I was a Vice President of Engineering for Hi5.com, which eventually became a startup working on a social games site called Magi. It was the first time I was an executive for a company with tens of millions of users and tens of millions of dollars in revenue. It was also a sinking ship. There are many reasons why the business utterly failed, and that conversation will cost you at least one or six beers. I am in SF next week for GDC if you wish to avail yourself of this storytelling.
I confess that I agitated my peers by my conduct. I was in the process of learning to teach people to lead. I had to read that back to myself, and I am satisfied with the sentence. Mistakes were made. There are old sayings about giving people fish and teaching them to fish. I cackle maniacally when people bring up these sayings and then change the conversation to explosives and scooping fish out of the water. There are as many ways to catch a fish as there are to skin a cat. I am admittedly not certain I would try to skin a cat with explosives.
This has nothing to do with engineering leadership and the teaching thereof. Today’s metaphor is the warp core.
I am guilty of conducting high-risk social experiments on engineers and engineering leaders. Some of these experiments were well-controlled. Some were detonations visible from space. I often encouraged people to lead meetings, which was a well-controlled experiment. I would randomly and, at the last minute, appoint someone to run a meeting who had yet to do so ever. At least one person in the room knew I was not there intentionally and was merely hiding out of sight. They were there to send me a signal flare if something was going badly and I needed to intervene.
My peers hated this with a passion. “You are meddling with the warp core!” They would proclaim indignantly.
Yes. Yes, I was. I was meddling with the warp core. I look at the people who were a part of these experiments a decade later, and I will say that many of them have been forged into terrific leaders.
If you lead people, give them learning opportunities and stretch their capabilities. Do not be afraid to do this! I had given people learning opportunities by accident early in my career and have deliberately done so much later.
I am quite pleased with the results.
You should take this as an encouragement to meddle with your warp core. Traveling around the universe at a comfortable Warp Six point Five will get you there consistently if you only care about the results. Occasionally, pushing your engines to a crazy Warp Ten will tell you how good the ship is under duress. It also gives you some opportunities to find issues that need tuning in case you need to go that fast. Eventually, you will.
That is it. That is the whole post. See you next week!
