Lessons Tech Employees Should Learn

  The last weeks of the calendar are confusing to the young worker. They are permeated with familiar and traditional emotions, driven in large part by the retail industry. Yet, they are a time when key work has to be done and key decisions are made. We have to finish product by the end of the fiscal year.  We have to make decisions about staffing plans and resource allocations, before the new budget begins. We give little guidance to the young worker during this period. We force them to find their way through a process we now call “empirical assessment” but once called “trial and error.”  

Traditional societies transmitted fundamental lessons about confusing situations through stories and myths. We don’t really do that in business and technology. Our literature is decidedly shallow. We have only a few stories and we tell them in a way that transmits more illusion than understanding. We mislead our young managers with the story of “The Poor Boy Who Became Miraculously Successful.”   It’s a hopeful tale that is applicable to only a few.  We encourage quick judgements when we repeat “The Insightful Girl Who Disrupted the Market.” We forget that we are more likely to be the disrupted than the disruptor. Finally, we build a simmering resentment with the perennial favorite, “The Little Company That Could Execute.” Execution is, of course, an important element of success but the mere repetition of the phrase “We Think We Can, We Think We Can”, generates more frustration than dedication.  

We need, of course, stories that ask us to get a new perspective on a seemingly familiar circumstance. They need to be narratives that reflects the conventions of our thoughts and guides us to change that point of view. Only through pondering such stories, do we improve our thinking and gain a more sophisticated understanding of the way we need to work.  

The one story that we need hear again and again is one that might be entitled “How We Should Behave When the End Seems Nigh.” The dark days of a company demand the greatest insight. Yet, they tend to suggest two narrow and confining options: Fight or Flight. If we fight, we stick to our desks until the final hour, when systems fail and cash flow ceases. If we take flight, we too easily rush towards towards opportunities that have no opportunity beyond an absence of failure.

A third option is suggested in the current episode of the podcast How We Manage Stuff. It suggests how one might learn from a failing corporation or at least perceive some of the lessons that can still be found in such circumstances.  It tells about a small group of programmers, laboring in the dark days of mainframes and Sputniks and Cold Wars, who tried to get and to give a little something in their last hours of employment. It is a tech story appropriate for the season, if such a thing is possible. It has the warm comfort of a familiar myth and the sting of a disruptive monologue. It is called “Songs of Comfort and Joy” and can be found at HowWeManageStuff.com or on iTunes at Itunes.HowWeManageStuff.com