How do you engage to stay Alive?
Alive has a special meaning when you are the short kid… and the school Bully has you cornered in the locker room… the door behind him…
Being a tech guy has similar moments, doesn’t it? The big, good-looking business person focuses on all the things your platform WON’T do, and beating up your well-made plans without ever understanding them. If you’ve been in either situation, this week is for you.
… from somewhere came the only option, the one I got very good at. I started talking. Wordplay, mostly at his expense, fast enough that the room laughed before he worked out what I had said. Embarrassed, he backed down. I walked out… and he never did that again…
… I have been Alive on my wits ever since… which limited my career…
Who gets your tape…
Pearl Jam started as an ending. Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament had a band with a debut record finished and waiting to come out. Their singer, Andy Wood, died on March 19, 1990, at 24, weeks before it did. Most of us would have stopped there… Stone kept engaged…
He wrote instrumentals. No words, no singer, just riffs on a cassette. He called one of them “Dollar Short.” He, Jeff, and a new guitar player, Mike McCready put a handful of them on a tape, labeled it “Stone Gossard Demos ’91,” and started handing it to people, looking for a voice. Through many hands, it made it to San Diego, where someone was working nights at a gas station and days as a hotel security guard.
That stranger was Eddie Vedder. He listened to the tape, went surfing, came back, and wrote words over 3 of Stone’s instrumentals in 1 sitting, a little 3-song story he called Momma-Son. Then he sang over Stone’s riffs and mailed the cassette back to Seattle. “Dollar Short” came back as Alive…
I started this. It is not finished. Make it yours.
Stone was the one who opened that envelope. The band he rebuilt out of a funeral, the songs he had written alone afterward. Here was a stranger’s voice on top of them, turning them into something he had not planned. In the band’s own film, Pearl Jam Twenty, he said it plainly: “It was so strange that my vision for what I wanted the band to be immediately was taken over by Ed.”
That is the sentence, Alive. Stone had written it, it was not finished, and he let a man he had never met make it his. He was not being generous. The tape came back better than it went out, and he was honest enough to hear it.
…who is strong enough to engage you?
Years ago, a great and gutsy manager marked my performance down. Not for the results; the results were fine. For the HOW…
I was the small, bright kid all over again, only now the locker room was a floor of engineers. Talking fast, running over people, writing condescending emails, and at one point a letter to the facility manager saying, more or less, that everyone in the building was an idiot. The trick that had saved me in that locker room had quietly become my management style. The fast words that once kept me Alive were now the thing keeping everyone else quiet.
He held my feet to the fire on it, and I have been grateful ever since. Because the better way was not a softer version of me. It was the sentence that Stone learned. The things on my plate that somebody on the team was better built for, I gave away with those 3 lines… I started this. It is not finished. Make it yours.…
… and then comes the hard part. Waiting…
So … which unfinished thing are you still holding tonight that somebody on your team would hand back to you Alive?
Your doing gets in the way of their doing. It is 9:40 at night after a day of “locker room” meetings. The work came back from your team 3 hours ago. You are in it now, quietly fixing it, because it is faster to do it yourself and because you can. You will send it at 11, and tomorrow you will say nothing… hoping no one will know it was not theirs…
… if you have great people, they will. And… you will never be known as the…
…Best Developer…of PEOPLE in your company…
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: before your next 1-1, hand 1 unfinished piece of work to the person on your team it belongs to, with 1 sentence … I started this. It is not finished. Make it yours. … and then do not touch it again until it comes back…
… let everyone else play their cards before saying a word. Some things will come back better than they went out. Some will come back different, and you will have to sit on your hands and let different be fine… Alive even.
How will you engage Mankind?
In 1996, 5 records in, on an album called No Code, Stone sang one of his songs. “Mankind.”
It is the only Pearl Jam studio track without Eddie on lead vocals. Fast, a little nervy, a little punk, borrowed from the sound of Stone’s side band, Brad, and it sounds like a man having fun in a room. He never did it again. He did not need to.
That is your trade. Hand the big thing away, completely, to the person who can carry it further than you can. And keep 1 small thing that is only yours, that you do because it is fun, so you remember why you started. Stone kept a song. I kept… developing leaders…
… our team went on to win work I could never have talked my way into. We can help you do that with your team… Schedule that here.
Stone gave away the song that made the band. 35 years on, that is still the best trade in rock and roll … and still the best trade for anyone who leads Mankind…
