Irreverence

In the early 90s, I was leading a team in the Systems Division at Microsoft working on a version of Windows.  The Microsoft campus in those days was still pretty small; you could count the buildings on two hands.  The company was growing very fast, with new employees showing up every week.  Parking was at a premium, and people sometimes had to get creative to find a parking space.  It was tough for visitors to find spots when they came to campus.

The facilities team responsible for buildings and parking generally did a great job, and we all had a lot of respect for them.  But the parking situation got tougher every day, and the facilities team felt like they had to get the situation under control.  So they blasted a whole-company email out, reminding people of the parking rules and asking them to respect visitor spaces, no-parking areas, etc.  My memory isn’t perfect; they may have sent the email to all managers, and then we had to send it out to the teams.

The response the next day was predictable.   Cars were parked on sidewalks, on lawns, in flower beds, straddling spots, just utter parking chaos.  People cleaned it up later in the day, but it was a messy morning.

Microsoft was a young organization with a lot of young smart people, and the company was completely focused on overturning the old ways of centralized enterprise-controlled computing with the PC.  It was a revolutionary company; it attracted revolutionaries, it encouraged revolutionaries, and irreverence was a core company value.  Trying to centrally control the behavior of the company by diktat was never going to work.  Irreverence was baked into the company.

This was a great lesson to me.  I led teams with people who were way smarter and way more competent at software development than I was.  You couldn’t just tell people what to do; that would just blow up in your face.   I had to lead with data; I had to convince people of the right path.  By the time we had to make a decision, it had to be obvious to everyone what to do.

Leading was not about me making all the decisions.  Leading was about creating the environment so that good decisions were made, whether by me or someone else.  I had to listen to the smart people on the team; I had to get the right information in front of the team.  I learned from leaders above me how to create systems so that the right customer data automatically saturated the team — everyone had to participate in product support calls and hear customer frustration first-hand, for instance.  

Irreverence was never an irritation to me — it was always a sign of health.  Everyone in the organization felt empowered to speak up, to push back against ill-considered direction, to engage in directing the business.  

Tesla

Anthony Bay on Tesla this week: 

The market capitalization has, at various points, exceeded the combined value of most of the traditional automotive industry. The gap between unit share and value share is one of the more instructive data points in modern business.

I can't help but wonder if Tesla misplayed its hand in the automotive market.  Tesla sells a small fraction of the vehicles produced each year, and there was probably never a realistic path for them to sell more than 1-2% of total vehicles annually.  But Tesla was so far ahead in charging infrastructure, battery infrastructure, software infrastructure – Tesla could have opened those technologies up and sold as components, and probably captured 30% or more of the component markets.  

But they didn't, and others caught up.  For instance, 4 years ago, the non-Tesla charging infrastructure was terrible, unusable.   But I used an electrify america chargepoint this past week, and it was completely reasonable. 

I wonder if Tesla automotive isn't going to be like Tivo – a brilliant pioneer who overplayed their hand and is now irrelevant.

Golden Age of Software

The software industry is confused right now; everybody and their dog can use AI tools to build SAAS tools and apps, most of which are unmaintainable and of uncertain long-term value.  Maybe the golden age of software development and software valuations has passed.  

But this morning, I saw this quote on a social network (and of course immediately lost the source as the feed updated):

There is no upward bound to human laziness.

And I became optimistic again — there are endless opportunities to automate and simplify our lives.