Pervasive Working From Home has enabled me, with my own set of complexes, to better cope with a bunch of things that in the past have been very difficult to deal with – the Voice, and the frustration of being unable to process information.

Let’s talk about The Voice.

I have a loud booming voice. Anyone who has ever heard me talk knows that I can assert my will over an audience.

The Voice is a natural tool that I often use to dominate a meeting, exclude people from talking, and suck the air out of the room.

The Voice wasn’t always there.  A lifetime of being in meetings and learning how to speak up trained the Voice to perfection.

But a funny thing happened – COVID.

At home, I can’t use the Voice. If you hear it once a week, it isn’t charming. But if you listen to it for 8 hours a day, it is infuriating.

So I have had to abandon the Voice.

But that then created a new realization, that in a class of meetings without the Voice, I can’t be heard.

Because OTHER people are using the Voice.

And so I sit in meetings and wonder how the hell do I get their attention?

Without the ability to control the conversation with the Voice, I have to use other tools.

But the fact that I had to use other tools made me realize how dominating the Voice is and how unbelievably exclusionary it is.

I sit in meetings, where I am being talked over and can’t get a word in edgewise.

And it made me appreciate how many times I was doing that to others.

And then because the meetings are over Zoom, folks who have private questions can ask them without feeling intimidated. And because the panels always have a digital trail, folks can still catch up with what happened.

And then it made me think about why did I develop the Voice? And the answer is that at some point in my career, to be a technical leader, you spoke up in a meeting. And that speaking up had to be done forcefully with a commanding manly presence. And so men who could talk about the commanding Voice tended to get promoted, and others did not.

If speaking up with a manly commanding voice is a requirement, then it’s inherently exclusive.

And so when I hear folks tell me – “Zoom is worse than in-person” – it makes me wonder? Is it worse for them because they have a manly commanding voice, or is it intrinsically worse?

Because my observation has been that it is – actually – better.

Coping with a world, you don’t understand

I can’t easily read people. I have a hard time understanding what they are thinking, and their body language is difficult to parse.

Furthermore, some things frustrate me, which is tied to how my brain works. I can’t sit still. I can’t give you my undivided attention for 2 hours without fiddling with something.

And then there is a whole slew of complexes that cause me to go to awful places. And because I can’t hide those wrong places, it had forced me to either learn to sublimate my emotions or explode when that was no longer possible when I was in person.

COVID has made it possible for me to function in this crazy world we live in because most meetings happen over Zoom.

I am not naturally disadvantaged in a meeting because of my inability to read the room. Folks can’t rely on their body language to convey displeasure. They have to voice it. Furthermore, they can express it in a variety of ways that can be non-threatening to themselves and me – written questions, private messages, etc.

And my conditioned reaction can now be managed more easily. Instead of having to control my feelings so I can get past my complexes and engage productively with people, I can give myself the time and space to do that through the magic of the mute button and the stop video button.

Me working through my complexes is very disruptive, and it’s about me, not the person who asked a question. They are good people asking legitimate questions. I am the one who has a lifetime of complexes I need to work through.  And so having space where I can do it, without having to explain or control the reaction, is very helpful.

SO?

I’m beginning to think that COVID, by normalizing remote work, will be very disruptive to the nature of technical leadership.

What it is, how it works, and what we value will change radically.

Exciting times.

The last ten years of my career are an example of how linear progression is a myth.

In 2009, I left NetApp in a huff. My attempts to redirect our investment strategy to either pursuing aggressive investments in replication or what later on became known as HCI went nowhere. Worse, for me, NetApp was more interested in what was known as convergence and later on became known as 8.0, and I wasn’t interested in that effort.

And so I left NetApp.

And I went to Zynga. Zynga was an incredible experience. The first startup, first pre-IPO, first IPO, cloud, on-prem, hybrid.

And for the first three years, I was flying on top of the world. I remember feeling that I had finally arrived!

Then Facebook changed its algorithms, did Libra 1.0 (aka Facebook credits), and Zynga fell, And we failed to deliver on mobile games. And I went from speaking to hundreds of analysts, building cool games, to being out. In less than 12 months, I went from the top of the world, to out.

So I looked for a job and took one at Juniper. And that was a professional experience that was surreal. In short, I joined to help transform the culture and got laid-off in 14 months.

And then, I ended up at VMware. By then, I had gone from a high-flying senior architect to joining VMware at a time when VMware was not that cool.

And the team I joined had just endured a lay-off, a re-org, and after I joined, the attrition was high.

I like to describe our situation in the following way. We were a team in a dark freezing room. Inside the room were a few pieces of dry lumber. And we had two matches. With the first match, we found the wood, and with the second, we lit it. We were great, and we were lucky.

The gap between success and failure of 6.5 was minimal. We had managed to assemble the right kind of team that could pull it off, but we didn’t know it at the time.

And then, after we worked to figure out our k8s strategy, we got lucky again.

The Heptio team decided to join VMware. And thanks to their decisive contribution, what was an excellent k8s technology strategy, became a tremendous k8s strategy.

The wheel has turned, and I gave a keynote at k8s about the work my team did. And the first time I did my talk at Zynga, I thought that this is why it must be because I am that good. And now, nearly seven years later, I realize that I wasn’t that good. I was lucky.

Twice in my career, have I sat in a meeting where an executive has harangued his employees about not caring as much as he did.

And, both times, the people who cared the most handed in their resignations within hours.

The executive was furious that the employees were not as concerned as he was. The point he was trying to make was that the employee should care about the business beyond the extrinsic rewards that the company provided. That this company, this employment opportunity was more than a job. The executive was frustrated that he was working with people who didn’t feel as connected to the mission as he did.

And in many ways, the minute the executive said that he had also admitted that had failed as a leader. If you feel the need to call out your team, a team you assembled then you failed.

And it got me thinking about caring.

As a leader, why people do the things they do is imperative so you can motivate them. Everyone’s motivations are different. Some people believe in the mission, some people do it for the money, some do it for the commute, and some do it for the sheer joy of doing it.

Your job is to figure out what motivates them and make sure that you align their rewards with their motivations.

Your job as a leader is to connect people to the mission every single day.

Your job as a leader is to connect people’s motivations to the mission every single day.

And the minute that connection breaks, you failed to do your job.

And I get why the executive felt frustrated. He had failed as a leader, and it was evident. And he was vocalizing his frustration at being unable to connect the company mission to the employee’s motivations. And he was taking it out on his team.

When that happens, and it will, what I found works better is taking a deep breath, and then asking your team what’s wrong. Ask your team why the team does not feel connected to the mission. Ask the team what all need to feel connected. Speak 1×1 with each key member and understand their needs.

Leadership is hard, and we can fail at being leaders, and when we fail our job as leaders is to recognize that and do the hard work to be great leaders again.

One of the most exasperating professional situations is dealing with the FUD machine.

The FUD machine is the following:

Team A has a proposal.

Team B disagrees and has an agenda to propose an alternative and the alternative is not ready yet.

Team B instead of arguing that the proposal of Team A is problematic focuses on narrow limitations.

Team A responds to narrow limitations.

Team B comes back with more limitations.

Time for Team A is lost and forward progress is lost.

Team B is then able to use the failure of Team A to move forward on their proposal, and argues that their new proposal is better and is able to take over the project.

Team B then basically does what team Team A was going to do.

The core of the FUD machine is that Team B wants to win the project and is trying to buy time and destroy Team A’s credibility to take over the project.

The good news is that I have rarely experienced this within a company. I have experienced this in competitive situations between vendors as a customer in the role of Team A.

So what do you do?

If you’re team Team A member, the first step is to realize the FUD machine is attacking.

The strategy to win is not to fight the FUD machine.

Focus your response on the business problem. Explain why your solution is better for the problem. And then – and this is important – explain why your solution does solve the problem and point out that their solution – as is – won’t meet the business requirements.

Great post here by Mark Suster at Bothsid.es

Lots of good stuff here.

My key takeaway is here:

The vast majority of this recent boom in prices is not being driven by VCs but rather by hedge funds, mutual funds, corporate investors and other sources of non-traditional venture funding. In the chart below you can see that a decade ago for every dollar a VC raised from LPs a dollar went into a startup. Now for every dollar a VC raises $2.50 goes into a startup.

Many moons ago, I wondered where the hell the money was originating. Mostly non-VC money chasing yield has descended on the valley. And like the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the non-VC money figured out that using preferential terms allowed them to invest in riskier assets with less risk.

Shifting risk, and increasing the value of assets without increasing their value never ends well.

A friend of mine and I have been debating unicorns for months. And what we concluded is that there are two stories.

The first story is that there are a bunch of excellent businesses that are worth billions. These are the true unicorns. I won’t hazard a guess of how many or which companies fit that bill.

The second story is that there are a bunch of donkeys with horns that are using creative deal structures to acquire valuations that are questionable. And that the story of the true unicorns is hiding the story of the donkeys.

The recent article on TechCrunch tells us that the number of potential donkeys is on the rise.

And so my buddy and I debated the impact of these potentially faux-Unicorns.

The first narrative, dominating the press, is the effect of faux-Unicorns on investors. After a lot of discussions, we concluded that the recent faux-Unicorn phenomenon of artificially constructed valuations is benign to positive. Positive because it mitigates the downside risk, and because it captures more of the upside if an acquisition occurs at the cost of investing more capital in a business that has achieved a certain amount of success.

If you take a unicorn job in 2015 and never say the words “liquidation preferences”, you are the sucker at the table https://t.co/cbh3lPRA9a

— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) December 24, 2015

The second narrative that is emerging is the impact of faux-Unicorns on employees. There we agreed that the story is downright appalling. The shift of risk from investors to employees who find themselves locked in, or worse, have their interests misaligned with the core investors, or even worse is not positive.

The derisking for investors and founders is increasing the risk of employees.

And so what?

The danger is that employees eventually figure this out. And they start demanding higher salaries, longer periods between when they quit and when they have to sell their shares or just plain refuse to work for any private company.

Furthermore, as more employees figure out that a Unicorn or a startup is not a path to riches, and that the investment strategies are being used that minimize their already minimal chances of wealth, people will over the long-term lose interest in working at startups.

And worse, because employees are not investors they have a hard time disambiguating faux-Unicorns from real Unicorns.

If a startup is a job where you work long hours, at low pay, to change the world, there are a lot of options that are not working in tech.

We can talk about culture, and opportunity and learning and if there is no money, then people will go elsewhere.

The people who work in the tech sector have the ability to do anything they want. And eventually, they figure that out.

In my career, I’ve chosen to work at larger companies instead of smaller ones. Or maybe, a better way to describe it, is that I have joined small sized businesses that became enormous.

And I was reflecting on the differences.

My favorite game of all time is Civilization II. Some players, like the beginning game:

The point is that you have the fewest pre-existing constraints. You can only make a small number of decisions. And each decision is a matter of life or death. You can very easily get destroyed if you make the wrong choices.

That part of the game is the most intense because every decision is, of course, critical, every moment obviously a life or death moment. You choose to explore a village, and if it turns out to be barbarians and you don’t have an army you lose the game.

In the later phases of the game, you have many cities and an accumulation of decisions. You can quickly destroy other civilizations, build wonders, and typically there is no existential threat. No decision is obviously existential. No crisis is obviously critical.

There are existential threats; they are just not obvious.

The challenge in this part of the game is how to marshall resources and make decisions to win the end-game while ignoring things that are not important.

When you join a large company, you are essentially being given someone else’s Civ game. Your job is to figure out what decisions your predecessors made that are prescient and build on those while figuring out what new decisions need to be made to win.

The funny thing about joining a Civ game in the middle phase is that you may have already lost. Some decisions made early on may have put your civilization in a terrible spot that are only obvious now.

And for many folks, this makes starting a game more attractive than taking on an existing game.

The funny thing is that when you launch a new game, the computer makes decisions for you, and those decisions, when combined with your preferred strategy, will doom you just as much.

The thing about the early part of the game is that when you lose you’re just a historical footnote, a leader of a small tribe. When you lose later on in the game, you may have a large thriving civilization that just didn’t make it to the finish line. You fail as a CEO of 10 person startup, and only your web page records your failure. You fail as the CEO of Yahoo, and it’s front page news on the WSJ.

The later part of the game in Civilization II can be more thrilling. You get to do more stuff, try more things, you are on a bigger stage and you are playing for all of the marbles instead of a chance at all of the marbles.