At the risk of pounding the Jobs-is-dead meme too hard, this reminds me of a good story I read recently about Steve Jobs:<p><i>Jobs tells the VP that if the garbage in his office is not being emptied regularly for some reason, he would ask the janitor what the problem is. The janitor could reasonably respond by saying, "Well, the lock on the door was changed, and I couldn't get a key."<p>An irritation for Jobs, for an understandable excuse for why the janitor couldn't do his job. As a janitor, he's allowed to have excuses.<p>"When you're the janitor, reasons matter," Jobs tells newly minted VPs, according to Lashinsky.<p>"Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering," says Jobs, adding, that Rubicon is "crossed when you become a VP."</i>[1]<p>[1] <a href="http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-05-07/tech/30043798_1_janitor-steve-jobs-vp#ixzz1aDW7Q1Y0" rel="nofollow">http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-05-07/tech/30043798...</a>
This post reads more like the author trying to come to terms with his own tortured, confrontational, win/lose outlook on running a company. It also reads like a case of passive/aggressive venting on a portfolio company CEO who is driving him nuts, or the aggregate of several such cases.<p>In any case, this is not useful advice. And patently untrue. When the chips are down, people do care, and people help out, if you explain the challenges you are facing and the odds you are up against. Not least of all, "your mama".<p>The article also strikes me as a misinterpretation of the quote and the exchange between owner and coach. I would read it differently... the coach is at his wits end, calls the owner for advice, and the owner doesn't merely say "nobody cares"! He says "just coach your team". Meaning, don't worry about all the things you thought you were going to do (with the team roster you thought you had) and just hang in there, stick to your core strength (coaching) and do your best to make it work.<p>No wonder the author has anguished posts on his blog like "What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology" wherein we read such gems of wisdom as "It’s like the fight club of management: The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown." Not really. The first rule is relax, don't take yourself so damn seriously. Actually, there are no rules. Isn't that why you became CEO?<p>People infected with attitudes like this suck all the life and joy out of doing business. It's not all about people standing around yelling "no excuses! yo' mama don't care!" at each other. Carrying around excess psychological freight like this only slows you down, makes you hate yourself and the industry, etc. If there are problems, you deal with them. Often times, solving problems means figuring out the parameters of the difficulty, putting all the resources you can against the problem, and then going and finding the right people who care to help you out with the rest.
I think this is great advice for a CEO's emotional well being. But it isn't true. I know I care a ton about the challenges our portfolio companies face and I know many other stakeholders who do too. Capitalism isnt uncaring
This is great advice that applies to life as much as to work.<p>Just changing the last three words of the last paragraph gives:<p>"All the mental energy that you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. It’s best to spend zero time on what you could have done and all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares, just LIVE YOUR LIFE."
No. You should care.<p>If it's your own team/project/company, odds are very good that it's not the things you're doing right that are in the way, it's the things that you're doing wrong, or that are going wrong. A systematic analysis of failure modes ("5 whys" in Scrum) is going to help.<p>Education is learning from other people's mistakes. If the it's another organization's problems or failures, then learning from them is a great way to avoid making the same mistake yourself. When forwarding the recent AmEx information disclosure story to my team, I added the question "do we have a '?debug=true' feature?"<p>comp.risks has been one of my go-to reading sources for a few decades. There's a reason for that.<p>To point on the story: identifying causes (and corrections) for injuries has been a big part of professional sports in the past decade. Moneyball is a story of doing highly systematic analysis of what it takes to win (and avoiding the mistakes leading to losses), in a manner any scrappy startup can appreciate: not enough money.<p>And much of the story of early industrial organization (and risk management) was taking a statistical approach to production (and loss) and realizing that though both were based on stochastic principles, this did <i>not</i> mean that the conditions or outcomes were unmanageable.
This is a great lesson in capitalism. When you're the boss, nobody gives your partial credit for good attempts. Either the team succeeds and everyone is happy, or they don't, and the boss takes the fall.<p>Taking this a step beyond the intended message (of football and business), this shows an interesting dichotomy in education in jobs. In many countries (example: Japan, France) school is results based, with admissions based soley on rigorous exams. The real world is softer based more on credentials and connections than results. Compare that to the US... Being a good football player (or trombone player) can help you get into school, but the real world is much less forgiving.<p>Our economy has tough times, but the unforgiving cruel world helps us stay strong.
This should not stop at the CEO level, it needs to apply to every job within the company, at every level.<p>Nobody cares about your excuses, whoever you are. Everyone's job involves goals, milestones and deadline. If you are performing you deserve commensurate rewards, if you are failing nobody should care to hear your excuses - only what could you fix and perhaps why you believe you deserve another chance.<p>The performance of the CEO and overall company performance depends on everyone pulling their weight. If the CEO does not enforce accountability throughout the entire organization, he/she is heading for failure and nobody would care about their sorry fate!
Is this meant to be taken as advice or something? Because it's useless advice. He could have at least said something like, "Be prepared for the day when all your assumptions about how to proceed are upended and you are left with nothing. Be mentally prepared to be broadsided by fate. Be operationally prepared to rebuild from scratch. Be prepared to get a carton of Tums and make the tough decision that gives you a bloody ulcer."
When Parcell asked: "What should I do?” .... is he not, in fact, spending his time on "what you might do" ?<p>Kinda makes the story pointless, if you ask me.
This reminds me of one of my favorite drawings from Hugh MacLeod (www.gapingvoid.com)<p>Nobody Cares: Population 6 Billion
<a href="http://alecsharp.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/nobody-cares.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://alecsharp.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/nobody-cares.jp...</a>
The NYT obit for Al Davis <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/sports/football/al-davis-owner-of-raiders-dies-at-82.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/sports/football/al-davis-o...</a>
or.. put more succinctly<p>" Success has many fathers, failure none. "<p>The above has an interesting spin to it. Failure is often caused by not having enough people to care.<p>" Care " itself is strongly associated with being a father.