Photo by Tom Fisk.
Cheap Red Wine and Election Results
As editors of a blog called The Co-pour, people make assumptions about the #mfbt selections around here. One of those assumptions is that our house doesn’t stock swill. But sometimes cheap red wine is exactly right. Tonight is one of those nights. Honestly, cava works for nearly every occasion but it’s hard to feel festive tonight. Particularly in a house that cares deeply about leadership and the personal accountability of leaders.
Two years ago, we wrote a Co-pour post about watching the US election from outside the US. We talked about the importance of participating in democracy. About the importance of voting.
Fast forward to 2018 and this week’s midterm elections broke all kinds of records for both voter turnout and early voting. People have been tweeting all day about how long the lines are at their polling places. Maybe because of unprecedented democratic enthusiasm, maybe because of deliberate suppression.
Politics is leadership of a peculiar sort. And the world in 2018 is a peculiar one to try to lead. But as we write this from Canada with the polls still open on the west coast, it’s all too early to call.
Here’s what we do know. We know that culture is a lagging indicator. There are things you can do to ruin culture quickly, but building — and keeping — a great culture is the sum of a thousand actions you take over a period of time. How do we treat each other? In disagreement, in conflict, in collaboration. Who is welcome and who is not? The same is true of you, yes you, as a leader. How do you treat people? Where do you act, and where do you stay quiet? You are the sum of the thousands of actions you take, of choices you make. Voting is one. Now what?
— Melissa & Johnathan
Move Fast and Be Evil
Google Faces Internal Backlash Over Handling of Sexual Harassment
It’s been a hell of a week. We talk about culture being the behavior you raise and praise. What gets you promoted? What gets you fired? At Google, sexual assault it turns out, gets you one hell of an exit package. And a promotion. And future investment. Surprising no one, Googlers around the world were livid and well-organized.
And then on the heels of the Google news, Under Armour comes out with a memo this week. The memo clarifies that it’s no longer OK to use your corporate card to take your colleagues to strip clubs. “We can and will do better” was the quote from their CEO. No shit, man. And I say this as someone who has loved and cheered for Under Armour since they launched. I grew up in Baltimore and UA is held up as one of the loudest and most sustained hometown success stories.
Bless their hearts, the people at Harvard Business Review wrote an article just last week about how managers can make networking events more inclusive. Their examples were about having non-alcoholic beverage options and finding parent-friendly times of day. Poor HBR. Someone in their editorial meetings is going ballistic, “Are you effing kidding me with this shit right now, Kevin Plank? We’re talking about parent-friendly socializing and your male execs are off stack ranking their female employees based on attractiveness. FFS.”
I’m not going to tell you not to be angry. There’s plenty to be angry about. There’s plenty to be outraged about. The news feels like an ongoing parade of the patriarchy’s greatest hits. But there’s also some cause for hope. Though you may have to squint to see it.
The New York Times has a piece about the impact of Google workers organizing. How tech workers tend to prioritize the individual over the collective. How unions and organizing workers have always felt like they didn’t apply in a tech context. And how that’s changing.
Closer to home, Toronto is trying to dial back the self-inflicted fuckery that is the Sidewalk Labs project. I’d like to say I got there first in terms of the scarier implications for outsourcing large parts of civic planning to a branch of Google, but I didn’t. There’s a crew of amazing folks who have been working tirelessly to remind us that tech and the surveillance state is not inevitable. The loss of privacy is not a foregone conclusion. That we can be thoughtful and mindful about the ways we invite tech to play in our physical spaces.
Last (and hopeful) word on this goes to Saadia Muzaffar:
We can say no. We can change our minds. We know better now. None of this stuff is inevitable or deterministic. We can safeguard and take our time and explore and in the meantime, opt out.
What Johnathan’s Reading
At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks
We often get asked what we think of the Netflix culture deck (originally a slide deck here, now more overtly their recruiting pitch, here). I think it’s well designed. I think it’s an effective marketing and recruiting tool. And it might even capture the experience that many people have, or aspire to have, at Netflix.
But that doesn’t mean you should believe anything it says. And I sure as shit wouldn’t recommend cutting and pasting it into your organization’s culture.
I don’t instagram much but I hear it’s popular. You know the thing about instagram, though. The thing we all know about instagram. That it’s not real. And that it’s not real in a way that can be dangerous if you’re not careful. Sometimes your friends are posting their recipes on insta, and sometimes they are literally buying vegan cookie dough for the instagram photo shoot and then throwing it in the garbage uneaten. I just… I think about that story so much.
Anyhow. On instagram we know, or try to know, that you can’t compare your blooper reel to everyone else’s highlights. That you’re seeing a curated, one-sided, aspirational portrait, not reality. And that’s how I feel about the Netflix culture deck. It is well-curated. It is aspirational. And, as the WSJ article covers in considerable depth: it is also not real in a way that can be dangerous if you’re not careful.
[We rarely link to paywalled sites because we find them frustrating, too. But this article is in-depth and well done and no one else that I know of has covered the culture this well. I think it’s important to support good journalism with dollars. But if now is not the time for you, a reminder that services like outline.com have permission to skip the paywall.]
