I’m doing most of my writing these days as @kenjudy on LinkedIn. It’s where people can find it, right now. More personal things I put on @kenjudy at mastadon.social.
Setting an Intention
This is what I said to open an all day creative exercise with our leadership team, and founder (Debbie) focused on our long term future…
The most important thing I have to say is Debbie and I have talked about this and we give you complete permission to let go of the day to day. We’ve given ourselves this one day out of 261 work days in a year to think about the future. Monday we can get back to the work of operating Stride.
As for today, I hope we make this a safe space. Your feelings are yours and you have a right to them. Your dreams are yours and you have a right to them. To borrow from open space. “The people who are here are the right people. Whatever happens today is the only thing that could.”
In terms of outcomes, today is an exercise in collective imagination. Everything we create here will be documented. We will share it with Striders. We will spend the next 3-6 months learning from them how to connect our plans to their aspirations. Ultimately I want every Strider to be able to use our vision to find more meaning in their day to day work.
This work is a piece along with our 2022 goals and the work you’re doing to mature our sales and consulting strategies. When we plan 2023 we will have the information we need to set meaningful and measurable long range goals and iterate on our corporate strategy.
Any questions on the outcomes or the day?
I want to talk about setting an intention. How much it guides our actions.
2035 is 14 years from now. 2007 is 14 years ago. In 2007, I was VP Eng at Oxygen Cable.
I’d been there eight years and we’d built a high performing Agile team: product, engineering and design. Our CEO had just started to work with us as product owner on a line of consumer software. She was looking to recapture her original mission to become a content brand for women.
Our first attempt was a kind of Pinterest two years before Pinterest. We were in beta and then over a weekend Oxygen was acquired. They new owner wanted the audience and carriage. But they didn’t want the mission.
It was pretty inevitable how things were going to play out. My team was scouted as individuals, each assigned separate transition responsibilities. I spent a decent amount of time writing down what I thought about the experience and laying out what I cared about.
About the acquisition process, I said:
We haven’t been rewarded or treated as one (team) but as individuals in service of organizations. A focus on citizens and cities – not neighborhoods.
What is difficult for the integrators to discern are the values, practices, spirit and reputation that allow this team to attract and develop new talent even as individuals move on.
About building software I wrote:
You can optimize construction practices as much as you want but if there is no discernible need for what you’re building…
The goal is not to build crap well. It is to find a way each day to do less and less crap and more and more not crap.
Ethical behavior is not about being right or infallible.
Human judgment is fallible but we must act to create the most benefit and least harm in accordance with the principle that others have as much right to joy, fulfillment and dignity as we do ourselves.
If harm results from even our best efforts we must take responsibility. No one is perfect and there are always mitigating circumstances but there are also no excuses.
Finally, I wrote this personal manifesto:
In my decisions and actions, I balance the following:
- I care about the people who use what I create.
- I care about the quality of what I create.
- I care about the people with whom I create.
- I honor my commitments to my employer.
- I am loyal to people who have earned my loyalty.
- I provide for my family.
I reflect on my decisions and actions to avoid:
- negligence,
- incompetence,
- deception,
- waste, and
- harm.
Agile practice is a means to these ends.
Putting out what I cared about and what I wanted to create in the world influenced my actions and shaped my career. It became the filter with which I made decisions, informed what I learned and who I sought out to learn from. It guided my interactions with co-workers, what work I was willing to take, and with whom I built working relationships.
It’s why I met Debbie. It’s why I hired her prior company and then Stride. It’s why I joined Stride. It’s why I challenged fundamental assumptions about our business. And it’s why I’d chosen to work for someone who cared enough about Striders to listen to me and take a risk with all of us.
We have been handed the opportunity to make decisions with a broader frame of reference and longer timeline. And we can move more quickly because we have each other.
Even still, it can as long as it takes. Because the incremental steps are worth it and the journey is worth it. It’s worth it to live true to the vision, values and people you care about. To see a future that is better than the present and to work for it together.
Stride will evolve along with us. It will continue to attract inspiring people to work with us and rise to meet our aspirations to achieve our life goals, make a contribution to society, and help improve conditions on our planet.
Who we want to be in the world
Stride recently had our first all company in person gathering 
since December 2020. I opened the day with these remarks…
It’s a thrill to see you all. Thank you for coming. I realize we’re skirting the edge of some of our comfort zones. Certainly mine. But the work to put this together has been really thoughtful. Thank you Rebecca and particular Julia for making this possible.
It’s been a really difficult eighteen months. Sad. Lonely. Stressful. We’re not fully through it. But we will come out the other side of this.
So what kind of future do we want? Not a return to normal. The intersection of so many crises has created momentum for change in the world and new opportunities to connect what we do for a living to what gives our lives meaning.
We have to dive into that. We have to join with others to make our society more just and equitable, to reverse our harm to our climate and resources, and to use capitalism’s ability to create wealth to create opportunities and make people’s lives safer more joyous.
To give you a sense of why I know we can do this I want to tell you about my friend Jim. Jim didn’t lead a social movement. He was an entrepreneur, artist, marketer, father, and husband.
I met Jim 30 years ago. I’d been cut from an mfa directing program and was back at home looking for a way to reconnect to my passions and to people. So, I called to this theater to volunteer. Jim answered the phone. Turned out he was the managing director. He welcomed me in. And i spent the next ten years there. Met many of my closest friends. Collaborated to create new work with writers and actors.
At some point, Jim decided to start a consulting business. And hired me. It was my first software developer job and my first Consulting job. He encouraged me to ask out the woman who became my wife. He encouraged me to move out to New York. By the time I did, he was moving back to Seattle so he helped me take over the lease on his apartment – where I still live now.
It wasn’t that he took me on as some project. I’m one of dozens of friends whose life he’d made better. He knew how to use his talents, he knew how to find joy in ‘enough’, he was generous with help, and he knew who he wanted to be in the world.
That’s how I see Stride. That’s actually the floor for how I see Stride because you are all so capable and heartfelt and disciplined. we are capable of creating so much _together_.
So, let’s continue to help each other navigate this present. And let’s start building our future.
Let’s find people to work with who inspire us, challenge us, and are doing meaningful things. Let’s commit to helping them build things that make an impact on the world.
It’s not about grand gestures. It’s about really doing the work. Knowing how to use our talents, how to find joy in ‘enough’, being generous with help, and knowing who we want to be in the world.
Good Middle Managers Don’t Leave Fingerprints: Leading within an Organization
This post is published on the Stride Consulting Blog.
Gerald Weinberg said in his Secrets of Consulting, “Never forget they’re paying you by the hour, not by the solution.” In other words, a consultant’s job is to help their client achieve goals. The client is the hero of their own story.
This is also true of a middle manager. Teams are the hero of their own story. Remove or shield obstacles in their path. Empower them to shape their missions. Open doors to direct conversation with stakeholders and end users.
For 15 years I worked at the VP/Director level for media companies in New York City. Over that time I built organizations, hired great people, translated vision into achievable plans, delivered critical projects, and expanded company missions.
Several years ago, Gerry Laybourne, former CEO of Oxygen Media, held a reunion for our software development team. At Oxygen, what had started as three developers rebuilding the marketing website had evolved into a 15-person cross-functional team supporting mission-critical systems and working directly with Gerry to build a consumer software product.
At some point in the day, we formed a circle. One by one, people reflected on one great thing about our time working together. People singled out Gerry for her creativity and vision and our engineering lead, Luke Melia, for his care and mentorship.
I felt my stomach clenching as the group shared their reflections. I felt disappointed. In my memory I’d placed myself at the center of this wonderful experience, but I wasn’t. Of course, that shouldn’t have surprised me. I had the extraordinary luck to work with talented people. Gerry and Luke were being celebrated for good reason.
Six questions for equity, participation, and buy in
After some hard won lessons, I’ve started asking these six questions before enacting any important leadership decision.
- What exactly we doing?
Answered as directly and simply as possible.
- How does it relate to an existing priority?
Something I believe people broadly understand to be important.
- Why now?
Why invest time & money now over things people might think are important
- Who’s accountable?
Who is following through? Who can answer questions?
- have we consulted with people affected by the decision?
Invite participation before or repair damage afterwards. If timing really doesn’t allow then admit it and ask for feedback.
- How can people help/stay informed/participate?
Are we asking for help? If not, how will we make progress visible.
I’m interested in what people think of this or if they are doing anything similar.