Photo by Ishan.
The Lighter Side of Salmonella
Sarah Taber came by last week for dinner and we can confirm that she’s delightful. We talked about the overlaps between tech and agriculture and management while our kids made her examine every plant in our house. And at one point she said something so clear and pithy (ag pun!) and obviously true that I have to repeat it here for all of you to bask in:
“You can fake records and play games all you want, but salmonella doesn’t give a fuck.”
I love this. I love that bacteria don’t care about you trying to game the system. I love that you can try to fool yourself, or your buyers, or your auditors, but you cannot fool toxic bacteria. And that if your facility is not buttoned up and your processes are not actually good, it will show. I don’t love that the signalling medium is vomit, but otherwise: A+. That’s good pith.
It makes me wonder what salmonella is for your business, or for ours. What’s the thing that you can’t fool? That will show up when you’re lying to yourself or others and make you reckon with the fact that your operation is not buttoned up? Is it already happening? How will you know?
Everyone should have friends in the agricultural audit business. And you should definitely subscribe to her podcast.
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s Reading
I almost never look to academia for advice on management. I come from a science-y family and the academics all call me when they need management advice. And I call them to help me identify weird medical symptoms. It’s our thing that we do.
So imagine my surprise when I found myself nodding along with this article from, of all places, Inside Higher Ed. Definitely not my first source for tech management advice. But they talk about a phenomenon that any tech leader will recognize. The one where a leader of another team left or was fired for incompetence. And now someone needs to manage those poor souls. And that someone is you.
This happens a lot in scaling orgs and apparently also happens in academia. The meat of the article is not so far off of what’s covered in The First 90 Days, just through a non-business lens. And bless the academics for their abuse of the passive voice and prepositions. This is how they suggest you assess the unit you’re taking over. “A basically evidence-based approach will provide threads for you to follow for possible action and questions to pursue as you come to know the members of the unit.”
They also include a link to A COLOR-CODED RUBRIC (!) for assessing academic units. You have to squint a bit and change some of the words, but all in all, it’s not a bad tool to have in your back pocket. Particularly the next time someone walks past your desk and asks you to manage a new department.
What Johnathan’s Still Thinking About
Geoffrey Owens on the value of work.
It was a week ago which, in this darkest timeline, feels like 5 kingdoms and 16 outrages ago. But I’m still thinking about Geoffrey Owens being job-shamed for working at Trader Joe’s. In particular I’m thinking about his reply. That there’s dignity in work, and that some jobs aren’t better or worse than others.
It’s a good reply, I think. I feel like there’s some nuance missing about whether we really believe that as a society or not – we certainly treat some jobs differently than others, value them differently, esteem them differently. But I think the core of what he’s getting at is that honest work is all alike in dignity. That there is no shame in it. And I agree with that.
Here’s a funny thing, though. We work with managers and executives, right? And a lot of the really great ones, the ones who you really want to have in leadership roles because we need their voices so desperately, have trouble finding the dignity in their own work. Finding dignity in management as a practice.
I mean. They get paid well. They have nice ergonomic chairs. As Geoffrey says in the video, “No one should feel sorry for me… I’m doing fine!” But the idea of management being their “only” job makes them so uncomfortable. They talk about wanting to do real work. They jokingly-but-not-really call themselves “administrative overhead”. They lean heavily on problematic versions of servant leadership. It’s humility, I get that. They’re trying to reduce the power imbalance between themselves and their peers. But it runs so deep that they internalize this feeling. They are frauds, getting paid to waste time and take credit for other people’s work. That’s leaving humility and moving into shame. And it’s a bummer.
Management is hard stuff. It’s hard to do it well, and worth taking seriously. Humility is important, but don’t let it take you into shame. It feels a bit silly to say it, but I’ll say it anyhow: management is also a job with dignity.
