“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders.
Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
- Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
- Antoine de Saint Exupéry
"Teach them to crave fast data insight from the their analytics software for marketing campaigns" lacks the same sense of romance or moral imperative.
I'll acknowledge that's a bit tongue in cheek and not being charitable to the underlying point as it applies to day to day work, but I also think that this snark often applies to the "missions" that some/many Silicon Valley startups proclaim for enterprisey, salesey products, because I think those missions are a form of self-delusion about how much good you're really doing for society, as opposed to just making money because there's value to be captured.
"[REDACTED]'s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."
"Our mission is to be Earth's most customer-centric company."
"[REDACTED]'s mission is to bring transportation—for everyone, everywhere."
Yeah, I do not know why but I do not feel very inspired by those ...
Not inspired by that? Is it too abstract? Asked another way, what kind of mission would inspire you? FYI I do agree with the general sentiment by munchbunny.
The mission statements mentioned, in order, correspond to:
* Google * Facebook * Amazon * Uber
Feels like it's shining the light of attention at the spot most aligned with human desires, but usually at expense of shrouding the holistic goals (which might not be in interest of participants).
It might be true, but the framing could still be dishonest because the specific focus is often intended to distract from a less savoury whole. <3
I'm not sure what your specific role in the industry was. However while it may not have the same sense of romance or moral imperative as something else, it can still help rally great teams around causes. I've found people, particularly teams of data-driven marketers, can get quite excited when seeing a business grow directly because of insights they distilled from data. It's the feeling of making a tangible impact.
My response was mostly aimed at statements like one of 8ytecoder's examples: "Let's improve the accuracy of ad targeting so small businesses can reduce their spend but attract customers and grow". This is because the focus on small businesses is often a foil, and reality is much more morally ambiguous.
Actual small businesses are at the far end of the long tail. Very few companies primarily serve small businesses or primarily make their money from small businesses. In practice, in order of how much money is spent, the list goes: (1) large brands, (2) local/state franchises and political campaigns, (3) small businesses.
Most companies (Google/Facebook, for example) might coincidentally serve small businesses, but the real infrastructure and engineering investments are for the other two groups.
Small businesses tend to be the least sophisticated of the campaigns, because they honestly don't need much sophistication. Their numbers are too low to bring in real data science anyway, so it's more about being savvy at community presence. However, when you get to franchises and politics, the sophistication really kicks in.
Also, some of those small/medium businesses were for things like predatory lending companies. That realization made me stop and think for a moment about what "small business" actually meant.
Point being that I've seen and used (earnestly, at the time) small businesses as a sort moral foil while actually aspiring to develop technology for the other groups. And you believe it because you're paid to believe it.
In that context, trying to make it about the businesses you are serving (external validation) may not be as interesting to that person as making it about them finding the key to the optimization settings that unlocked growth for the team and business that is credited to them. Helping them celebrate via recognition or whatever else drives that individual can let them get more out of the win than they otherwise would have, and become more engaged in their role.
Every time I buy in to some sort of corporate mission statement and believe it, I want to actually help get there.
If I'm being told to do something which obviously/patently won't get there - because I've done XYZ for 25 years and I know the ramifications/impact of these decisions, and I know they don't get us closer to "mission statement" - I want my input and direction to be heard/heeded. Not always 100% "do what he says", but... when you simply ignore my warnings, and my outcome happens... I lose interest in your "mission statement".
But of course truly believing something like that would make your life difficult. So you create stories for yourself, "missions".
Do you believe that?
I mean... I do believe that. I also believe fervently that all of humanity's existence is an insignificant stray mark in the book that is reality. For some people that's a fundamentally depressing idea, followed by "well then why do we even exist?" For others that's liberating. For me... that line of thinking doesn't lead to any practical conclusions about what you should do, so I tend to keep my thinking at levels of abstraction that are somewhat more Earth-sized (or smaller) in scope.
But more broadly, the point I was getting at is that I don't think people in general spend much time thinking about the multiple possible perspectives/beliefs that can be held about their actions, or about the second order effects of their actions, and my personal plea is for more people to do that.
Even more specifically, this time speaking about conversations I've actually had, if you are one of the thousands of engineers whose job is to crunch data ever more efficiently, perhaps it's worth spending some time mulling over why it's not kosher to just pull that customer data into the training data for a new ML model without getting consent first. I promise it's not because stupid laypeople want to make your job difficult.
None of my team would believe me anyway.
My pitch is more mundane: please give me good service, at least as much as you would want from any contractor that you might have hired to work on your own home. In return, you should expect that I am a good customer for your services, one that you would want to do repeat business with, and that serving my company is a profitable for you. I don't know if they actually buy my pitch, (they haven't yet quit! :-). I hope its a reasonable one.
That doesn't sound terribly exciting, and yet it is. I've been involved in this project from the very start, I've been talking with many stakeholders, I've had to make decisions on how to approach this, what tech stack to use, what features to focus on, what new features we could add, how to prioritise different concerns, etc.
I'm involved in the context of the project, and not merely the execution of it, and that's given me a much greater sense of ownership. I really care about this project and want to see it succeed.
So maybe just talk about the context isn't quite enough; involve people in that context, make sure they understand the why and have them decide on the how. Make sure they're not just cogs in the machine.
(It helps that the tech stack involves a Graph DB, which we didn't have any experience with before, and we create a lot of interesting data visualisations.)
This isn’t about opinion, it is about honesty and transparency and knowing what you’re working for.
Much better motivation is love for a process, in ship building example, ship engineering with management supporting career development.
On reddit they'd just invoke /r/lostredditor
My latest strategy is to hit back with humor. I don't know if it's working, but early results are positive.
Welcome to HN
But I guess (still using the language of this quote) you could say the the article is presuming the shipbuilders already love shipbuilding, and just need to be reminded that what they're building is for purposes of going to sea. Fine, but should they be impressed? To milk the analogy for all it's worth: A ship goes on the sea but it's not of the sea. It's of metal that comes out of the ground, or trees that grow out of the ground, and it's built on the ground, by people who go home at night to sleep in their houses that are on the ground. That's the divide. Shipbuilders actually have very little to do with the sea; in fact it's sort of their enemy, the thing they're protecting the customers from, the thing always threatening to creep in, seep in, and ruin their work! Maybe the analogy breaks down there... although then again... :)
Anyway I disagree with the notion that doing something for its own sake, or even (perish the thought) TO MAKE MONEY, somehow isn't adequately motivating. Half the time I wish all the temporarily-embarrassed millionaires could just fess up for once and say, yeah, I need the money. I wish it were okay to say that.
Or are they just getting a list of requirements from a middle-manager (rather than the user) who doesn't actually know what needs to be done?
The former can help motivate them and also help them develop better systems (that fit the real user needs, not management's perceived needs).
I'd ask why you need an "enterprise CRUD app". Programmers tend to like doing new things, and if your app doesn't offer anything new, why are you even building it?
"One will weave the canvas; another will fell a tree by the light of his ax. Yet another will forge nails, and there will be others who observe the stars to learn how to navigate. And yet all will be as one. Building a boat isn’t about weaving canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It’s about giving a shared taste for the sea, by the light of which you will see nothing contradictory but rather a community of love."
Thanks for the pointer, I love quote provenance research (well, reading it.)
Being listened to, and having a point of view heard and considered, is powerful stuff. If at the end, they feel heard, and their point of view considered, then they're usually willing to go along with the majority opinion at least, and sometimes become your biggest supporter.
Most times, being heard is all people want. Some times, being heard only validates a false sense of superiority and correctness.