On Being Happy At Work
Why I Joined SlideRoom
--
On Monday I found myself in the kitchen at work making coffee and chatting with Chris and Dimi.We had all arrived early and were talking about some problematic claims being made about mental health by an NPR guest. The conversation meandered around a bit and in an unguarded moment I heard myself say, “This is the healthiest place I’ve worked in a very long time.”
This year I joined SlideRoom. The circumstances of this transition are as varied and mundane as most transitions. What is extraordinary is the company itself. Chris Jagers is both the reason that SlideRoom is here and that I am at SlideRoom. Chris is the next generation creative executive who lived his passion and learned the world of business along the way. His MBA is spelled MFA. His pedigree is the life he has lived. His training ground has been his projects.
SlideRoom executes quietly and beautifully. This is no small thing. Much of my career has been spent honing the skills of war and survival. It is common in most organizations to be wading through the warm stench of the loud and mediocre at every turn. It is de rigueur to pretend you aren’t.Under Fortune 500 conditions you work to thrive in spite of your surroundings. You build the shop inside the quarterly earnings machine and do your damnedest to give it aircover to get its work done. You fight to institutionalize nested, repeatable lifecycles from the product family roadmap down to the daily stand up meeting.You build a war machine to protect the product from the mindless whim of the VP du jour desperate to plant a flag before the clock runs out. The craftsmen fight the careerists to eek out every win. Sometimes you succeed. Many times you don’t. It is tiring, unhealthy, and extremely wasteful.
SlideRoom is a collective of craftsmen. The well-honed patterns of craftsmen are the magic that fuel good companies. You can’t be a craftsman at scale. It is the work of the craftsman that scales. Across the corporate world “executing at scale” often means little more than being a dickish self-promoter. Executing at scale should mean multiplying well-honed patterns. Patterns drawn from the raw materials of a business by the craftsmen who care about it. The character of things is wrapped up in the patterns through which they manifest. You can be a lot of wonderful things at different scales, but not without craftsmanship and that only ever comes at human scale.
SlideRoom has navigated a path through the last 6 years that is debt free (and what is VC if not super debt?) and unencumbered by the norms of self-promotion, saying “yes” to everybody, and building to flip. SlideRoom has done this by crafting beautiful solutions to organizations’ complex qualitative decision making problems. If you run a department, competition, school, or have other decision making scenarios, particularly in media rich environments, we should talk.
