“Even I couldn’t figure out what we wanted, and I wrote the request!!”
Our systems had to be bullet proof… literally they could go down less than 1 minute in 3 years. Yes… that is real. You hear about “5 nines” – that is 99.999% uptime… And while we built them well, to get them into “operations” there were so many hands between us and the production system, we were having lots of deployment challenges.
I had asked our most senior technical resource, someone I helped get promoted to Principal Engineer – the same level as a VP (me) – to get to the bottom of it. “Write a request and track it all the way to the person who puts the change into the actual system” was my gentle suggestion. Well – not gentle…
…the leader who is still the first one to grab the wrench…
You are the best fixer on your team, and everybody knows it, including you. So when something breaks, it comes to you, and you fix it, and it works. And every time it works, the team learns a little more that the fixing is your job and not theirs.
The same thing happens at the kitchen table. The parent who always solves it raises kids who wait to be rescued. Nobody means it that way. But the Legacy of the best fixer in the house is often a house that never learned to fix anything.
…the founder who had to sit out his own band…
Larry Mullen Jr was born in Artane, Dublin, on October 31, 1961. At 14 he pinned the notice on the Mount Temple board, and on September 25, 1976, the band met for the first time in his family’s kitchen. His mother died in 1978, in the same year the 4 of them became U2. U2 had not played a show without him since 1978. Then, in February 2023, the band announced that Larry would take time out for surgery, and that Bram van den Berg of the Dutch band Krezip would sit in. From September 29, 2023 to March 2, 2024, U2 played 40 shows at the Sphere in Las Vegas without their founder, the first time since 1978. Larry came back to drum on the Days of Ash EP in February 2026, and on September 25, 2026, 50 years to the day, he played live again at Mount Temple. With a stadium tour ahead, he said that even if he could not play for 2 and a half hours, an hour would be enough.
A band that can play without you is the best thing you ever built.
…a song for someone else’s future…
U2 released Days of Ash by surprise on Ash Wednesday, February 18, 2026, 6 songs made with all 4 of them back in the studio. Song of the Future went to radio the same day, a tribute to Sarina Esmailzadeh, an Iranian schoolgirl killed in 2022. Larry put it plainly: the only reason to make a new record is music that deserves to be heard, and he believed these songs stood up to their best work.
The founder stepped back, and the band executed 40 shows. He came back to a band, not a hole, and a Legacy he could hand on.
…the fix I did not execute…
What he found was the our simple request was translated through about 10 different documents, and in the old grade school game of “Telephone” by the time the poor person actually had to make the change, they had no idea what to do. And… once that was clear, he was able to develop a much simpler handoff system, one that preserved the actual “why and what” not just the “what” so everyone along the way understood what to do. And… he gave ME credit for the work – which was crazy, but also something I eventually noticed. My Legacy is always seeing things in people they don’t see in themselves.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: Pick 1 thing you would normally fix yourself this week, hand it back to the person who owns it, and stay out of it until Friday.
If staying out of it is harder than it sounds, and it always is, I can help you execute the step back without dropping the ball. Schedule time with me here.
Hand it back, then listen for the… Song of the Future
