
Nobody Cares - timf
http://bhorowitz.com/2011/10/08/nobody-cares/
======
jessedhillon
At the risk of pounding the Jobs-is-dead meme too hard, this reminds me of a
good story I read recently about Steve Jobs:

 _Jobs tells the VP that if the garbage in his office is not being emptied
regularly for some reason, he would ask the janitor what the problem is. The
janitor could reasonably respond by saying, "Well, the lock on the door was
changed, and I couldn't get a key."

An irritation for Jobs, for an understandable excuse for why the janitor
couldn't do his job. As a janitor, he's allowed to have excuses.

"When you're the janitor, reasons matter," Jobs tells newly minted VPs,
according to Lashinsky.

"Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering," says
Jobs, adding, that Rubicon is "crossed when you become a VP."_[1]

[1]
[http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-05-07/tech/30043798...](http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-05-07/tech/30043798_1_janitor-
steve-jobs-vp#ixzz1aDW7Q1Y0)

~~~
raganwald
We can go back further than that. Hal Geneen was the CEO famous for expanding
ITT into a multi-national conglomerate using rigorous metrics-driven
management. His favourite saying was,

“Managers must manage.” As in, your job as a manager is to overcome the
obstacles, not to use them for excuses. What do you manage if not the
impediments to success?

~~~
sausagefeet
So true. It reminds me of working on a project and there are so many times
when some piece of the stack that we didn't write is acting up. You want, so
bad, to say "well, we can't do this because X has a bug in it". But then you
remind yourself that your users don't care why your product doesn't work, just
that it does. And you spend some frustrating amount of time finding a work
around.

~~~
emp_
You just described my last few years working with SharePoint :)

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kb101
This post reads more like the author trying to come to terms with his own
tortured, confrontational, win/lose outlook on running a company. It also
reads like a case of passive/aggressive venting on a portfolio company CEO who
is driving him nuts, or the aggregate of several such cases.

In any case, this is not useful advice. And patently untrue. When the chips
are down, people do care, and people help out, if you explain the challenges
you are facing and the odds you are up against. Not least of all, "your mama".

The article also strikes me as a misinterpretation of the quote and the
exchange between owner and coach. I would read it differently... the coach is
at his wits end, calls the owner for advice, and the owner doesn't merely say
"nobody cares"! He says "just coach your team". Meaning, don't worry about all
the things you thought you were going to do (with the team roster you thought
you had) and just hang in there, stick to your core strength (coaching) and do
your best to make it work.

No wonder the author has anguished posts on his blog like "What’s The Most
Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology" wherein we read such gems
of wisdom as "It’s like the fight club of management: The first rule of the
CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown."
Not really. The first rule is relax, don't take yourself so damn seriously.
Actually, there are no rules. Isn't that why you became CEO?

People infected with attitudes like this suck all the life and joy out of
doing business. It's not all about people standing around yelling "no excuses!
yo' mama don't care!" at each other. Carrying around excess psychological
freight like this only slows you down, makes you hate yourself and the
industry, etc. If there are problems, you deal with them. Often times, solving
problems means figuring out the parameters of the difficulty, putting all the
resources you can against the problem, and then going and finding the right
people who care to help you out with the rest.

~~~
Cushman
I like this. I think there's a common fallacy where people want to think that
other people are more selfish and uncaring than they are. Maybe it makes it
all seem more explicable?

But it's not true. Humans haven't managed to colonize the whole planet because
we're so mean to each other-- that doesn't even make sense. The physical
universe is impartial and uncaring; people have succeeded primarily because,
most of the time, we _aren't_.

We have access to such great information sources these days, we hear so much
about war, crime, and poverty, it's easy to forget that we actually live in
the most peaceful, prosperous times that mankind has ever seen. It's so easy
to get ahead for a little while by screwing the other guy, we forget that the
only reason any of us exist is because a relatively short time ago, and ever
since, some apes realized that if they just put aside their differences and
worked together for a little while, they could conquer the world. _And they
were right._

A little bit of trust, humility, and respect for humanity goes a long way.
Have a problem? Tell your mother. She probably can't do much to help, but
she'll _care_ , and that is way more important than people think.

------
fredwilson
I think this is great advice for a CEO's emotional well being. But it isn't
true. I know I care a ton about the challenges our portfolio companies face
and I know many other stakeholders who do too. Capitalism isnt uncaring

~~~
dmor
Sounds like some good tough love for CEOs (and everyone else really) who care
too much. That's probably most of them, and a whole lot of employees,
investors, and even customers too.

IMO the why matters, but only for a moment, and then the "what are you going
to do next?" has to become the focus. That way caring so deeply doesn't become
unproductive -- you grieve the pain of mistakes and unfortunate outcomes for
no more than a minute or two ("and this too will pass") and then keep moving.
Startups are like sharks, if we stop moving we die.

------
sajid
This is great advice that applies to life as much as to work.

Just changing the last three words of the last paragraph gives:

"All the mental energy that you use to elaborate your misery would be far
better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your
current mess. It’s best to spend zero time on what you could have done and all
of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares, just LIVE
YOUR LIFE."

------
dredmorbius
No. You should care.

If it's your own team/project/company, odds are very good that it's not the
things you're doing right that are in the way, it's the things that you're
doing wrong, or that are going wrong. A systematic analysis of failure modes
("5 whys" in Scrum) is going to help.

Education is learning from other people's mistakes. If the it's another
organization's problems or failures, then learning from them is a great way to
avoid making the same mistake yourself. When forwarding the recent AmEx
information disclosure story to my team, I added the question "do we have a
'?debug=true' feature?"

comp.risks has been one of my go-to reading sources for a few decades. There's
a reason for that.

To point on the story: identifying causes (and corrections) for injuries has
been a big part of professional sports in the past decade. Moneyball is a
story of doing highly systematic analysis of what it takes to win (and
avoiding the mistakes leading to losses), in a manner any scrappy startup can
appreciate: not enough money.

And much of the story of early industrial organization (and risk management)
was taking a statistical approach to production (and loss) and realizing that
though both were based on stochastic principles, this did _not_ mean that the
conditions or outcomes were unmanageable.

~~~
sausagefeet
He's not saying _you_ shouldn't care, he's saying nobody else cares what the
reason is. Nobody is going to give him a win just because his best players are
out.

~~~
vacri
Sure they care. Sports fans are easier on a coach if they know he's got an
injured team; customers are easier on businesses if they know the reason their
product isn't working is due to an independant third party.

------
mathattack
This is a great lesson in capitalism. When you're the boss, nobody gives your
partial credit for good attempts. Either the team succeeds and everyone is
happy, or they don't, and the boss takes the fall.

Taking this a step beyond the intended message (of football and business),
this shows an interesting dichotomy in education in jobs. In many countries
(example: Japan, France) school is results based, with admissions based soley
on rigorous exams. The real world is softer based more on credentials and
connections than results. Compare that to the US... Being a good football
player (or trombone player) can help you get into school, but the real world
is much less forgiving.

Our economy has tough times, but the unforgiving cruel world helps us stay
strong.

~~~
Klinky
_"This is a great lesson in capitalism. When you're the boss, nobody gives
your partial credit for good attempts. Either the team succeeds and everyone
is happy, or they don't, and the boss takes the fall."_

Perhaps in pure capitalism & small business, but what with the era of large
salaries & golden parachutes often those who mislead aren't really "punished".
There is also plenty of CYA & scapegoating in the professional world along
with a lot of people who eat it up.

------
dmk23
This should not stop at the CEO level, it needs to apply to every job within
the company, at every level.

Nobody cares about your excuses, whoever you are. Everyone's job involves
goals, milestones and deadline. If you are performing you deserve commensurate
rewards, if you are failing nobody should care to hear your excuses - only
what could you fix and perhaps why you believe you deserve another chance.

The performance of the CEO and overall company performance depends on everyone
pulling their weight. If the CEO does not enforce accountability throughout
the entire organization, he/she is heading for failure and nobody would care
about their sorry fate!

~~~
coffeemug
Most employees have a very different mindset. It seems that a company composed
only of people who understand and follow the 'nobody cares' principle would be
a perfectly operating entity where everyone always smoothly goes in the right
direction, but I'm not actually convinced that's possible. 'Nobody cares'
personal philosophy is very much correlated with alpha personalities, and you
can't have a team where everyone is an alpha - they'll rip each other apart
with conflicts. It's very tricky to balance this well - I'd like to see how
different leaders do it in organizations of different sizes.

~~~
nostrademons
The incentives at a typical corporation are also not setup to encourage
"nobody cares" attitudes. Employees are paid whatever the results are, unless
they do something egregiously bad. They have every incentive to care about
their effort and motivations - that's what they get fired for - and no
incentive to care about results. That's diametrically opposed from an equity-
owning cofounder (who basically can't be fired, unless the board forces them
out) but doesn't get paid anything unless the company succeeds.

You could argue that this is the _reason_ why anyone would accept a salaried
employment position. In a well-run knowledge organization, employees have just
as much freedom as startup founders do. The difference is risk assignment:
under an employment agreement, the employer assumes the risk (and reward) that
the product may fail despite the employee's best efforts, while in a startup,
the founder assumes the risk that the company may fail for reasons outside his
control. (The incentives issue actually falls out of this as a form of moral
hazard.)

Note that the alternative of paying everyone by results doesn't always work
either. Many financial firms use this approach. The problem is that
realistically, in a decent-sized organization, people _don't_ have a
measurable effect on outcomes, and results will be dominated by randomness
anyway. If you pay for results but results are not under the worker's control,
you end up incentivizing risky behavior, because the worker's upside is
potentially unlimited but their downside is generally capped at "everything
they own". This was the problem at Enron, LTCM, and many hedge funds in the
financial crisis.

------
DannoHung
Is this meant to be taken as advice or something? Because it's useless advice.
He could have at least said something like, "Be prepared for the day when all
your assumptions about how to proceed are upended and you are left with
nothing. Be mentally prepared to be broadsided by fate. Be operationally
prepared to rebuild from scratch. Be prepared to get a carton of Tums and make
the tough decision that gives you a bloody ulcer."

~~~
daeken
I think you completely missed the point. The point is this: nobody cares why
you failed, just that you failed, so put your energy towards finding a way to
turn it into a win rather than coming up with an excuse for why it all fell
apart.

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Alex3917
There's no asterisks in startups.

~~~
staunch
Not even Twilio? :-)

------
whyme
When Parcell asked: "What should I do?” .... is he not, in fact, spending his
time on "what you might do" ?

Kinda makes the story pointless, if you ask me.

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bennesvig
This reminds me of one of my favorite drawings from Hugh MacLeod
(www.gapingvoid.com)

Nobody Cares: Population 6 Billion
[http://alecsharp.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/nobody-
cares.jp...](http://alecsharp.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/nobody-cares.jpg)

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mechnik
The NYT obit for Al Davis
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/sports/football/al-
davis-o...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/sports/football/al-davis-owner-
of-raiders-dies-at-82.html)

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jwingy
RIP Al. I'm no Raider fan, but I definitely respect your passion for your team
and football!

------
Hitchhiker
or.. put more succinctly

" Success has many fathers, failure none. "

The above has an interesting spin to it. Failure is often caused by not having
enough people to care.

" Care " itself is strongly associated with being a father.

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daniel-cussen
Typo: "As I was feely sorry for myself..."

