Loving Future You, Inc.

All this week we’ve been talking about our relationships to “future us”. Those relationships can be strong or weak. But whichever they are has an influence over the decisions that we make right now.

It’s a little bit easier to think about this as individuals. We know that our bodies will continue to age, our financial decisions will have consequences in our later lives, and our personal habits will determine some portion of our health as elderly people. But it’s a little bit more challenging to parse this in our professional capacities.

In the start-up universe, there’s a heavy emphasis on relatively short term returns. VCs invest in companies hoping to get ten times their money back within 10 years. And, that expectation exerts pressure on the way that founders and leadership teams think about their organizations. But, even while we’re attending to the 10X growth we hope to produce for our investors, depending on how strong our relationship is to the organization’s future, we may also be thinking about building a sustainable enterprise.

That calculus can’t be a purely abstract one. Organizations are comprised of people. And every challenge, problem, or error will ultimately be left to a person or team of people to solve. So, if the detritus of our leadership is a hopeless mess, even if it has produced a wonderful exit for us as founders, our successors will have to clean up that mess.

Equally often, founders remain in the organization in some capacity. They may be richer, older and less directly operational. But no amount of money can cure the potential embarrassment of facing consequences of a mess you created.

Clearly we make mistakes that have bad consequences. Mistakes are not what we’re talking about here. Instead, we’re talking about the organizational equivalent of eating fried fast food for your entire life, and then expecting somebody else to provide the money and time to care for you through your diabetes, incapacitation, and heart failure over the last 20 years of your life.

As a leader in an organization, you can set your strategic horizon for quarterly results, or for long-term sustainability. But what happens is that long-term sustainability often forces difficult choices in the short term. For example, correct and technical debt is the kind of thing that you do when you’re focused on long-term sustainable growth. But in the short term, it can kill your balance sheet, slow, your product, roadmap, and use up a lot of resources that you prefer to spend on growth. But, if you intend to remain at the organization, then, being connected to future, you would demand that you hold yourself to account for the baggage you will leave should you neglect that technical debt.

Infrastructure or Marketing?

Failing to consider the effects of your diet and exercise habits as a young person increase the likelihood of chronic disease. Failing to consider infrastructure projects as the organizational growth trajectory accelerates is similar.

It always seems like there’s simply aren’t enough resources right now to focus on those big non-revenue generating projects. It’s more important to build a customer base, add features to the product, hire more sales reps or engineers and attend more conferences. But all the while you’re making those investments in growth, you’re setting the stage for a quagmire for the future company.?

The customer you’re attracting and their activity with your product will foster a demand for more complexity and a more robust product. And customers don’t like when things don’t work. So, the very nature of growing your customer base will tax whatever infrastructure you have. If we don’t think of and investing infrastructure proportionally to how we invest in growth, that growth will be our undoing.

Whether the missing infrastructure is a knowledge management system, or a clear onboarding process, a performance management system, or standardizing the existing code base and engineering notes—they all are investments that will feel unproductive when we make them; unless we force Future Us to retrofit later, when the shit hits the fan,

Of course, making those investments will benefit the sustainability of the enterprise.

Connected to Future Enterprise

Making the investments in a firm and scaleable foundation and understanding that they are integral to building a sustainable enterprise, reflects the strength of connection between you and Future You. Of course, in this case, it may not be Future You, but the Future Enterprise. That connection influences both decisions and outcomes—especially for the successors you may not yet have met. They will grapple with the technical, cultural or organizational debt you’ve left them.?

I have been in organizations in which my predecessors neglected to consider what they were leaving for the future. I’ve watched my own teams have to contend with significant technical debt: Platforms that don’t work or were built on archaic software, integrations that took MacGyver-like technical skill to accomplish.

In that kind of setting everything becomes taxing. The work is hard, and there is little gratification, because nothing is ever superb. I recall the kind of perpetual miasma of dissatisfaction within my team. They were great people who wanted to do great work. They couldn’t achieve their own standards of excellence because of what they were working with.

In that situation everything demands some kind of workaround, and the amount of retrofitting necessary to bring things up to spec is both daunting and too expensive for the resulting enterprise. The enterprise can no longer afford the investment it would take to modernize. And that’s also a function of decision made in the past.

There is a little acknowledged law of the universe: If you don’t build for future growth, no matter how much you grow right now, when progress overtakes the mediocre foundation you’ve built, the growth will reverse. [Click to tweet this thought.]

Enterprises built by neglectful stewards of the future become salvage missions rather than rocket ships.

From the very human standpoint of working in the aftermath of delinquent predecessors, one is left feeling both resentful and deserted. It is a lonely and miserable experience to do the work of trying to salvage what somebody who came earlier created badly. And part of what makes it so onerous is that it feels like they had utter contempt for you.

Acting out of Love and Compassion

Whether in organizations or personal development, it behooves us all to spend some time in the future—considering the repercussions of the things we do —and even more often—the things we fail to do.?

It may feel like you have to grit your teeth and bear down to invest in the non-revenue generating activities of building infrastructure. But, especially if you are a founder, you are creating something that is an expression of your self. And so, as you see that creation come alive, the only word that adequately expresses that connection is Love.

In the future, when you have left the organization, or sit on the board but no longer operate, others will do the work that you and your team do now. They will contend with what you have left behind. And if you have left various kinds of debt that they must repay, consider that what you have done is callous.

Instead, you have the opportunity to express your deep appreciation and compassion for them. Leaving them something beautiful that they can continue to grow and build upon is an act of love.

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