How Star Wars can help you run your company

On Star Wars Day, 2022, I’d like to welcome you to the #roboverse with the traditional May the Fourth Be with You greeting and explore how you can channel the Force to help you run your company.

But first, here’s a great video montage of all the times someone said “may the force be with you”.

I’d like to start with an anecdote from my own company, InOrbit. As a distributed company, my co-founder and I have always strived to create a sense of community and belonging for all team members regardless of their location. As a small team facing a seemingly overwhelming task of moving a whole industry, we already felt a bit like the Rebel Alliance. Have you ever wondered how they stayed connected and motivated across all those different planets?

One way we helped our team connect is through a meeting we call Wins and Lessons, or just “the Wins meeting”. This is a pretty unstructured meeting, with a randomly rotating MC whose job it is to facilitate so that people can share anything they want: an accomplishment, a product demo, something that didn’t work out as planned that we can all learn from or some piece of personal news.

On May 4th, 2020, as we were all adjusting to lockdowns and the uncertainty of the pandemic, it was one of our interns’ turn to run the meeting. She asked for advice a day or two before, and I suggested that we might want to have a Star Wars-themed meeting. She took this idea and ran with it, creating an online game to test the team’s knowledge of Star Wars trivia. This was a huge success with everyone, and it very quickly became a tradition, with subsequent MCs expected to organize other trivia games. Two years later, we are still going strong.

At other companies, Star War references can take a more ominous tone. At Meta, for example, the coding interviews for software engineers include 3 portions: Ninja, Pirate and Jedi. The latter, of course, refers to the Jedi Knights, which are central characters in Star Wars. Several people have pointed out that using these terms may be seen as patronizing, sexist, or just plain silly. In particular, Jedis are an elite, so maybe don’t call people that.

Some companies are rife with internal politics, pitching different groups agains each other. I’ve even heard people refer to an executive “on the other team” as a Sith Lord. This kind of pitched battle between good and evil makes for great storytelling, but does not result in a positive work culture.

On the other hand, I think we can all be inspired by movie characters like Rey or Luke Skywalker, who developed great skills with the goal of helping others. And of course, in the case of a company like ours working in robotics, the references to R2D2 are never too far away. In fact, one of the robots we are using for a public demo next week is called just that.

In sum, Star Wars lore can be used to bring people together around a common goal and add a bit of fun to our work, but it can also sow internal division. Just don’t give in to the dark side, and the Force will be with you, always.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.