I spent last weekend traversing up Mt. Hamilton to help cater a wedding. The Stefanis were helping cook for a big fat Italian family wedding for 170, and they were looking for a couple helping hands, so I thought I might as well put my cooking skills to good use. The kitchen crew consisted of six people, and miraculously we got all the courses prepared and out the door on time through the whole day. I also successfully predicted the first song that the DJ would play for the newly married couple, minds were blown.
Here are some of the photos from the weekend:
After a long day of work, I smelled like rosemary and chicken. We spent the later half of the wedding clearing tables in the sun, and we were pretty parched by the end of it. When we finally drove down from the mountain, my friend Kenny and I went to a Vietnamese Pho restaurant in search of fruit smoothies to regenerate (they have really good and cheap smoothies). We spent a couple hours just sitting there, sipping smoothies. By 10pm our appetites had returned and we started working on some pho. It was glorious.
I keep getting asked, "you have a catering company?!" The answer is no, but if this technology gig of mine stops working out, I guess I have my alternate career lined up.
I've been mulling over a phenomenon that I'm observing at work lately, which is the idea of normal people suddenly rising up and accomplishing remarkable and inspirational things. I will call this, the rise of heroes. To give you some context, Yahoo! recently has been dealt quite a few blows in the court of public opinion: we laid off 2,000 people, we had to fire our CEO over a resume scandal, and we have high-profile talent leaving the company. You could feel the morale plunge, classic FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
Then something quite remarkable happened. BusinessInsider.com had picked up a story about a debate happening on Quora. The question was, why would anyone still work for Yahoo!? Gil Yehuda, the director of Open Source at Yahoo! had mounted an incredibly thoughtful and eloquent defense.
But let's say your company is indeed in trouble. Do you leave? It depends. Some people leave, and I can't blame them if they are going to a better job. But there is a strategy to play when staying in company under change (where there is churn, but hope for recovery). There are new opportunities every day in these environments. In my case, two levels of management above me are gone -- I shot up from N levels from the top to N-2 levels from the top. And given the leadership gap, I have a lot more empowerment to do the good job I was doing, with much less resistance.
When I finished reading the defense, I posted the article on devel-random (our internal mailing list) and the thread exploded with people sharing inspiring stories of what they were working on, and why they're still at Yahoo!. The thread got so much buzz that the corporate PR folks got wind of the thread, and they were wanting to do a media piece about it. PR was collecting quotes from the thread (including one from me, yay!). It was a nice change to finally read something in the press that wasn't negative about the company.
One Yahoo! planted an idea that spread like wildfire. Inspiring.
Whenever I hear the word hero, I always think back to this quote from the play, "Life of Galileo" by Bertolt Brecht:
Andrea: Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero. Galileo: No, Andrea: Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.
I love the duality of those thoughts. We generally assume that it's bad when we have no heroes left; but it's the land's underlying problem that creates the need for heroes.
Back to Gil's defense, he was absolutely correct that as levels of management disappear, it creates an environment where you are empowered to do what you need to do with much less resistance. In previous posts, I have talked about getting my Hack Day ideas finally funded, and I'm building out my own team right now. The experience has been very empowering and liberating. I am filled with joy when people ask, "are you sure we can do this?", and I reply, "who's going to stop us?"
When you have folks in the organization who are in full retreat, and waiting to see what's happening next, people notice when you're charging ahead with very unconventional means. When you start accomplishing some remarkable things, you become a beacon of hope, and people take notice and start coming off the sidelines, and begin to rally to offense.
It's E3, so this was an apt video to illustrate leading one-man charges:
A label that some folks are trying to pin on me is "Rock Star", and I actively reject that label. I explain that I'm just crazy enough to lead the charge because I have nothing to lose anymore.
I've been having quite a few chats with folks who are uncertain of their future with the company, and a common concern is the negative headlines around the company. I typically point them to an old historic video of Steve Jobs in 1997 defending Apple. The tech press was destroying Apple, and this was Steve Jobs' response:
Yahoo! has recently delivered two home runs, with Yahoo! Axis and Yahoo! TimeTraveler, both apps have a 4.5 star rating in the Apple app store currently. I heard a quote that if Yahoo! delivers another dozen home run products like that, the press will start turning because there's a lag time between perception and reality. I tend to agree. My hope is the product I'm incubating will be among the home runs. If it fails to be a home run, then at least I can look back at this time and tell everyone, at least I tried.
"The goal of the hero is to return (normal) life to the living." -Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Journey into the Void (2003).
