Qui Audet Adipiscitur “Who dares, Wins!”
It is not surprising that the motto of the British SAS (Special Air Services paramilitary forces) should also find a home in the tech industry. Growing up as a Boy Scout in a former Crown colony, we sported SAS jackets as the fashion regardless of how the thick material made us sweat profusely in the jungle heat during hikes. We accepted the discomfort as a small factor with focus of being ready to last through the hikes and camping in the jungles of Borneo. We were explorers, hacking ourselves a new trail through the ever-changing undergrowth. The reward, simple but resounding, was the discovery of a hidden waterfall, a lost cave, or even a forgotten piece of history.
For one trip we brought no tents, but a large tarp, and despite never having designed or built a shelter before, we mocked up a plan for a wood and bamboo structure with two levels, raised platform floors, and siding. It took about a day to build and even as the rain started falling, we were striping bamboo and putting up siding to keep it out.
Did we know what we were doing? Specifically, no. Generally, yes. And it was more than enough to keep 30 scouts dry for a week of continuous rain, day and night, with only an hour or two of respite. In the overall jamboree of 100 different troops across several square miles of jungle, ours was the only structure later considered sound enough to let us stay while most others evacuated their flooded sites.
What does any of that have to do with Ms. Ekaterina Walter’s new book, Think Like Zuck? Coincidentally, quite a bit. After all, the technology industry is a new frontier, a new ‘wild west’ yet to be truly tamed. As Ms. Walter describes,
How easily we forget that other “empires” were run by the “inexperienced.” Bill Gates knew nothing about running a company when he founded Microsoft, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had been an investment banker when he started his company in his garage. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were in college when they created Google.
I would certainly ascribe this quality of entrepreneurial exploration as part of the new work ethic of the generation of businesses currently emerging per the stories of this book.
At its heart, this is a book about the ethic, the drive of what makes us work, lead, and succeed. This is a profile of a number of young companies beyond Facebook alone, including parallels in TOMS, Dyson, Zappos, XPLANE, with examples from other long-standing institutions like Kimberly-Clark, Disney, and 3M.
By examining the attitudes toward work by the leaders profiled in this book, we cut into the layers of culture that are set into the tech-driven industries of today. While technology may not be the sole purpose of all these companies, they are strongly affected or facilitated by the ability that technology provides to share, distribute, interact and collaborate.
We can be explorers
This ethic of exploration strikes with the boldness to test out the limits regardless of how well you may know a particular domain. In part this may be due to the realization that we have a strong sense that the rules are being rewritten although not entirely sure how; one could wait and see, or simply take a direct hand in rewriting them.
To go in hand with the explorer’s spirit, as Ms. Walter describes it, is some degree of naiveté in the space. If you don’t know everything about a space, it reduces the view of risk.
This work ethic in particular often gets drummed out over time working in environments where risk taking is held carefully in check, or maintaining harmony with others in the system, organization or industry is part of the organizational culture.
Harmony it seems would be at odds with this ethic, but harmony could be viewed in different ways.
In the desire to make sure the risks are evaluated thoroughly or to reduce duplication of activity, some organizations focus significantly on checking plans with other teams. This is sometimes referred to as collaboration as well. Statements like “Make sure you collaborate with Team A on this. And did you talk to Mr. X and Ms. Y in this other department?”
The fear of duplication harks back to a drive for greater efficiency. Organizations that emphasize efficiency as a primary value tend to create a cultural assumption to avoid duplication, multiplicity, and risk taking.
Dave Gray, founder of XPLANE, one of the companies covered in this book, and author of The Connected Company (O'Reilly & Assoc., 2012), has a focus on the idea of ‘podular’ units or teams that are individually capable of doing work, and the organization as a fractal model of such movable pods. Without central coordination, duplication of work, context and teams, aren’t just possible but to be expected. The harmony of such an organizational model emerges from a shared common (and easy to comprehend) vision that individuals and teams can follow as a guide. However, what does emerge is creative destruction and creative loss.
If I have to summarize this ethic into a simple formula
(exploration + naiveté + risk-taking)
With the anti pattern
(efficiency-driving + deep knowledge + verification)
We are Makers
Another recurring motif that emerges out of the book is the Hacker ethic. If you still think the word ‘Hacker’ is a negative one, it is also referred by other names: Makers, innovator’s view, or the entrepreneurial experimentation. As stated in the book
“Prototyping trumps discussions. And sometimes curiosity and imagination trump knowledge.”
Another personal reflection: back in my college days we started the HACKS club to take older computers and systems that University departments were done with to build new servers out of them. We learned to take it upon ourselves to take something we may know little or even nothing about, and try to bring it to life as something new, and learn about hardware, operating systems, and problem-solving along the way.
This goes beyond the words of Yoda: “Do or do not,... there is no try.” It isn’t simply about trying but about building something to prove your point or your idea can work. You debate an idea not with words but with action, with code, or a counter-example.
I would say this has several implications:
- You need to spend a little time to understand the general problem or challenge they are attempting to solve.
- You must have the time to understand how it works or check the results are what they say they are.
- There aren’t too many dependent variables and other elements that have to be addressed and outside your control before you can work on it
- You must have the time and resources to be able to work on your response, in the form of another implementation.
As the author states: “Involve your employees, and give them freedom to create.” It takes more than giving the imperative to “be innovative” while restricting their time and ability to pursue their own ideas. It again is the anti-thesis of an efficiency-focused drive.
Ironically, a common motto at Facebook “Done is better than perfect” also describes the opposite view of spending time. In addition, Ms. Walter focuses on another idea:
“Creating an environment of agility and a sense of urgency is critical to the ongoing success of an enterprise that is looking for ways to innovate.”
You need sufficient time to experiment, but don’t become obsessed with getting it just right. The book unfortunately seems contradictory in this area because while it recounts the efforts of British inventor and designer James, known for inventing the bagless vacuum cleaner.
Experimentation by definition means trying out things that may not have been tried, and possibly lead to dead-ends.
James Dyson is also known for his trial-and-error approach in building function-led product designs. Just like Zuck and Edison, James Dyson prefers to invent not by theorizing but by building one prototype after another until he succeeds.
…
Supported by his wife’s salary as a teacher while pumping all of his finances into the idea, on his 5,127th attempt, Dyson finally developed a working version of the new bagless cleaner. But it would take him about 15 years to launch the Dyson Dual Cyclone under his own name.
…
Dyson’s approach to innovation is quite remarkable. He doesn’t talk about ideas; he prototypes them over and over again. He says that to truly understand what works and what doesn’t, one should experience it firsthand. He believes that the inventor’s life is one of failure and that purposeful failure is an essential ingredient in coming up with the most breakthrough solutions.
The motif on ethic here: the understanding and acceptance of failure as essential. However, Mr. Dyson many trials were to perfect the basic idea of the vacuum, and not simply to be done. It is what makes his invention and life so remarkable.
In a world, where it is too easy to ascribe trials as ‘best practices’ and glossify ‘lessons learned’ we are even afraid to use the word ‘failed’. Per Dyson’s words in the book,
We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually.
There is also no such thing as ‘done’ and ‘perfect’ as the Facebook motto goes, but experimentation requires both a willingness to try many ideas, but also the relentless pursuit. In some cases, the pursuit seems to be towards perfection; while in others, it seems to find a solution quickly enough to move on to something else.
If I have to summarize this ethic:
(working-model-prototyping + investing experimentation time + no ‘best’ right way to do things + acknowledging-failure)
With the anti pattern
(ideas-in-theory + pushing innovation without permitting time + seeking to set ‘best’ practices + spinning ‘lessons learned’)
To be accurate, I would have liked to see more first-hand, primary research, interviews and accounts in the book. An actual direct interview of Zuck should have been a key aspect. There is a great deal of recounting from secondary and already published stories collected together here. There needed to be a more critical look at some of these stories within because many of the sources are inherently biased, while rapidly glossing over any flaws.
Following MIT Sloan School of Management, Prof. (Emeritus) Ed Schein – generally credited for inventing the idea of organizational or corporate culture – there are three levels of cultural elements: visible artifacts and behaviors; espoused values, and shared (often unspoken) basic assumptions. Corporate storytelling needs to go beyond the visible artifacts and espoused values, to get beyond propaganda to the deeper heart of what truly lies within. While it is very possible to read or see the first two declarative aspects, the assumptions are the foundational elements that lead to secrets of success.
All in all, these are far from the only ideas within this book and insufficient to explore all the ideas within. So, I would say it is a worth the time to read through the various stories.. A good deal of passion shows through the writing and is a key theme across the book, another work ethic of today. Passion drives. Passion creates. Passion fails. Passion excels.
