No-bullshit tenets for faster decision-making
rubick.com
rubick.com
Reading anything that plays that fast and loose with language makes me think that the author plays equally fast and loose with other aspects of their writing that I'm not qualified to judge (in a way similar to how we can spot errors in movies that depict hackers, but are more likely to "buy" whatever we see on a medical drama), so it makes me generally distrustful of the material.
Am I being pedantic? I don't think I am. I think clear communication is super important.
Edit: my comment is inspired by, but not directly related to, the article.
I think this is what gets me when people use "Segway" or "per say". It suggests a certain lack of curiosity, an attitude of "I have no idea what this means, it doesn't make sense, but I'm going to use it confidently anyway". It also suggests that the speaker doesn't read serious works (otherwise they wouldn't use the mangled spellings).
(As an aside: I recently read something about "wearing a Guy Fox mask". Took me a second to get it, and it was almost physically painful when I did)
Now we just need to stamp out "reign in" (the 'g' shouldn't be there), "mute point" (it's "moot"), "take another tact" (it's "tack"), "digestive track" (it's "tract"), and various versions of "Wallah! Here's the product!" (it's "voila!").
And "its" is always possessive while "it's" is never possessive.
This sounds very like Gell-Mann Amnesia.
I should have said Gell-Mann Mnesia.
The article is a good first introduction to the framework, although I have to admit that I found the tenets mentioned in the article not very convincing.
Thinking about how you would finish the sentences "We would never do..." and "We would always do..." is a good way to start drafting tenets.
A good quality check for a tenet is to ask if the tenet could be used for decision making, for example in a heated team discussion.
A good tenet is unambiguous in application and interpretation. There's no way to misuse a good tenet. Some of Amazon's are incredibly easy to abuse: frugality, disagree and commit, be right a lot. Here are some strong ones that may or may not be useful to your company:
If a decision is easy to reverse, don't spend to much time figuring out of it's the right decision.
Prioritize paying for something over building something assuming the annualized cost of an engineer is ~$X (e.g. $1MM).
Document and test internal systems as if you were selling them to a customer.
Simple, repetitive and dumb over complex, convenient and smart.
Plan to throw the first iteration away.
Be honest, and be honest to customers.
Always assume disaster can and will strike at the worst possible time. Better safe than sorry.
Prioritize people over processes. This means don't follow some dumb process if it makes everyone upset. Change the process.
Admit when you were wrong.
I’ve generally thought of tenets as smaller in scope; “on this team/project, our tenets are _____” They would keep overall company vision in mind, but would break it down more specifically to the local situation, helping to guide people to a common understanding of “we have a generally frugal culture/LP, but in this case, we will value speed over cost in this type of trade off”.
They are indeed LPs but they were effectively framed as tenets everywhere possible. I'd be wary of this sort of Amazon culture creeping into other orgs.
Are tenet and non-functional requirement about the same thing?
Not this one. This one has no plausible opposite. It's just going to lead to weasel-y debates. You can't remind someone else to admit that they're wrong, because they don't think they're wrong.
Note that the leadership principles are also a form of tenets, with their own internal contradictions that is waved away by a usual "it's a constructive tension".
Oh wait I think they stopped doing that after they "lowered the bar" for being a principal engineer there so much that most of them can no longer code. And that's how there was a sudden explosion of senior principal engineers...
Or in the language of this silly article:
"Hire good people and trust them."
No matter how much we may strive to hire better, overall there's a need to not only rely on having the best people.
Even if there's little need for such tenets in my excellent organisation, that doesn't preclude their utility in less-than-excellent organisations, which are certainly more numerous.
Tesla
* We value aspirational storytelling over the "truth". [We might make it true later!]
Apple
* We think different, except when it comes to creating a non-toxic environment.
* We value making money and engagement over democracy, people's lives, or their mental health.
* We value starting things over making them successful. [We will definitely kill it in a few years, but don't worry, we'll try again later.] * Don't be evil, unless you're an executive or it will make the company a lot of money.
All the rest are n-th order effects in the decision making process. The quicker you come to grips with this, the better. Everything bends to that. It defines the rules and the exceptions to the rules for all other tenets you may derive. Having other principles is just PR to defer to so people forget what they're actually doing. "We make products to help people", "we value quality over speed", whatever. It's all a waste of time and those tenets will change depending on if it makes the business money or not.
They can provide the framework for the model of how the business makes money, your 2nd order rules you develop really do this, but from my experience, all such policies are subject to change and on a frequent basis until you find a set for the underlying driver.
If I wrote a personal fitness book that simply said “be healthier” or a self-help psychology book that said “Be happier”, or a road atlas that said “don’t get lost”, that probably captures the essential goal of the task at hand, but people want/need to know the specific how that the method is prescribing.
Someone who is training for collegiate sports needs different advice than a middle-age person who’s out of shape and 50# overweight. “Be healthier” isn’t enough.
Someone who has just lost a child needs different content than someone who found out their spouse is cheating on them or considering a divorce. “Be happier” isn’t enough.
Tenet statements do change from time to time as business pressures and realities change. That’s good.