Catching up
Today, Tuesday, I take a mid-week day of vacation. I am stretching this Thanksgiving week longer. As I am grilling some chicken wings for lunch, it is a good moment to catch up on saved TED talk, Youtube videos and podcasts.
The Infinite Game
In the Infinite Game, Simon Sinek discusses some of the principles from his 2019 book.
He makes it sounds so obvious and straight forward that some companies or adversaries work towards a different end goal. The North Vietnamese played to run out the clock. So did Reagan in the cold war against the Russians. The Afghans are the masters of playing the Infinite Game.
In business, it is convenient to trot out Apple or Tesla. They are truly great companies with great products. Though I fear grand theories can be more easily applied to them.
“While Microsoft executives were discussing presentation after presentation how they would beat Apple, their Apple counter parts were focussed on the educational customer and not on their direct competition. They were playing the infinite game.”
And yet, was Steve Jobs avoiding Amazon, the competitor, when Apple strong armed publishers into eBook price fixing?
I would love to read the infinite game plans of some smaller companies, as they transitioned from a small to mid-sized company, and eventually a large company. The struggle will be more real.
Companies that solely focus on competition will die. Those that focus on value creation will thrive.” — Edward de Bono
No Rules Rules
What if your company had no rules? is a Freakonomics book report podcast about Netflix’s Reed Hastings book. He talks about how he stumbled into the now famous Netflix culture, where the focus is all about enabling employees, and isn’t so much about policies and rules. A key tenet of Netflix is to get rid of the normal controls you’d come to expect in a corporate environment. Things like expense reports; approvals for big spending decisions; vacation policies. The idea is to entrust every employee to decide for themselves and provide them the flexibility. That, and a policy of not hiring any brilliant jerks.
Netflix is managing on the edge of chaos. - Reed Hastings
In conversation with current and former Netflix-employees, you do learn that their culture is different, counter to the culture at many other companies. There is a lot more chaos. Nevertheless, I hear a lot of positive feedback, as Netflix lets people build what they believe is the right thing to build.
One form of efficiency is coordinating all the tactics so everybody knows what’s going on. And then, the problem is, as you get big, that gets harder to do, you get slower. So, another way to operate is more loosely coupled, where lots of different departments are doing different things. And then the danger is that they’re going in different directions. So, you want them to be aligned, but not tightly coordinated. And to do that, you have to really set a lot of context, use a lot of examples, a lot of storytelling. But remember that all of Netflix is managing on the edge of chaos. Okay? You want to be right up to that edge where it’s dynamic and there’s freedom. It has not fallen into chaos, but it’s kind of right on the edge of it. And again, that’s only appropriate for some types of businesses.
The Netflix podcast reminds me of the time I worked at Sun Microsystems. There was quite a bit of chaos within. Surely things were uncoordinated because we were growing so fast. Yet, I have to believe it was also by design. At Sun, I regularly ran into competing projects which were going after the same goal. I didn’t feel efficient. I’ve since learned that if you are trying to solve challenging projects, you need competing projects to figure out the right approach.
At my current company, I’ve seen myself evolving. I started when we didn’t have any documented development processes. I then created some structure, and we ended up with a voluminous development manual. Over the past 1-2 years, I’ve been on a quest to put our processes on a serious diet. I’ve killed many documents, and shrunk the various process documents. The goal really is to keep the rules to a minimum, and provide a lot of freedom to the engineers.
The No Rules Rules culture is about preserving the small company culture into puberty and adulthood. I wonder if this is truly Netflix’s grow-up secret, or whether their initial financial success allowed them to continue to be like a small and innovative company. In other words, what’s the chicken and what’s the egg. Probably it’s both.