Vocabulary Lesson

If you couldn’t guess from my prior post, “they” is not one of my favorite words. Another disliked one is “just”.

First, everyone will not just. If your business strategy amounts to “if we all just do our job we will succeed,” you’re on the road to failure. I’ve fallen prey to this thinking before. It seems so simple and straightforward. But it’s ultimately lazy leadership. People have their own motivations, incentives, and goals. This is okay. Being a leader means figuring out how to find the right Venn diagram overlaps between individual objectives and company objectives, learning to fight effectively with the army you have, and in the worst case, making the tough calls where there isn’t enough in common.

A closely related failure mode is “we’ll just hire the right people.” That won’t work either. Yes, you should invest a lot of effort in your recruiting and hiring efforts. But it’s hard! And you’ll get it inevitably wrong, because there are no perfect people.

Finally, while it may sound good, “just get it right the first time” is a fool’s errand. It’s doubly impossible: first, no one can get it right the first time. And second, no one gets the definition of “right” right the first time either, so even if you hit your target with your first shot, you’ll find you were aiming at the wrong one. This is exactly what agile process exists to account for. Change along the way is inevitable so embrace it.

Fun fact: I wrote most of this post while riding in a Waymo for the first time, which feels appropriate. Human drivers don’t “just” either.