including the potential of me changing my frame of reference), then as an investor I feel a responsibility to take action.
Both of these approaches are examples of valuing competence as the most important attribute while assuming loyalty. I’m always willing to take one more shot at any situation (where I’m demonstrating my presumed loyalty) where I think someone is falling down on the competence dimension. However, if the other person isn’t willing to reciprocate (demonstrate bi-directional loyalty) while attempting to address whatever the competence issue is, we are finished.
I’ve encountered virtually every iteration of this you can imagine in the 200+ companies I’ve been involved in over the past 20+ years. Sometimes I / we succeed; sometimes I / we fail. The entire dynamic is always complicated, as it’s never really a 1 to 1 situation, since it includes many founders, executives, employees, investors, and other constituents of the company. When a CEO has a clear point of view on this, it’s relatively easy to deal with and participate in, even if it’s different than my point of view. However, I find that when there’s clarity in the thinking, some derivation of my point of view typically (but not always) holds true.
Thomas Friedman has a phenomenal Op-Ed in today’s New York Times. Time to Reboot America. Whether you like or dislike Friedman, he’s nailed this one. Repeat after me: Ctrl-alt-del.
Oh goody, they are here. Every magazine, newspaper, and most of the online publications known to man are putting together their “2008 year in review” and their “2009 prediction” editions. What a fucking waste of human energy.
This has been one of my pet peeves for 20+ years. For a while I managed to ignore them completely. At some point I started getting asked for my predictions and succumbed to my ego for a few years and participated in the prediction folly. At some point I realized that there was zero correlation between my predictions and reality and that by participating, I was merely helping perpetuate this silliness.
The energy that goes into the “year in review” and “prediction” stuff seems to be significantly greater in “extreme” (both good and bad) times. The prognostications become stronger and bolder. The analysis by hindsight intensifies. I don’t think this benefits anyone.
Over dinner recently, I was having a discussion with a friend. The conversation took place in a very full and busy restaurant. At some point the discussion turned to the sentiment throughout the United States right now and how the level of anxiety, negativity, pessimism, depression, and downright panic seemed at an extremely high level and appeared disconnected from general reality. We talked about what “general reality” meant for a little while – both “our realities” (which are different) as well as our view of the “actual general reality in the United States.”
As we rolled through some of the discussion, I made the offhand comment that I thought much of the sentiment that existed started near the end of the summer a few weeks before the DNC. As I thought about it more, it made sense. For the 90 days prior to the election, all we heard and read was “things suck in America.” Oil hit $135 / barrel and was going to go to $200 / barrel (it’s $35 / barrel today.) Gas was going to be $10 / gallon (it’s under $2 / gallon in Colorado today.)
I was on vacation in England the week Lehman went bankrupt, AIG melted down, and Merrill Lynch got bought by Bank of America. Amy and I rarely watch TV on vacation (other than movies) but since CNBC’s Closing Bell was on about the time we were crawling into bed, we watched it as though it was a sporting event. Over the course of the week, we must have seen 100 different people predict 500 different things. 485 of them were wrong. Oh – and I read Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable during this week and just could stop bursting out with cynical laughter each evening. Over the 90 days we heard over and over again how much America sucked. How many problems we had. How everything was totally screwed up.
Of course, the financial markets have been a disaster in Q3 and Q4. The housing bubble has finally officially exploded (doesn’t explode sounds more dramatic than burst.) Unemployment is rising. Credit is frozen. Retail sales are massively off this Christmas. All companies except Walmart are having a tough Q4. Blah blah blah. And now come the 2009 predictions.
My prediction for 2009 – the vast majority of the 2009 predictions will be wrong. Ignore them. Find a Dharma that fits your Karma (more on that when I review Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement (Columbia Business School) by Bill Duggan, which I read last night.) You get a finite number of years on this planet – make the most of all of them, no matter what is going on around you.
Every male tech nerd (and some female tech nerds) that I’ve known has at one time or another has fantasized about a robot bringing him (or her) a beer from the refrigerator. Thanks to my friends at iRobot that’s now possible.
Ok – that’s a Pepsi. But it could have been a beer. The future is closer than you think.
Q4 vacation earlier this month was the site of my 43rd birthday (to those who wished me a happy birthday, thank you!) We spent the week in Cabo at the One&Only Palmilla my new favorite place to disappear from the world for a week. I hadn’t been reading much lately (no clue why – I just hadn’t been – maybe it’s due to the DDoS attack I have been under) so I reacquainted myself with one of my favorite things to do. As I’ve started my new daily book reading drill between now and the end of the year, I realized I hadn’t done short reviews of the books I read over Q4 vacation. Several were great; several weren’t. Here you go.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: Beautiful written and a great place to start. Haruki Murakami is a tremendous writer who has been running for the past 30 years of his life. He mixes personal philosophy, memoir, and treatise on running in a nice, appropriately size package. If you are a runner or triathlete, this is a must read.
Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race: This long history of the Cold War was really well done. For some reason I’ve become fascinated with the space race during the Cold War – maybe it’s a function of Sputnik’s 50th anniversary. Rhodes is a masterful story teller; this book was more like a novel than a history book. Coincidentally I saw an HBO Special on Sputnik and got to watch Ike and Khrushchev rail at each other, putting real faces to the whole thing.
Napoleon’s Privates: 2,500 Years of History Unzipped: Boring. I thought this was going to be interesting based on the teaser that it was a series of short vignettes on sex over history, pivoting around everyone’s favorite short French general. "Short" and "sex" are two words that should never go together in a teaser; this book lost my interest about half way through. A few of the stories were funny; most were just silly, stupid, vapid, or dull.
The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL: I’m the football widow in my family, but this book was dynamite. It was a combination an extended description of the highlights of the 1958 Giants vs. Colts championship game, biographic sketches of all the major players and coaches involved, and an extensive explanation of the evolution of football into the NFL. At some point I looked up and realized I’d been sitting in the same beach chair for three hours without moving. I guess some of y’all have this experience every Sunday in your living room – it appears to take a book about football to work for me.
Then We Came to the End: A Novel: Damnit, this should have been good. It’s a cynical novel about the contemporary workplace. I kept trying to get into it but couldn’t really care about any of the characters. I’d try again. Still no interest. I bailed at about the halfway point.
Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know: A fresh cut on the history of Google. Stross does a good job of organizing the story by chapter around specific Google products and their evolution. If you know a lot about Google, this book probably won’t be very interesting to you. If you think you know a lot about Google, but in you own personal quiet moment of honesty, you realize you probably don’t know as much as you do, this is a good book.
Rules of Deception: After that list of books, I definitely needed some mental floss. I was turned on to Christopher Reich in 2005 after writing a book review titled The Chairman (about one of Stephen Frey’s books). Reich is delicious – perfect mental floss.
Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World: Another awesome sports book. This one was about the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. Once again I get some geopolitics around the Cold War – this time with a direct intersection with a play by play history of the 1960 Olympic games. Russia vs. US Cold War stuff, Germany trying to decide if it is one country or two, Taiwan and China arguing over who is actually China, US athletes showing racial unification while the black / white split in America boils over, and a whole bunch of awesome and dramatic sports stories unfolding on a day by day basis, chapter by chapter.
Upbeat: I read a draft of Rajesh Setty ‘s newest book Upbeat. I met Rajesh at Gnomedex 5 and we’ve kept in touch since. He’s done a nice job writing a book that you can read in 45 minutes that has practical advice for entrepreneurs about how to deal with all the negative talk all around everyone right now.
Hot Mahogany: Stuart Woods is one of my favorite mental floss writers. Stone Barrington is a heroic character I can relate to. This was another fun one. Woods proudly says in his books that he’ll respond to all emails. I’ve sent him a few and never heard back. Nonetheless, I still enjoy his writing very much. Like a lot of mental floss, you’ll get a lot more out of it if you start at the very beginning, in this case New York Dead .
Divine Justice: David Baldacci is one notch above Stuart Woods. Divine Justice is another book in the Camel Club series and is the best one yet. Yummy.
Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study (Studies in Jungian Psychology, 12): I was at a board meeting last month where we were discussing different entrepreneurial personality types. One of the board members suggested that we all read Addition to Perfection by Marion Woodman. I hunted it down and started working my way through it. After three chapters of Jungian philosophy, I had very little idea why I was reading it and bailed. I wonder if he was simply suggesting that we ponder the title.
Letter to a Christian Nation: Sam Harris has written a short, blunt, and extraordinary well reasoned book. Based on his assertions, I’m going to guess that about 50% of American’s will be completely offended by this book. That alone makes it worth reading and contemplating. And since I like reading both sides of the argument, I just one-clicked Letter to a Christian Nation: Counter Point.
I’m always amused at how many “lists” appear at the end of the year. I’m anti-list – I never read them and I no longer am willing to contribute to them. So – for some non-list reading for today, I present to you the best of what I read this morning on the web.
Washington Is Killing Silicon Valley: Michael Malone nailed it in this article. “If Mr. Obama is serious about getting the country out of this recession using something more than public make-work projects, he should restore the integrity of the new company creation cycle: rewrite full disclosure, throw out options expensing, make compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley rules voluntary, and if he won’t cut it, then at least leave the capital gains tax rate alone.”
Day 2 Giveaway 6 – iMenorah: It’s Hanukkah (how do you spell that again) and all good jews with iPhones need the iMenorah app. Dad – I knew there was a reason you should have gotten an iPhone instead of a Blackberry.
Keystroker V2: Drive your co-workers insane in 2009 (if they aren’t already insane). Thanks Ryan.
Introducing the BUGvonHippel! The gang at BugLabs has shipped the BugvonHippel module (named after MIT professor and my SM / Ph.D. advisor Eric von Hippel). I first wrote about this in January 2008 – it’s awesome to see it released.
Bristol Palin’s boyfriend’s mom arrested in drug case: Even though this is completely and totally irrelevant, I couldn’t help myself.
Windows Live Writer 2009: Release Candidate: I love Windows Live Writer – I’ve been using it as my blog editor for a while. The new RC is up on the web with fancy new UI and some fun features.
Will This Economy Finally Push the Toyota Way Into Software Development? Good short thought piece about Agile software development highlighting Rally Software. My friends at Rally have had an awesome year and I’m really proud of them.
More Companies Are Cutting Labor Costs Without Layoffs: Would you rather have layoffs or try some creative things like salary cuts, furloughs, four-day workweeks, elimination of 401k matches, and unpaid vacations? While large companies are aggressively pursuing these options, it’s worth pondering for smaller companies that are flirting with trying to be cash flow positive.
See – no lists. I didn’t even number these posts.
As Chanukah sprints ahead and gets started before Christmas, we all know how this ends since Christmas will finish before Chanukah does. To refresh your memory, take a look at The Difference Between Christmas and Chanukah. An oldy but a goody.
Today’s book was an easy one. When Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007, I decided to read all of his books. A quick trip to Amazon resulted in the purchase of 14 novels. I’ve read about half of them and am gradually tossing in the balance between more "challenging" books.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater wasn’t Vonnegut’s best (although he rated it a A in his review of all of his books in Palm Sunday), but it was solid. He wrote it in 1965, sandwiched between Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five – easily his two best books (at least that I’ve read so far.) So, the dude was on a roll around the year I was born (and in the 1960’s in general).
As I work my way through Vonnegut, my inner cynic is rewarded with gems from 40 years ago. For example:
Kilgore Trout (near the end of the book): "The problem is this: How to love people who have no use? In time, almost all men and women will become worthless as producers of goods, food, services, and more machines, as sources of practical ideas in the areas of economics, engineering, and probably medicine, too. So – if we can’t find reasons and methods for treasuring human beings because they are human beings, then we might as well, as has so often been suggested, rub them out."
Don’t try to understand it – it won’t really make any sense without the context of the rest of the book. But – if you want a good jolt, read the book. One thing is for certain: Vonnegut knows how to string words together in a magical way.