The Luckiest Room Mate In The World

Posted by Richard Newton | 0 comments
Posted by Richard Newton | 0 comments
A veteran of PLC boardroom politics, a highly rated and wily treader of the greasy pole had been trying to help us and he was in despair. “The problem with you lot is none of you want to be led”, he raged at me and the fellow directors of our tech startup. “Business needs leadership! You need to accept that the Managing Director should be able to make the final decision …AND THEN GET ON WITH IT!”, he continued. He looked around for a full compliment of cowed and nodding heads but didn’t find them. “Look, here’s the thing. You’re an orchestra and like any good orchestra with lots of individual talent you must let the conductor conduct you!”
The silence that followed was punctured only by the branch of a tree squeaking against the window. Then one of the directors said: “But here’s what you don’t understand: We’re a jazz band.”
Not long afterwards I departed and the jazz band theorist became the MD.
The disconnect between the gameplaying world of careerists at giant multinationals and the cash-starved mentalists who inhabit startups is probably the clash of culture I know best. But the world is not short of other clashes of culture. There’s the clash between my personal trainer and me. He has taken to giving me dietary advice on printed paper because he knows I don’t read the emails. It would be outside his healthiness worldview to even contemplate that they go straight in the bin and nestle among the Mars Bar wrappers.
And there’s Brexit which has done for us all, has it not? Swivel-eyed leavers and sanctimonious remoaners dare not speak about what’s on their mind without carefully preparing the conversational ground first.
And let us not get into the world of generation snowflake who despair of their callous elders just as much as the bewildered others ponder whether the snowflakes’ brains have turned to slush. And…I wasn’t going to say this for fear of giving offence but I can’t help it, the carnival of identity poltiics is the worst clash of the lot. There, I said it. Send your complaints to the pilot in his safe space behind the re-inforced cockpit door.
The identity thing is the worst, I contend, because it atomises society more than anything else. But this is a business magazine and business folk need no more complaints about business culture; they need solutions. And in this highly atomised and ever-so sensitive world business leaders need great performances from people functioning as teams. But in this environment how can they ever do this?
Fear not, I am here to tell you that someone wrote a book about it.
And it’s very good! I expected it to be intolerable because the terminology triggered my snowflake politics sensor. There are three “secrets “ to building a culture that enables “highly succesful groups” says Daniel Coyle. They are: Build Safety; Share Vulnerability, and: Establish Purpose. Well, you read that lot and think one thing: Pass the sick bag.
Coyle, it turns out, is a master of managing expectations because the book is much better than the list of “secrets” suggest. This is because he’s a good story teller and has found many exceptional stories to illustrate how great organisational cultures are fomented. Drawing on examples of US Navy SEALS, outperfoming basketball teams, world class restaurant chains, Soldiers on the fonrltine at Flanders, the success of Zappos, Google, Pixar, the pilots of spiralling jet aircraft (sorry), inner city schools, stand up comedy and many more Coyle succeeds in gripping your attention and teaching you many things along the way (and I say this as a cynic).
He even succeeds in surfacing three core rules (I mean, secrets) that can be applied strategically and tactically in almost any organisation. But, and this is a personal problem I should see someone about, the label “sharing vulnerability” just irritates me beyond belief. I would describe the qualities he is seeking as “humility and openness”. That tiny culture clash aside, I would tell you (if I was your conductor) to go and pick this up.
……
I read:
The Culture Code: The secrets of highly successful groups
By Daniel Coyle
Posted by Richard Newton | 0 comments“It’s fluorescent orange your book”, observed Paul, who owns the coffeeshop. “It looks like you’ve been colouring it in. Like a mad person with only one colour of pen…who only does straight lines…”
He was exaggerating for effect, just like his “thermonuclear blend” but he had a point. I had underlined so much of the book in preparation for this detailed review that more of it was orange than, er, paper colour. Were a search and rescue helicopter flying above trendy Shoreditch coffee shops that Sunday morning to check up on book reviewers they would have had no trouble locating their rescuee. Who needs a flare gun when you can simply wave your book in the air while flicking the neon pages?
But there was no need of a book-reviewer-rescue operation. This orangeification of the book was not a signal of distress but the sign of a cracking read.
“This will stun you”, I said to Paul, preparing to read out a passage of the book.
“You did that when you turned the pages”, he replied, putting on some glacier glasses.
I soldiered on: “The billionaires of Silicon Valley, all the geek-billionaires, they’re all mates”. I said “It’s not quite the meritocracy they would have you believe. Most of them went to university together or previously worked together! At Paypal!”
“Well, well. You don’t say”, he yawned and went to serve a customer who wasn’t holding a glowing book.
I had a similar response elsewhere: The revelations of this book only fitted what most people already thought was the case. To be specific, the news I was sharing was that Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ebay, Amazon et al in cahoots with the Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists are hell bent on gathering all the money and power in the world while at the same time declaiming that they do it all for the benefit of humanity; To make the world a better place.
So if gut feel already told most people this, including me, something else had made me proselytise “The Know It Alls”. The writer Ayn Rand is a sort of philosopher queen for the Silicon Valley libertarian meritocratic elite. In her famous doorstopper, Atlas Shrugged a recurring piece of advice is offered every time something fails to make sense: “Check Your Premises”. Dutifully I went back through the book and realised that what actually made the book such a terrific read was that Noam Cohen lays out precisely why the cynical interpretation is the right one. Now we have facts. Subjective, I grant you. But compelling and very well told.
Cohen structures his tale as a sequence of ten character sketches beginning with John McCarthy, one of the founding professors of Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University and via Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and the Google founders making his way to Mark Zuckerberg.
As a tech columnist at the New York Times, Cohen has picked up a treasure trove of anecdotes and these leaven and entertain a story which otherwise remorselessly drives toward the dread realisation that you were right all along. It is all these proof points which I realise I have gleefully highlighted with my Stabilo Boss.
He identifies two primeval swamps from where the species of geek-billionaire rapidly evolved. The first is Stanford University which turned into a local Silicon Valley hothouse for the conversion of academic computer science into freemarket billions.
The second is PayPal, the online payment firm, whose former leaders are the founders or significant investors in many household names: Facebook, LinkedIn, Tesla, YouTube, Yammer and Yelp.
Some of these moguls never were idealistic in the first place says Cohen. But others were and it is his account of the “re-orientation” of the aims of Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page once they had investors on board that are the most chilling.
The nerds who claim they want to make the world a better place now hold all the cards. And Cohen’s book suggests they chose the path not of Frodo but Gollum. People instinctively know this as my friendly baristapreneur had made clear. But with this book we know how it happened.
……
I read The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball
By Noam Cohen
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