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It happened at lunch the other day. We were talking about how much we want to believe in tech, and how hard it is to do that when there’s so much about it that’s awful. It wasn’t a conversation about Uber, but the Holder report had just come out (along with its raft of hot takes), and so it was hard to avoid using them as an example.
And then one of the people at the table said it. Said a thing that I’ve heard a lot of times before. You have, too.
“Yeah, it’s a mess. But it works for them. We can complain about it, but it’s hard to argue with success.”
I want to talk about that.
Role Models
I never really felt comfortable with the cult of personality around startup CEOs. As a leader out there hustling, you’re supposed to obsess over these people. You’re supposed to want to know their secrets, listen to their podcast interviews, and run your business like they run theirs. For me it’s hard to suspend disbelief. If you watch them, it’s always more or less clear that they are making it up as they go.
Still I am more sympathetic to them than I used to be. It’s amazing how much shit gets thrown in your path when you’re trying to build something. Everyone’s got an opinion on how you should have run things differently, and none of them have to answer to your board, or your users, or your employees. None of them have their life savings invested in a company that’s going to be worth nothing in 6 months if a competitor wins and you lose. I have been the guy that everyone had an idea for, and a pet complaint, and a “why don’t you just…”
It’s hard. It’s impossible to imagine that anyone will be perfect at it. It might not even be realistic that anyone will be passable.
And so we get these celebrity CEOs. These polarizing figures who seem to have done the impossible, and found a path to glory and riches. It’s not a surprise that people want some of that for themselves.
Let’s Talk About That Glory
Have you read the Holder report?
You know what strikes me most about it? It’s so elementary.
This company that people point to as a beacon of brilliant and strategic execution? Its leadership just had to sit through a remedial class on the fundamentals of running a grown up organization. In public.
Recommendation 5 says that leaders should get leadership training. Recommendation 7-D is to use blind resume screens. Recommendation 9 is that they should figure out what’s driving employee turnover.
This is not glorious execution. This isn’t even, “some things are complicated at scale.” This is finding out that your friends with the nice house and the expensive cars are secretly bankrupt. Only it’s much worse than that. Because when a company is run like this, it’s the employees who suffer first and most, not the owners.
Travis has announced that he’s taking a leave of absence to properly grieve for a personal tragedy. No one should fault him for that, nor begrudge him time to heal. But nevertheless, whenever he comes back, Recommendation 1-A in the Holder report is, “Review and Reallocate the Responsibilities of Travis Kalanick.” It says that pieces of his job should be taken away and given to other people.
Is this what glory and riches look like? It feels more like foreclosure.
Decency Debt
Every engineer has had to pay off technical debt. The ugly bits of code, sometimes borne of expediency, sometimes ignorance, often both. Startups love this debt metaphor. I hear founders talk about metrics debt, marketing debt, and even people debt: the debt you accumulate as you refuse to let your organization grow up.
Well there’s another kind of debt that seems to follow these meteoric leaders around, like a shadow. The failure to be basically decent, and to build an organization that values decency, builds up. Like technical debt, it comes more from ignorance and expediency than malice. Some leaders are sociopaths, no doubt, but I think most would insist that they aren’t trying to make things awful. They just never bothered to give enough of a shit to make them better.
As with all debt, people sinking into decency debt often look heroic. They go fast. They don’t take no for an answer. Nothing slows them down. But being decent does slow you down. It takes effort to properly address reports of harassment. It hits productivity to fire the brilliant assholes in your organization. It messes with your recruiters to demand a diverse mix of candidates.
When you decide to skip all that, you go faster than everyone else. For a little while, as the debt builds, your people see it but the public doesn’t. People break out the awe-struck emoji. 📈 🚀 🦄
Debts Get Called
And then one day the facade starts to crack. People leave your company and the word gets out. Friends tell friends not to work there, and you start to have to raise salaries a lot to land candidates. You have your recruiters talk up the position before they mention the company’s name. That’s debt being called.
Your internal emails and all hands calls are now leaked to journalists within minutes. You can tell yourself that this is just the peril of success and you’re partly right, but you did it to yourself. Every week another awful email you sent to staff years ago, when you were getting away with it, comes to light. There seem to be a lot of those. That’s debt being called.
And, what’s worse, in the middle of the now-unending bad news cycle, your team is still screwing it up. New reports emerge of fresh idiocy and even you, who laid the groundwork and made the excuses, can’t believe that someone would be so stupid as to do it again. To say it in public. Given everything else that’s happened. That’s debt being called.
I wish I could say that this debt always gets called. The pathetic truth of our industry is how rare it is, especially for white men in leadership roles. I want to believe that it’s happening more these days, but I don’t even know if I believe that. So maybe you think you can get away with it. Do you want to gamble on that?
To be honest, if you run one of these companies right now, I don’t have much to say that’s helpful. Pay down your debt. Get really humble about how much you have to learn, pay for that education, and try to make some amends. Even then, if the sunlight hits you, you might need to leave for your company to recover.
Be Better
If you’re just watching these people, though, and trying to figure out what kind of leader you want to be, the path is clearer. You don’t have to do what they do to get ahead. Even if it doesn’t explode in your face, you’ll have to live with yourself and the shittiness that surrounds you. People who punt on decency end up surrounded by lackeys who agree. That part is guaranteed to catch up with you.
So give a shit. Be clear about what behaviour is okay and what isn’t, and hold people accountable for it. When your people tell you they felt threatened or harassed, believe them. Get educated. Follow up. The word gets around about that stuff, too. And your company gets better for it.
We talk about the New York Times test for salaries, but you can apply it much more broadly. How do you feel about the way your company handles internal management and conflict? Are you proud of the behaviour of your staff? If someone decided to write a public profile of your company and its actions, would you be able to defend them?
What would be in your Holder report?
Part of what makes this hard is that building with decency doesn’t have the same role models. John tries to rhyme off a pile in his a-bit-too-gentle piece about all this, but I suspect all of them would be the first to admit that they’ve screwed up plenty, too. That carefully following their footsteps is no one’s best bet.
I reference Anil’s post about this stuff frequently because I think it’s the truer thing. There are no heroes. There are no people who get it all right, and whose playbooks you can copy and run. That doesn’t mean you’re doomed. It just means you need to let your sense of decency back in, even when it doesn’t move a metric.
Moral Compass
You have one. It’s in there. But I know how easily it can get shouted down by the noise of your team and your customers and your board. It’s in there still. You feel it when you do something expedient and one of your staff jokes about what would happen if you got caught. You feel it when someone leaves your company, upset, and your colleagues try to talk about how she was always a problem. You feel it when someone asks you a hard question about how you run your company and you give them the prepared dodge you practiced instead of the truth.
I can’t sermonize here. I’ve ignored my own inner voice more times than I’m happy about. Stayed quiet when I should have been loud. Gone along instead of planting my feet. I’ve taken on my share of debt. It’s privilege that I was able to do that and keep my job, not moral rectitude. I’m working on paying it down, but still ashamed that it took me so long.
So please, listen to it. Even if you’ve ignored it in the past and aren’t sure you can still find it. Listen hard. Check your decisions against it. Give it a voice in meetings when folks are deciding to do a shitty thing and wondering if anyone will say stop. Get back into integrity with yourself.
You’ll still screw up. I certainly do. But I’ll take your earnest and imperfect efforts over the open rejection of decency to chase that ugly glory. And if you’re already a voice for decency, thank you. You make us all better. And we are in your debt.
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A version of this post was previously published on mfbt.ca and is republished here with permission from the author.
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