#269: Book Review of Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard, Top-Performers Demand Remote Working, Contradictions are Honest...
Hello!
This week we’re making a return to regularly scheduled programming. By that, I’m referring to another book review! It’s a book by Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and equipment company, founder on his journey of building a unique and spectacular company by focusing on its purpose and building a culture that enables the best people in the company to do their best work. it was such a wonderful book and I think it’ll do more good for both capitalism and environmentalism (yes they’re not mutually exclusive but must work in harmony for the latter to achieve any success).
The essay in the Business segment is about one of Apple’s directors leaving because the company is calling people back into the office. This led to some thoughts from personal observations about remote working becoming a default for top performers. It’s crazy how when I was having conversations with tech founders in 2018/19 they said remote working wasn’t feasible and not a good idea. The number of times I heard that it wasn’t realistic and when I would companies in job interviews that I wanted a remote arrangement, I got a lot of quizzical looks. Thankfully, we’re making a positive step in life and work.
The next essay is about the odd, yet affirming, view that contradictions are often the clearest signs of honesty and truth. That’s to say when something appears perfect, it often isn’t and such a view of textbook perfection is an optical illusion best scrutinized for the dirt it hides.
The ABC’s of the OMD learning function are below. Feel free to pick and choose the segments that interest you and I hope they make you think about something you didn’t before, raise an eyebrow, or leave you satisfied.
Art: Books, Movies, Creations
Business: Investing, Systems, Work
Culture: People, Self, Observations
Art: Books, Movies, Creations
Book Review: Let My People Go Surfing—Yvon Chouinard
Review & Rating: 9/10
This is one of those books I wish every founder, investor or leader would read. Heck, I think it’s worth it for most consumers (i.e. 99% of us on Earth) to read. The book is semi-autobiographical on Chouinard’s journey of building Patagonia. But it also goes into depth about the culture and philosophies that guide a private, family-owned clothing company that has annual sales of $1b+ by ignoring all the traditional ways of doing business.
Patagonia is one of the few businesses that succeed by making it harder for customers to buy their products. But it makes sense with their mission of using commerce to heal the environment. They often tell customers not to buy clothes they don’t need, they have repair programs for their gear, prefer to not prioritize foot traffic for store placement (they believe the loyal customers will come to find them), and don’t offer free shipping (one more layer for the customer to really think if they need the item). That’s how you test the loyalty of your brand. When customers are willing to change their life around for you.
It starts with the founder who didn’t buy a tent until he was 40 (sleeping in a sleeping bag outdoors until then) and drinks straight from the lake on most occasions. He taught himself blacksmithing to make and sell climbing pitons, thus starting the predecessor of Patagonia. He went about building a company that made sense to him, not from what schools or consultants or industry best practices said. He made Patagonia into a company that employed its best customers so they could serve the same people (themselves). That also meant he needed to build a company and culture centered around the climbers, surfers, and outdoors people who shared the collective purpose.
This book is a tale of refreshing clear thinking, a rarity in commerce. It shows why company-sponsored child care is important. Why employees should be trusted to manage their own hours and be allowed to leave the office to catch a big wave when they see fit. Why a company would prefer to concentrate on the suppliers and dealers it works with. Why a company should kill its best-selling products if it harms the environment.
It doesn’t mean that Patagonia’s processes and practices should be blindly applied to all companies. Rather, they should all learn to approach designing a company and culture with first principles the way Patagonia did it. A self-aware company required self-aware leaders and only the self-aware will be able to build something for the long term.
Book Notes:
On Chouinard:
Chouinard’s stories of always drinking lake water when possible, early stories of seeing kindness and philanthropy from his parents, and the like are important to revisit in the book to get a sense of how the value system formed. It’s more an indication of how rare and special this kind of person is.
Chouinard lived a true dirt-bagger life.
“I didn’t buy a tent unitl I was almost forty, preferring to sleep under boulders…”
He taught himself blacksmithing to make climbing pitons and that turned into Chouinard Equipments, the predecessor to Patagonia.
What’s amazing is how Chouinard was able to befriend the South Korean climbers when he was deployed there for military service. Maybe it’s because he was French-Canadian himself but to be so open and immersive to other cultures in the 70s…it’s admirable.
Chouinard went about building a company the way he wanted to.
“If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, ‘This sucks. I’m going to do my own thing.’”
Patagonia became the company name because Chouinard didn’t want to dilute the Chouinard Equipment name (it was specifically for climbers) but also because he had a greater vision for the new clothing company than just a store for mountain climbers. They chose Patagonia because it had a similar mystique and romantic vision to places like Timbuktu (the bags I own) or Shangri-La (hotel chains now).
“Our intent was to make clothing for the those rugged southern Andes/Cape Horn conditions. It’s been a good name for us, and it can be pronounced in every language.”
Chouinard’s why:
“I wanted to create in Patagonia a model other businesses could look to in their own search for environmental stewardship and sustainability.”
Always focus on changing the self. It’s the only one within our control.
“…if you want to change government, you have to aim at changing corporations, and if you want to change corporations, you first have to change consumers….The consumer? That’s me. You mean I’m the one who has to change?” Yes.
“With the average American reading at only an eighth-grade level and nearly 50 percent of Americans not believing in evolution, we have the government we deserve.”
Less is more. This applies to everything in life.
“I believe the way toward mastery of any endeavor is to work toward simplicity; replace complex technology with knowledge. The more you know, the less you need.
From the feeble attempts at simplifying my own life I’ve learned enough to know that should we have to, or choose to, live more simply, it won’t be an impoverished life but one richer in all the ways that really matter.”
On Design & Product
Explore Antoine de Saint-Exupery's, the French aviator, design principles that focus on simplicity above all else. Simplifying always yields to richer results.
“…perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.”
It’s my opinion (and experience) that perseverance and endurance are key requirements to success in any endeavour. Then, simple conditions like keeping one’s costs low, keeping material possessions low, reducing social and physical clutter, etc. are all functions to help one endure for a long time. It’s a manner of curbing distractions to focus on what matters. That’s why simplicity is crucial because it helps one endure longer and that’s the only way success will be achieved. Nothing worth having comes quick or easy.
It would be a mistake to think that Chouinard lacked the artisanal craftsman’s obsession for beauty and perfection in his creation. He was obsessed with building the near-perfect product and the ‘clean lines’ in his pitons and climbing hooks were what differentiated him from others in the early years. But this lesson on product quality was designed to persist in the Patagonia culture later on.
If a shirt can only be dry-cleaned and stored in a specialized way, is it really quality? Chouinard would say no.
Patagonia’s clothing starts with the industrial design principle that the function of an object should determine its design and material. As the famous architecture saying goes, ‘form follows function.’ For Patagonia, this means fabric is chosen last while most fashion shops will start with fabric
A good clothing company needs to sell less. Less is always more in everything from design to life.
“The more you know, the less you need.”
“Buy less; buy better. Make fewer styles; design better.”
Delayed gratification in purchasing can pay dividends in ways outside of just the purchase. Saving up to buy quality equipment that will last a lifetime is one thing. But it will also make you patient and think differently about your spending habits. It’ll make you think twice before investing time and money into all facets of life.
Functional design is minimalist. Complexity is a sign that functional needs haven’t been solved.
“Good design is as little design as possible.”—Dieter Rams
“The best-performing firms make a narrow range of products very well. The best firms’ products also use up to 50 percent fewer parts than those made by their less successful rivals. Fewer parts means less to go wrong; quality comes built in. And although the best companies need fewer workers to look after quality control, they also have fewer defects and generate less waste.”
Probably best to avoid companies that sell products 1) no one needs 2) is identical to the competition’s and 3) can’t be sold on the merit of the product alone. Instead, look for companies that sell products that are so good and unique they have no competition.
Simplicity:
“You don’t need to eat a filet mignon to be healthy, you don’t need to live in a four-thousand-square-foot house to be sheltered, and you don’t need a pair of $100 surf trunks in order to go in the water.”
Simplicity is art:
“An illustrator becomes an artist when he or she can convey the same emotion with fewer brushstrokes."
Beauty. Fashion is now. Art is timeless:
“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”—Richard Buckminster Fuller
It’s not about chasing trends. It’s about discovering new fabrics and processes. It’s not about inventing. It’s all about discovery of something new or looking at what existed differently.
People do what they want to do. If they can’t get something or won’t do something, it’s because it’s not a priority. Most times, they’re saying they don’t care enough and would rather give up.
Quality > On time > price. Priority means choosing one thing that matters above all else.
“Patagonia puts quality first, period.”
Quality has the highest correlation with business success. High quality => high ROIC, about 12x higher ROIC for a higher quality business than low-quality low-price competitors per the Strategic Planning Institute’s PIMS report.
On Patagonia’s First Principled Strategy
Patagonia’s mission statement:
"Make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis."
Create your own game. Most of the best businesses have found a way to become a category of one and aren’t comparable to others. That starts with a founder that isn’t obsessed with playing the preset games (social or commercial) and would rather focus on playing their own game. That is only possible when the founders are routed in first principles. At an early age, Chouinard played out in the creeks, mountains and lakes and had an independent, almost solitary bend to him.
When the import fees for Chouinard equipment meant the climbers in the UK couldn’t afford them, they reduced the weight of the pitons by dunking them in vinegar and water so they could be exported as scrap metal so that it would be affordable to the poor climbers who were their core customers.
Businesses that last rarely have commerce and making money as the core of its purpose:
“None of us saw the business as an end in itself. It was just a way to pay the bills so we could go off climbing trips.”
Great businesses disrupt themselves when the facts have changed. When Chouinard realized their best product, climbing pitons, was destroying the rock surfaces they loved to climb, they moved away from them and introduced a foreign and new source of climbing and killed their own core product. It was all about doing the right thing and a belief (almost certainty) that fellow climbers felt the same way and would prefer to use different tools and techniques to climb so as to preserve the rock surfaces they loved.
Market share isn’t everything:
“At the time (1970s) we had about 75 percent of the climbing hardware market, but we still weren’t making much of a profit.”
Visions matter for innovation:
“Sometimes good ideas spring from having a sense of where you want to go, of having a vision of the next level of products.”
Build a company from intrinsic values/scorecards. Then, there won’t be much debate about wondering how others are running their company…it’s not rebelling when you don’t even care what the majority is doing.
“We never had to make a break from the traditional corporate culture that makes businesses hidebound and inhibits creativity…..we simply made the effort to hold to our own particular tradition.”
Chouinard's management philosophy: MBA (management by absence). He is one of the product testers of all new products as he tests them against all of nature’s environments.
Concentration on customers and suppliers can be a strength. This might appear risky with one point of failure hurting the business. But concentration also narrows the relationships to a few worth managing and setting the high bar could actually lower the risk of failure by only working with the best. Patagonia cut their wholesale dealers by half and focused on their commitment to their most engaged and loyal dealers. This mutual necessity and reliance on one another made a stronger relationship. This also proved to be the case for my father’s business as well. More and diversity aren’t necessarily better in customers and suppliers.
“...we do as much business s we can with as few suppliers and contractors as possible. The downside is the risk of becoming highly dependent on another company’s performance. But that’s exactly the position we want to be in because those companies are also dependent on us. Our potential for success is linked.”
Is that not one form of alignment? Mutual success and destruction. Is that not how a win-win relationship is built? Patagonia goes out to also work with everyone in their supply chain to educate them on best practices tailored to Patagonia’s high standards and this improves the entire supply chain.
“As a rule, in the United States we work to have eventually 20 to 25 percent of a dealer’s business and/or be its first or second-largest clothing vendor.”
Patagonia had to let go of 20% (120 people) of its employees in 1991 when a recession hit and it only grew by 20%. Consider that! It grew but it was stretched so thin that it needed an unsustainable growth number in the 30-50% range to keep the operation going! It had to learn to play within the edge and not go over it.
Patagonia learned to prioritize sustainable growth:
“…we had to look to the Iroquois and their seven-generation planning, and not to corporate America, as models of stewardship and sustainability.”
Patagonia learned to focus on organic growth and not force any with excessive marketing. Patagonia actually grew more in recessions as customers stopped buying fashionable products and preferred practical and multifunctional products that would last a long time. Quality products have staying power.
“We let our customers tell us how much we should grow each year. Some years it could be 5% growth or 25%…”
A global company does business locally. A company that controls everything from its US HQ is a US company that sells internationally. A truly global business tailors every operation and product to the local market and is run by the local team at the local office. Companies that wish to expand to global markets need to have the humility to build out the operation locally from locals.
“When we become a global company, not just a business operating internationally, we’ll adapt our design toward local preferences toward their functional need and sizing and color. We’ll product more locally and less centrally.”
Do. Iterate. Do again:
“The entrepreneurial way is to immediately take a forward step and if that feels good, take another, if not, step back. Learn by doing, it is a faster process.”
When Patagonia entered Japan in 1988, they went about their own way, ignoring all the books that were telling them to set up local partnerships to enter the market. They went in and hired their own dirtbag climbers, hired their own management team, and implemented their Californian working culture like not firing women in management positions (hiring them in the first place for such positions) when they got pregnant. They decided to fill the company up with locals and let them operate the company to Japanese standards while overlaying the Patagonia culture and values. This made Japan one of the easiest places for Patagonia to do business with because their strict quality standards and processes were in alignment with Patagonia’s.
“The reason American companies have had trouble breaking into the Japanese market is that they’re trying to do it by the book, and the quality of their products isn’t up to Japanese standards.”
Market facts and philosophy. Patagonia doesn’t use focus groups either, they ask themselves since they’re their best customers.
Rules for retail.
It’s more profitable to turn inventory than to raise prices and margins
specialty retail should design stores to look like showrooms tailored to customers who know what they want. Know your customer.
Keep the inventory/backstock in the basement or nearby storage to reduce rent cost
“If there is one common trait to all outdoor people, it’s the fact that they do not spend their free time aimlessly shopping.”
Proper marketing is about telling the truth. Telling the truth requires a level of introspection to understand what the company and individual stands for. It’s a level of awareness that can only come from businesses that are operated by self-aware people who know why they built the business. They didn’t use models in their marketing catalogs but friends and photos from actual climbers (i.e. customers).
“…it’s more honest, and honesty is what we strive for in our marketing and photography.”
A product-first company. It’s not a business that exists to make money and must hence make products. It’s the other way around. Most companies see their business as the product that will be sold one day (i.e. most VC-backed companies). Some public companies see their stock as their product (something to be kept up until people at the top cash out).
“…the product comes first and the company exists to create and support our products.”
For a business to be taken seriously, it must be viable. It needs to be profitable for anything it does or says to matter. Because then it can show the world what’s possible and what works. Being cashflow positive is how a company earns the right to be taken seriously and for anything it says to have any validity (hence, be wary of any company not producing cash flow spouting some new strategy or model).
“It’s okay to be eccentric, as long as you are rich; otherwise, you’re just crazy.”
Profit isn’t the goal at Patagonia. It’s the result of doing everything else right. This is the same in business, career, and life.
The highest ROI is earning loyal customers. Don’t think of sales & marketing as expenses to earn an incremental customer every time. Think of it as a concentrated effort to earn a loyal customer (i.e. a true fan).
“A loyal customer will buy new products with little sales effort and will tell all his friends. A sale to a loyal customer is worth xis to eight times more to our bottom line than a sale to another customer.”
Customers vote with dollars, particularly repeat purchases. Only 14% of Americans, 8% of Europeans, and 4% of Japanese will ever contact a company if they have a problem. So, companies can’t rely on having customers reach out and tell them that something is wrong. There is a silent majority who won’t say anything and this number is larger in countries outside the West, where the concept of independence and self-preservation is a core value. At the end of the day, an increase and longevity of repeat customers are what matters for the long-term success of the business.
No ambition for growth. Customers will tell Patagonia to make more and sell more by running the inventory dry. Patagonia will respond to said demand. Their goal is to not use leverage and grow at a manageable clip. Chouinard has voiced that slow growth makes it far easier for the company to be profitable than when under high growth.
“We want customers who need our clothing, not just desire it.”
“We never wanted to be a big company. We want to be the best company, and it’s easier to try to be the best small company…We have to practice self-control.”
How adaptive is your company? How willing is it to completely change itself? Show me how the business and its leaders suffered, adapted and changed themselves.
“It’s not the strongest species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”—Charles Darwin
Good businesses don’t hire consultants. Consultants are hired to fix shitty businesses. If they only see shitty businesses, what the hell do they know about a good business? They only know how to make a dumpster fire into just a dumpster.
“Outsiders don’t know your business the way you do, and anyway, I’ve found that most consultants come from a failed business.”
When looking at a business, don’t look at where they are now. Look at HOW they got there. I don’t care who reached the summit of Everest. I want to know how they did it. Did they fly there? Did they hire an army of sherpas to carry their shit? Or did they get their with a small team with minimal gear after training for years? Look at how the leaders value the journey and process versus the goal and result.
Don’t let the short-term costs and finances dictate decisions that’ll help with the long-term.
“Long-term capital investments in employee training, on-site child care, pollution controls, and pleasant working facilities all are negatives on the short term ledger.”
“We have to get away from thinking that all growth is good. There’s a big difference between growing fatter and growing stronger.”
On Culture & Enabling the Right People
Patagonia was designed around making work enjoyable every day. That meant providing the basic necessities for the people who loved making the best product for climbers and outdoors people. This included wearing anything to work (even bare feet since Chouinard did that himself) and having the “Let my people go surfing” policy where people could take off whenever they needed to so that they could catch the perfect wave to surf or climb a rockface because many of these things can’t be planned to a specific time but are subject to all kinds of weather and mental conditions. At the core was understanding who the employees of the company were and what they considered to be the basic necessities for living, and not holding those over as some special perk.
The best companies look to harmonize, not balance.
“We needed to blur the distinction between work and play and family.”
As sales 5x’d to $100m from 80s to 90s, the Chouinards kept most of the money inside the company and reinvested it. They made it so retail employees could rise up rapidly to better paying roles within the organization (internal mobility + promotion). Most new employees came from internal referrals from those who already believed in the mission.
They had open-concept offices in the 1980s. Chouinard acknowledged the chaos and distractions as a possible downside but the pros of connectivity between all levels of the organization outweighed the cons. They also became one of the few companies to have childcare facilities for the employees. This focused on creating a family-focused culture where kids could be seen running around the company cafeteria or parents would take breaks with their kids and eat together, etc.
Employee retreats were week-long trips where Chouinard would take groups of employees out into nature and educate them about the company’s values in small groups.
Patagonia’s solution to their sprawled eight-division clothing business was to create semi-independent product teams with its own leader, designer, product manager, financial and marketing people. What was centralized was inventory and the related distribution. That took the burden of complexity away from the product teams. It reminds me of LVMH.
A great business has quality products and quality products are made by passionate people:
“I cannot imagine any company that wants to make the best product of its kind being staffed by people who do not care passionately about the product.”
Elements to the culture
Not looking for ’stars’ who want special treatment
Employees are the ultimate customers
People treat work as play
Hire carefully, treat them right, and teach them to treat others right
Hire the people who matter to YOUR business. Hire people who make sense to your specific business. Not stupid metrics set by some business community. “…we’ll often take a risk on an itinerant rock climber that we wouldn’t on a run-of-the-mill MBA.
You can’t teach passion. “Finding a dyed-in-the-wool businessperson to take up climbing or river running is a lot more difficult than teaching a person with a ready passion for the outdoors how to do a job.”
Hire from within to maintain strength of culture
Take the time to train people, your future depends on it
The leaders are learning to run the business themselves! Have empathy for how hard it must be for leaders to learn how to run a growing business whilst teaching people to be ready for that same task as well! There are no experts here. All companies are unique and have specific learnings required for each.
Always allow employees to work flexible hours. If you hired adults, let them be adults. People rarely abuse the privilege. You don’t cater to the lowest common denominator because that means you aspire for the bottom tier. You cater to what the best people need and everyone else will follow suit to match that standard.
They offer health insurance to part-time employees because they want serious athletes working for them! Know your customers and know your employees. Know who you are serving and what your company is meant to be and do!
Patagonia recognized how essential family care was for the success of its employees. It has on-site child care because it recognizes that when parents don’t have to worry about the well-being of their children, they will be more effective at their jobs! They also recognized how important the early years of a child are to their development and being in an environment (i.e. parent’s work) where there are more opportunities to interact with their parents are bound to be beneficial for the child.
“A mother nursing her child during a meeting, commonplace in Ventura, is a regular reminder that the career-versus-child choices so many of us make in fact need not be choices.”
Consider the impact on children for them to not have to see their parents disappear for 8 hours of their lives but to actually go in to work together with their parents. Chouinard’s understanding and empathy towards the Micronesian family culture helped him develop the philosophy of how systems can keep a culture intact (revisit examples on page 165 in future).
Once you’ve hired right. You must develop and retain. An inability to do this will cost the company dearly in annual operating expenses. The recruiting, training and loss of productivity can cost a company 20% of an employee’s salary to replace that person.
“Fifty-eight percent of our employees in Ventura are women, and many occupy high-level management positions. Our [child care] center helps us retain our skilled moms by making it easier for women to progress in their careers. Both moms and dads are motivated to be more productive, and the center attracts great employees.
The mark of a great company is one where they hire independent-minded people who would be characterized as misfits in other organizations. If you hire people who do best in average companies, you’ll form an average organization. You need people who won’t fit into the mediocrity of average companies. Bring on board all the exceptions.
“…our employees were so independent, we were told [by an org. psychologist], that they would be considered unemployable in a typical company."
“We don’t want drones who will simply follow directions. We want the kind of employees who will question the wisdom of something they regard as a bad decision.”
Great leaders are able to build environments where the misfits, independent-minded and unemployable can work cohesively together and bring out the best in each other.
“Since we can’t order out employees around, either they have to be convinced that what they are being asked to do is right, or they have to see for themselves it’s right.”
Decentralized companies follow the organic and optically chaotic beauty of nature. Look at ant colonies. They appear crazy and chaotic. They have no centralized form of control. But everyone knows what they have to do and are able to form an effective and efficient network. The SEAL teams follow a similar pattern. There is a leader but the teams are designed to be self-managed and once a leader falls, they know exactly who steps up and who does what without missing a beat. That is only possible in a decentralized structure. Remember that the existence of a leader does not mean the organization is centralized! A true leader at the helm will form a self-managing company, unlike a manager who will want to micro-manage and maintain control. The reason why it’s important to study the leaders of companies is because leaders lead by example and the people below will look at how the leader behaves to determine what’s accepted, what’s normal and what should be followed and admired.
Patagonia runs by trust. They built their policies around the all-stars they want to attract and retain (not around making sure the stragglers keep on performing instead of cutting them loose asap).
“A familial company like ours runs on trust rather than on authoritarian rule. I’ve found that whenever we have had a top manager or CEO leave the company, there is no chaos. In fact, the work continues as if they were still there. It’s not that they were doing nothing but that the system is pretty much self-regulating.”
“Maybe a few people take advantage of our flextime policy, but none of our best employees would want to work in a company that didn’t have that trust.”
Small is the answer to making decentralized, self-managing teams work. Because Patagonia follow “natural growth”, they are able to control the size. Chouinard believes 100 people is the max in one location to avoid bureaucracy. This seems in-line with Dunbar’s number of 150.
“This is an extension of the fact that democracy seems to work best in small societies, where people have a sense of personal responsibility.”
“The most efficient size for a city is supposed to be about 250,000 to 350,000 people, large enough to have all the culture and amenities of a city and still be governable…”
“Hundreds of studies in factories and workplaces confirm that workers divided into small groups enjoy lower absenteeism, less sickness, higher productivity, greater social interaction, higher morale…”
The best CEOs in America—not those who manage investor expectations and pump stock prices up and jump around all the time like mercenaries—all seem to share a trait of enjoying working with their hands. They like to get into the nitty-gritty and have boots on the ground. All kinds of factors can be shown in this act from general humility, and empathy to curiosity and passion for the business they are leading and the people they are serving and working with. Good CEOs have long tenure in companies because it means they stuck around to adapt and evolve to solve all the problems they were confronted with.
Leaders must fight complacency and comfort from settling into the organization. A great company will disrupt itself and evolve when they are ahead. Other might think they’re insane for “changing what’s working” but a great leader and company knows that the best time to change and evolve is whilst they’re ahead, not when they’re falling behind. Look for companies that are always throwing themselves into discomfort. It’s only in discomfort that one grows.
“He not busy being born is busy dying.”—Bob Dylan
“Only those businesses operating with a sense of urgency, dancing on the fringe, constantly evolving, open to diversity and new ways of doing things, are going to be here one hundred years from now.”
Business: Investing, Systems, Work
Apple’s Director of Machine Learning Leaves for Remote Work
The Director for Machine Learning at Apple, Ian Goodfellow, quit because he wanted to continue to work remotely and Apple was asking employees to return to the office. So, he went to a competitor, Google. It’s just one data point in the continued movement where work and life must harmonize to become a cohesive system. Goodfellow doesn’t appear to be a slouch either as the inventor of AI protocols that I don’t know if I’ll ever understand.
But this speaks to the evolution of self-managing top performers who are choosing to work in companies that trust them to build a system where they will be most successful (i.e. freedom of location for one thing). Letting their best people work their magic is the only way companies will thrive in a world where people are the only asset. This should be as obvious as 1+1=2.
Since the pandemic, I’ve had one friend who wanted to return to the office. It wasn’t because he missed his coworkers. He’s dispassionate about his job as a director at a major bank and only stays for the money (his words). Because he dislikes what he does, he said he didn’t do any work when at home and needed the external constraints to force him to work. I get that. That’s one of the reasons why companies are calling people back. But once again, it’s often for people who dislike what they do.
But most friends I know who love and prioritize remote-working for their next job are high performers in their field. I’ve been speaking with a number of friends in the last few months in senior positions in sales, back-end devs, and design who’ve all rejected any opportunity that wasn’t 100% remote (mostly large software companies that want to enforce a hybrid model).
None are against going into the office. But all are against being told to go into the office on select days. If their jobs required no thinking and judgment but a mere blind following of rules, then I get it. But most of these jobs aren’t. If the company is hiring adults for their judgment, then they should trust the judgment. Successful companies are the ones who cater to the highest performers. They don’t make systems designed around keeping the low performers from slacking further. Of course, there are always exceptions.
It’s one thing for individual contributors to prefer remote working. But it’s when respected leaders take action that people listen, which is unfortunate but true. Whether it’s Brian Chesky testing remote work himself before announcing remote for Airbnb or Goodfellow leaving a prominent role, it’s wonderful to see common sense slowly take form as remote working moves to become a conscious decision companies will have to embrace instead if they want top talent.
Culture: People, Self, Observations
Seeking Contradictions
A doctor who smokes.
A personal trainer who is overweight
A nutritionist who loves cake.
A therapist whose an alcoholic.
The world doesn’t like contradictions. But when perfection is a figment of the imagination, is there an alternative?
A basketball player who is short.
A world champion athlete who is old.
A drop-out whose a billionaire.
An overachiever who is broke.
A world that’s obsessed with fitting in, showing face, hiding shame, and showcasing the illusion of perfection. In this world, the obvious contradictions are rare specks of honesty and truth. It comes through in the contradictions to our perception of perfection.
I take comfort in the person who is a walking contradiction. Simply put. They appear flawed. They don’t fit the image of what should appear competent.
But that person has the ability to at least see two sides. That’s valuable beyond measure. It’s one thing to consider two sides intellectually. It’s another to know from experience. The apparent flaws are what allow a person to empathize.
It shouldn’t make sense. So, it does. It’s possible the contradiction itself is a construct.
If I was seeking a therapist, wouldn’t I want someone who has experienced more shit than myself? Why would I want someone who appears to have hit every perfect milestone and a smooth career trajectory? Give me the therapist who lost it all, fell to addiction, and climbed out from the depth of hell. That person has lived and is thus, competent.
Why would I want a nutritionist who's only known the life of having a perfect body? Give me the person who's been in my shoes. The kind of person who knows what it’s like to see holes where knucklebones would be for skinny people or why buying oversized clothes isn’t a fashion choice but a desire to hide.
I don’t trust the ones that look perfect. I don’t trust the ones with padded resumes. That kind of extrinsic padding came at the cost of intrinsic understanding. The walking contradictions are the ones I trust. Imagine the crap they went through given the optical contradiction. The messy journey shows the structure within.