when i thought i was smart

i still think i'm smart, actually. but back in the day i thought that, in addition to my smartitude, the world was, apparently, very stupid.

which lead to a lot of wonderful angsty moments. like the time when i was working for netscape. the company brought together a set of people from all over the company to help think about how to make the company even better. only the company wasn't good in the first place, and so instead of figuring out how to extend the goodness, we ended up talking a lot about the badness. i remember the ceo saying something like, "i like to think of a new company as a child that i am helping to grow up, and you just told me i have an ugly baby".

i still remember that day as one of the historic wastes of time. strangely, that particular venue, the garden court hotel, seems to be a common venue for historic wastes of time, because i have wasted a time with a number of organizations at the garden court hotel.

i just found in a file folder, pages of notes from that much smarter michael toy. mostly one liners, which i took while sitting in that meeting.

if i remember my timing right, these notes were taken at a time when to the external world, netscape appeared to be a rising superstar in the tech world, but would actually be laying people off because of revenue problems within the next 6 months.

here are the ones that are still part of the "michael toy" way, many years later ...

• dissent is more valuable than consensus, because it forces you to know why you do what you do.
• comfort is the last state of mind before death.
• reality is king. reality can be painful. pain that comes from reality should be given attention.
• small teams rule the universe.
• consensus/comittee .... death
• dictatorship ... death
• get out of people's way
• focus is king (nobody tell reality about this, there will be a war)
• don't waste people's time
• non-comformists are necessary. if we do things like everyone else does, we limit ourselves to being no better than anyone else.
• honest failure is valuable

when i was writing these down, i was writing them down because these were things i thought i saw that nobody else could see. these older and wiser days, i have learned that what i used to interpret as clueless-ness by the non-michaels in the world, was often clueless-ness by michael to the world that non-michaels live in.

and so while i still believe all of these things, i no longer see other people's non belief in these things as as a sign of their stupidity, but instead as a sign that i probably don't understand their world well enough.

for example, there is a near maniacal defense of the importance of software engineers being given space to be productive underneath that above list. i have since recognized that people who run companies tend to have that exact same maniacal focus, but the essence to be preserved is not engineering productivity, but revenue. when very smart people who are trying to protect revenue make their bullet lists, they look very different than the one above.

Comments

[k rigg]

so what does the bullet list of very smart people trying to protect revenue look like?

[Michael Toy]

Well, I am not exactly sure, because I am not one of them, but I guess I could intuit some things about their lists. They probably say things like this:

1) Efficiency comes through measurement and improvement
2) Imperfect measurements are better than no measurements
3) All measurements must be translatable into dollars
4) If the doors are closed next week, it doesn't matter how cool the product is that would have been ready to ship in 3 weeks.