Today it's been exactly one month since I started here. Already most faces look at least familiar, if not friendly. I've had the chance to interview a few new hires and have an impact on the future membership in this family. And I know exactly my role, that is, what part of the product I'm engineering.
I read half of the book "Leadership and self-deception: Getting out of the box" by The Arbinger Institute last night. So far it's a great book and I highly recommend it. It's written mostly in a dialogue format and illustrates how little we get to know the people around us in our quest to advance in our careers. It argues that ironically, the key to career advancement is in getting to know people around us and treating them as equals on a very personal level, rather than as parts of our self-elevation machine that just happen to be made of people.
I liked people I worked with at Microsoft equally well. I still remember their faces and their kindnesses. The exact charismatic facial expressions of a few of them come to my mind when I read case studies of leadership in this book. But there was a fundamental difference: At Microsoft, the sense of unity I feel now didn't exist.
I'm going to have to resort to analogies to explain this better. A team is like a tribe: with its own culture, role structure and survival goals. When a small tribe is unleashed into the wilderness, their primary evolutionary purpose becomes tribe-, not individual-, survival. The resources in the nature are infinite, and so are the survival risks. Performing your duties in the tribe is not a zero-sum game. If you perform in such a way that you increase the productivity of the tribe, you and everyone else will feast more often. If you don't know how to handle your tools, it's in everyone's best interest to teach you voluntarily, knowing that when the roles are reversed, you will do the same for the common good.
As the tribe grows into a gigantic size, it faces new natural constraints. The resources, once virtually infinite, are now only as vast as the size of the tribe itself. While ingenuity will always lead to more production despite limited resources, the natural and physical constraints on resources put more pressure on individuals to be creative. Any lapse in the stream of visions for new ways of maintaining and increasing production will put more demand on exploiting the existing resources. The culture of co-operation, facing scarcity of resources, turns into the culture of zero-sum games. Gains are finite, and therefore scheduled. The tribe cannot grow faster than the nature will allow it to, similar to how the company cannot grow larger than the market itself. The scope of success is therefore reduced from the good of the collective to the good of the smaller groups inside the collective who compete with each other for scarce resources.
This is what breaks apart empires. This is why powerful kingdoms and unions have to deal with separatist revolutionary groups. When scarcity for all becomes the norm, minorities will spontaneously try to tip the balance of survival.
Let's get back into reality. When a company dominates the market, you see people hiding away in their offices, trying their best to outperform each other. It looks competitive and brilliant. It looks impressive, until you lift up your head and realize you have become one of them. You get to work a certain time of the day and you leave work exhausted after 10 or 12 hours to manage the other broken roles you have to play at home, as a friend, a spouse, a parent or otherwise as a balanced human being. You give it all, compete, get stacked, ranked, allowed to survive just to do it all over again next year. The culture of doing important things for the common good is replaced with the culture of doing unimportant but urgent things while hitting yourself against the walls of nature and waiting for something good to happen out of the blue.
One thing I really enjoyed about my life in Washington before I moved to Silicon Valley was the huge, tall and lush trees. I often felt lost in nature driving down Bellevue or up the Cascades. It's an amazing feeling, as if one is lost in the Fangorn forest of a Tolkien epic story. And in the end, I observe that as a human-being, I feel healthier when I'm a small part of an infinite nature. It's the chase we're all in love with, not the domination. In our evolution, we have always faced infinite resources. Our minds have developed into machines that cooperate with each other to build new tools to survive.
When our tribe population dominates the forest, when the cottages become town-houses and the duplexes become skyscrapers, we may need to move out to less explored lands; just to find a neighbor who wants to invite us in for a cup of coffee instead of going over the maintenance schedule. Our ultimate goal is to be happy, and our happiness is tied to a sense of being fit for survival, together as a group. Maybe it's time to jump back into the wilderness.
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