managing to stay Alive…
“Semiconductor memory will never fly in space.” The PhD in our division said it in a meeting, flat, the way people say things they have already decided. Cosmic rays would flip the bits. End of discussion. I was 25, with a new baby at home.
You have been in that meeting. The most senior person in the room has already decided, out loud, in 7 words. You have the data, or you could have it by Thursday, and what you do not have…
… the standing to say so. Everybody looks at the table. If you have been that person, or you are the one who said the 7 words, this one is for you.
…by working harder?
I did not argue. Not because I was wise … I was 25 … but because I did not have anything to argue with yet. So I spent a week in the NASA library. I knew how to research from years of high school debate, as a nerd. I found the papers the field was built on, and a model that said how often those flips would actually happen. Then I did the thing that took the next 2 years: I made a list of everyone who would have to say yes before that memory flew. 2 IBM sites. Several NASA centers. A physicist with a cyclotron at Berkeley. My own management. The PhD.
That list was the whole job. And here is the sentence it took me 20 more years to be able to say out loud:
It’s never Alive… until it’s theirs too…
It flew on Shuttle flight 41-G in 1984. My parents watched the 7 am launch with me from the Cape. The cyclotron confirmed the model. I have never been more Alive at work, before or since. And I nearly threw it all away with one magazine article, which I will get to…
…Pearl Jam’s bass player is not the member you notice first. Jeff Ament grew up in a small town in northern Montana, came to Seattle for the music, and has been the band’s quiet infrastructure ever since: the bass lines, yes, but also the artwork, the design, the business sense, the long view. When the band decided in 1994 to take on the biggest ticketing company in the country over service fees, it was Jeff and Stone who put on jackets and went to Washington. On June 30, 1994, they testified before a House subcommittee. A rock band, at a hearing, with a stakeholder map.
They did not win the fight. What they did not lose was the band. That is the manage question in 1 line: do the right people have the right information to make it their’s … and did you draw the map before you picked the fight, or after?
…and what is not as it seems?
In 2000, on the album Binaural, Jeff wrote the song that I think is the truest thing he has put his name on. “Nothing as It Seems.” In his words, it is “a song about judgment and not always understanding what is going on with another person.” He wrote it looking back at that Montana childhood, at memories he said he had “selectively forgotten for my own mental health.”
It went to number 3 on the rock chart and number 1 in Canada, which for a slow, dark, bass-driven song from the least visible member of the band is its own kind of miracle. Mike McCready played the solo through a pedal he said sounded “like a plane going down.” Listen for it. It is the sound of a story you thought you understood, coming apart.
That is what a stakeholder map is for. Not to win. To find out what is not as it seems before you say something you cannot take back.
Did you draw the map … or just the target?
When our experiment worked, I was so proud that I pushed a magazine piece out about it before the scientists had published their own results. Their results. Their years of work. I had the map for the experiment to be completed… and no map at all for what happened after it, and I had not asked a single one of them whether that story was mine to tell.
I had to fly up to face them… about an hour, in a windowless conference room. I did not defend myself, which I am told is the only thing I did right that day. Somebody asked me later what I learned. I said, “Don’t do that.” It took about 20 more years for the real lesson to land, and it is the one I manage by now: the right information at the right time to the right people is not a courtesy. It’s what keeps the work Alive after the moment you were proud of it.
Make it theirs to be… Alive
Is that you? The one who is quietly the best developer of people in the building, and would rather build the thing than talk about it. They have the answer 5 minutes into the meeting. They know they have it. The ones who last have learned, usually the hard way, to not say it until the people who will have to live with it have said theirs. Distance from the situation. Really see before you decide.
It is 5 minutes into the meeting and you already have it. You can see the whole shape of the thing, and you are watching 6 people walk slowly toward what you could say in one sentence. Your hand is not up. You have learned that much. What you have not learned yet is which of them needed to get there before you did.
So this is the practice for manage this week. Before the fight, before the announcement, before the article, draw the map. Every name that has to say yes, and every name that will be quietly hurt if you skip them. Then look at it and ask what on it is not as it seems.
Who on your map have you not read into the story yet?
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: take the 1 decision you are closest to announcing. Write down every person who has to say yes, and every person who will find out from someone else. Talk to 1 person on the 2nd list today.
Drawing that map with that leader before the announcement is the cheapest hour we will ever spend. We can draw yours… Schedule that here.
Jeff went to Washington with a map and came home with the band. I went to the magazine without one and came home with a lesson. Both of us learned the same thing, at different volumes: in a good Team, and in a good career, there is almost always Nothing as It Seems.
