“Noble Vision”
I heard a CEO mention this concept during a Tech Stars talk then ran into it again reading some awesome articles on Harvard Business Review (e.g. http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/05/managing-a-negative-out-of-touch-boss/).
Quote from article:
You can do this by asking about the core purpose of the organization, or even its noble vision. “What is our purpose?” Not, “how are we doing?” but “why do we exist and how do we serve our organization and society?”
Nate asked this recently in a meeting with everyone (though I wasn’t there for that)… I don’t know if we have a good answer to this yet but it should be something that’s key going forward. We’re all part of an early team and all invested in coming up with a good answer to this question, and as key contributors we should all be empowered to shape what this means.
Why did I end up here, at a startup, instead of working somewhere where I could be getting paid a living wage? ;) For me, it’s to build a kickass engineering culture working with people I trust and can befriend, where everyone can capitalize on their ideas, where we encourage risk-taking because we trust we are all smart and get shit done, and that moving fast and trying new things may lead to spectacular successes even if that means we occasionally fail.
People talk about ‘SecOps’ or ‘SecDevOps’ but what does the philosophy of DevOps really mean? To me, it’s just that dev + operations work transparently together, and are both accountable when shit gets a wrench thrown into it. The noble vision for me, in terms of what we do for society, would be to bring that to security + operations (but maybe without using a silly term like ’SecOps’ ;)). As I see it, where security is headed is somewhere that is no longer something dictated by people in a group totally divorced from the reality of development and operations. Security works best in tandem with the ops teams and developers who know what is being deployed and can best inform how to protect it. Similarly, everyone is accountable when shit goes bad.
If we do this right, our products should enable that. If we can build products that make that easier for the world, then I think we have served society well. And I believe the best way to build such products is in the type of environment I described above, one that encourages transparency + cooperation + trust among employees, it allows people to not be afraid of failing, and that is the soul of innovation. That is the beauty of startups.
That’s my 2 cents — but why are you at Threat Stack? What is your noble vision? ‘Bitch gotta get paid’ is not a valid response. ☺
Best,
Jen
(ps yes we are hiring — jobs@threatstack.com)
