You can learn a lot about a person by looking at what books they’ve bought and chosen to display. (Whether they actually read them is another matter.)
Increasingly, though, bookshelves tell us about ghosts. My books tell you a lot about 1995 Liza or 2005 Liza, and not so much about 2015 Liza. I’m not buying fewer books, but I am buying fewer ones made out of paper. There’s a space in my bookcase where my current self used to be.
There’s one place you can still look and learn a lot about me — what I’m struggling with, what I’m learning, what others expect of me, and who I’m trying to become. It’s not my bookshelf. It’s my company’s bookshelf, and it’s made of pixels, not wood.
I work at Safari. We let people read and watch any of the 30,000 books and videos on technical and business topics that we’ve aggregated. It’s like a Netflix for ebooks, if your company paid for Netflix and expected you to watch movies at work because that would make you better at your job.
Naturally everyone at Safari has access to Safari and because we’re an evolving technology company, we’re an ideal audience for our own product. We want to model a daily habit of using Safari to learn something new, so in January we asked every employee, in every role, to use our own service at least a little bit every day.
Books can be a slog. You invest a lot of your limited personal time reading one. They don’t provide the instant reward of social media and you can’t zone out with them like a mobile game. Reading, especially non-fiction reading, is work. Studying this material every day is an act of deliberate practice, of honing a craft.
We learned all the usual things from our dogfooding exercise: the what, which, and how. What could we add to increase engagement? Which tickets should be in the next sprint? How will we fix that intractable bug?
Only when I peeked at the company bookshelf — the titles that people were actually reading — could I see all the whys. Why should anybody buy our product? Why do people work here and not somewhere else? Why do I enjoy spending 8 hours a day with these humans?
From our top 30 titles in January I selected the books and videos that, to me, answered those questions.
(We’ve done a lot of soul-searching through this process, and got feedback from our team about monitoring and reporting usage. How do we feel about an employer knowing what we read, even among our own colleagues? Everyone knows that your boss might read your work email, but books can feel special. I’ve decided to broadly report here on only what was read, and not expose individual reading habits.)
What we read,
who we are
Nerdy
Team Geek was our most-read book in January. The book teaches technologists how to work together effectively, how to develop leadership skills, and how to empathize with non-technologists.
About a third of our employees have a primarily technical role, but we have nerds in many departments, all the way to the top. We’re doing something right if our staff is engaged in building better collaborative technical teams. As CTO, I couldn’t ask for a better set of self-directed goals.
Distributed
The Year Without Pants is about WordPress and its parent Automattic, a defiantly remote work company. Safari is mixed: we have physical offices but about half the employees work from home. It’s a struggle to balance competing needs, and the remote/local question pervades every operational decision: Do we need more mics in the conference room? Is it demotivating if the Boston team goes bowling? Sorry, can you mute please?
Many outspoken and influential staff work remotely, including our entire design team. Two people wrote popular blog posts on their experiences: “Working in the Future” and “How to Thrive as a Remote Worker.” We’re proud of the distributed work culture we’ve developed thus far.
Remote teams are hard. Honestly I think we are acing it, but I’m glad everyone else isn’t so complacent. They all want to get better at this new way of working, of video calls and chat and Google Docs and, hopefully, pants.
Smart
Our CEO Andrew recommended Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy — to a CEO this is a light, enjoyable read — so I wasn’t surprised to see it show up in staff reading lists because if the CEO suggests something you probably do it. What surprised me was that people actually read the book: an average of 100 pages per reader. I was not one of those people.
This is a difficult book. I thought it would help me if I looked at Andrew’s public highlights, but faced with the sheer information density in those quotes I just backed away slowly. But, you know, if my coworkers can do it, I can do it. I’ve put it into my queue because I don’t want to look dumb in front of my friends. Peer pressure works.
Flat
Safari has a pretty traditional org chart. We’re not a holacracy and our desks aren’t on wheels and we’re so totally square that we still have people called “managers.” Some of that is probably inertia but a lot of it is just about keeping things uncomplicated. You know all that management advice about how you should wear the same outfit every day? Work is hard enough without somebody rolling your office away every quarter.
So what I mean by “flat” is not about the company structure but about the culture. We hash out a lot of things in the open — in public chat rooms, in all-company Google Docs, in frequent all-hands meetings. While it’s absolutely true that a person higher in the org chart has more decision-making power, I think we’re pretty good at letting everyone raise concerns or suggestions. There are no communication silos and no fiefdoms.
Our VP of Engineering, Keith, recently interviewed 70 people from across the company and asked them what they thought about working here. He learned that we have to improve onboarding, release processes, and prioritization — pretty normal stuff.
He didn’t specifically ask about company culture, but people talked about that anyway: “We’re okay with people working their way into a better place,” and, “This is the first company that seems to care about me as a person.”
“There’s a lot of kindness.”
“You can talk to everyone from the CEO to an intern.”
“People will always make time for you.”
Brave
“The organization you build is as important as the products that you build.”
The tech community is too cavalier about failure. When a company folds there’s a lot of collateral damage to families and careers. Not everyone can just pivot to their next entrepreneurial adventure.
The second-most popular title for our team was a video, a keynote by O’Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O’Reilly, called “How I Failed”. Tim’s keynote (free text version) is not about a graveyard of failed enterprises — he’s been running the same company since 1978 — but the mistakes he made along the way in learning to be an effective leader.
Some of us watched the talk because Safari is owned by O’Reilly Media and his decisions can directly affect our business. But there are a lot of talks by Tim in Safari, and this is the one we watched the most. It resonates because our company has undergone a lot of change in the last 18 months, not all of it easy or, frankly, successful.
I watched Tim’s talk to learn from mistakes that could have very real consequences for our employees’ lives. I also wanted to assure myself that small failures along the way are to be expected. If we weather them bravely, we’ll build a sustainable company, and I can someday talk about my failures with the hindsight of decades of success.
A physical bookshelf is a good icebreaker. It’s the natural thing to look at in those first few nervous minutes in someone’s home. Both parties are a little vulnerable: is my collection smart enough, with the one trashy paperback to show that I’m not a total bore? Is my commentary insightful, or am I going to rhapsodize over the novel left behind by an ex?
Not every company has a bookshelf (though we’re trying!). If it’s true that culture is what happens when the boss isn’t around, it follows that it’s most true when nobody’s around, when your time is your own and you choose how to spend it. I believe in work/life balance, but also that it’s impossible to build an ambitious career solely from nine to five. You cannot solve big problems, lead a great team, or climb your way up from the help desk to the exec team without deliberate, continuous, sometimes excruciatingly boring practice. But it’s nice to know we’re not going it alone.
