Feeling Grateful

Screen Shot 2015-12-06 at 8.06.44 PM.png

This time of year inspires in me, like most folks, a feeling of reflection and gratitude – the last year has gone really well, with the little one growing up in so many ways, with my own personal and professional growth, the podcast is picking up steam, not to mention a whole grip of new readers here at the blog!

Today my aunt and her partner went home to Philadelphia after a really lovely weekend visit, and one thing they commented on was my enthusiasm for food – eating it, preparing it, and talking about it. Thinking about this today, for some reason, has brought me back to a really singular moment.

When the Doctor and I lived in Providence, I worked for a small local chain of bakeries called Seven Stars – they’re beloved in that town, and I think rightfully so. Among other things, I actually did my first-ever growth experiment there! I feel immense gratitude to have had the trust and confidence of the owners there – that’s something that has made a huge difference in my whole life.

I remember I also, at one point. had the chance to spend a day in the production bakery, doing some light bake-work, rolling croissants and so forth.

While there, I remember this so, so very clearly, I took a bite out of a plain butter croissant fresh from the oven. It was explosive. It was remarkable. I’ve had red wine at midnight on the banks of the Seine and I had the extended tasting menu in the wine cellar at wd-50 (RIP), and that moment, in a T-shirt and a white apron in a commercial kitchen, stands among my finest and favorite culinary memories. For that, I am immensely grateful.

If you have a bakery in your town, a real artisan bakery that starts their croissants from butter and flour and laminates the dough in-house (this is rarer than you think) – you should do whatever you can to be their friend, and to find some way to replicate this experience. A fresh, warm croissant is simple, and delightful, and can stay with you forever.

From the Introduction of The Counterinsurgency Field Manual

This publication can help compress the learning curve. It is a tool for planners, trainers and field commanders. Using it can help leaders begin the learning process sooner and built it on a larger knowledge base…

…Current tactics, techniques and procedures sometimes do not achieve the desired results. When that happens, successful leaders engage in a directed search for better ways to defeat the enemy. To win, the Army and Marine Corps must rapidly develop an institutional consensus on new doctrine, publish it, and carefully observe its impact on mission accomplishment.

This learning cycle should repeat continuously as US counterinsurgents seek to learn faster than the insurgent enemy.

The side that learns faster and adapts more rapidly wins.

Plato, Socrates, Working Remotely and Communicating Well

Plato, Socrates, Working Remotely and Communicating Well

That’s a big, serious post title, isn’t it?

I was enjoying a one on one with the most recent addition to my team, Bruce, when I made an off-the-cuff remark about the way I think about communication and value within a remote company – this is something I think about a lot – specifically using Plato and Socrates as an example of what I meant.

It was the kind of moment where you realize no matter how long it’s been since you’ve been in a classroom, if you’re a philosophy major, you can’t escape it. Even so, it was one of those neat moments where my whole life coalesced together – Socrates and remote leadership? Sure, why not.

What I was saying to Bruce was this: if you’re working in a remote environment, creating value with your work is only one part of the equation. The second part, equally important to the first part, is ensuring that your value is communicated and distributed across the rest of the company or organization. This isn’t about self promotion; rather, this is about ensuring that any benefit you can create is enjoyed by the maximum number of your colleagues and comrades.

Everyone is pretty well familiar with Socrates, right? He said a lot of cool things, had a style of teaching named after him, he’s seen in a lot of ways as the father of modern Western philosophical thought. The thing about Socrates is, he never wrote anything down – he was a purely verbal guy, and he definitely created some waves in his locale.

He created a ton of value for the folks around him, and like many innovators, was not fully appreciated by the status quo. However, if it were not for Plato, that value would have remained locked in those relationships – when Socrates died, virtually all of that value would have died as well.

Plato is our force multiplier – we can argue whether or not he was as good a philosopher as Socrates, that’s not super important here – he recognized the value that Socrates was creating, and he captured it, in the form of the dialogues, play-like pieces that explained and explored Socrates and his thinking. We still read those dialogues today, thousands of years later.

We can see Plato’s work in the lens of aggressive transparency; he recognized value that existed but was not being captured in a way that would be accessible and evergreen to folks broadly (both geographically and temporally), and he captured it.

Aggressive transparency doesn’t just mean distributing value that you create yourself – it means maximizing the value for everyone, everywhere, everytime. Create  value, yes, absolutely – work hard, be inspired, make awesome stuff – but recognize that the value of what you make, what you do, should be stripped of limits and sent out into the universe – or at least your company wiki.