can you execute a plan you were never given the reason for?
26 VPs, an NDA, and a spreadsheet with 1,765 names on it
Five hours in Mountain View, a red eye home, and then a mandatory meeting that nobody would explain in advance. Twenty six of us in a room. I signed the NDA for something called Project One.
What followed was months of daily iterations of a spreadsheet with 1,765 engineers on it, spread around the globe, traded in complete secrecy with my peer on the West Coast. We executed the reorganization on January 1. Even leading the largest part of it, I was never entirely sure what the real objective had been.
You’re the leader who can deliver anything, and who stopped asking what it was for some time ago. What are you executing right now that you could not explain the why of, out loud, to the people it is going to land on?
…and the ratio turned all the way up
The thing I Compressed hardest in 30 years of corporate life was not my volume or my vocabulary. It was my empathy. To do that work you have to distance yourself from it, and that is Compression with the ratio turned all the way up.
A spreadsheet is a beautiful instrument for it. Names become rows. Rows become counts. The signal coming off 1,765 human beings gets squeezed down until it fits inside a number you can put on a slide, and the squeezing is not a failure of character. It is the only way most of us can make ourselves do it at all.
the man who turned down the royalties
In February 1993, Nirvana went to a studio in Cannon Falls, Minnesota and made a record in 9 days with Steve Albini, then mixed it in 5 more, deliberately raw, as an answer to how polished the last one had been. Albini took a flat fee and refused royalties on it, calling royalties an insult to the artist. That is what it looks like to execute a conviction on the day it costs you money, which is the only day the conviction counts.
…so execute the ask, and leave the gap open
And then the honest ending, which almost nobody quotes. Kurt, in January 1994, about the record they had just made their own way. “I think there are a few songs on In Utero that could have been cleaned up a little bit more.”
The man who was embarrassed by the polish went and made the raw record and then said in print that parts of it wanted more polish. So the answer was never no Compression. The answer was his own hand on the dial.
That is available to you too, any morning, in whatever room you walk into and whatever you were handed to do in it.
One thing in that season I would do again exactly the same. When it came time, I was forced to transition my own team to my peer’s leadership, and it was easier than I expected, because I knew they were not only in good hands… better hands. That is the whole of what you can control in a reorganization. Not the reason. Who catches them.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: Ask the “why” question… any project is better with context. Most don’t because “it is rude.” Ask anyway… and see if it makes sense to you much less your team…
Finding your own hand on the dial, so you execute at a setting you chose, is work I would gladly do with you. Schedule time with me here.
Whoever you are actually working for this weekend, I hope you picked them on purpose… Serve the Servants
