company / community

 

1.

One of the blogs I have followed for more than 15 years, is Matt Webb’s Interconnected. I am not sure how I came across his blog, but it is one I kept track of, as I migrated from blogreader to google reader to feedly over the years. I don’t understand him many times, but like people whom we remember for having given us something in life, I owe him for introducing me to Gregory Bateson’s “Steps to an Ecology of Mind”, all those years back. I came across below in one of his latest blogs. 

"For me, a company is, at least to a degree, for the people in it. Right?

A company that makes not too much profit but is the collective endeavour of many people is a good company, surely? Or rather, it occupies as many people as it requires and allows those people to enjoy a relaxed life.

Imagine a company staffed by people with enough room in their days to build intuitive skill in their work and show empathy to customers. To be not transactional.

And to take long lunches.

That’s good for them and good for the community the company is part of, right?

An aside:

My second job was as Saturday boy at the local ironmonger’s.

One day we cut the hedge and swept the street. We did it for the neighbour too because, as Eric said, that’s what neighbours do."

I had been thinking in similar lines for a long time. I wanted to write down a manifesto of a company which will exist for just the purpose he articulated above - for allowing people who work there to enjoy a relaxed life. Why shouldn’t friends who want the same things work together for life? Instead of the company’s primary purpose as satisfying shareholders and the market, what if one exists for just the people who make up the company. Beyond the rhetoric of “assets of the company walk out every day and come back the next day”, but existing for those assets as the primary purpose. 

2.

I read below in Thejesh’s blog. 

I see that people think being nice is a weakness and never gets work done. It's not true in my experience. I believe not being nice to each other means there are assholes in the surroundings. And they drag down the team. I strictly follow the No Asshole Rule and avoid them at all costs. 

I had been thinking in similar lines the same day I read this. I had thought since long and came to a conclusion that managers in traditional companies cannot be true friends with the team - since if they say everything they know or feel, it might be depressing (same as the way parents may want to protect the children from the harsh realities of the life for as long as possible) and that if you eventually are forced to decide compensation, gradation based on performance, decide on progression of someone’s career under constraints of a limited budget and such, there will be scenarios where it is not possible to be defined as a friend in traditional sense. 

Now the connection to niceness. I had come across the difference between being kind vs being nice - being nice could be interpreted as avoiding unpleasantness and conflict, but being kind could be to put something in a way that conveys the message that is useful to someone but without being an asshole. I was thinking whether the standards are lowered, people not realising their potential and raising their level when everyone is being nice to each other. Compared to the “tough love” of a strict teacher or a boss who demands excellence and won’t settle for anything less or the “hairdryer” treatment managers were known to give to underperforming team mates. I was mentally comparing different groups whom I had known where the collective standards are higher vs lower. Danger is that many times this can slip to asshole territory and become toxic, like the movie “Whiplash” with a teacher who drives the students to the edge of madness in pursuit of perfection. So the question is where is the line and what is the right thing to do. 

I also had come across this line from Naval Ravikant, that I adopted - that one should aspire to work with peers, all relationships as peer relationships, no hierarchies. 

Now combining this, being nice/kind, all relationships as peer relationships with the earlier concept of a company existing for the people - how should the ways of working be? 

3.

For the third and final thread in this is, this story about places where people live the longest. 

"The Chorotega also have a strong sense of community, with the whole town coming together to build each new house. It's a concept called "mano vuelta" which roughly translates as "work for the collective benefit".

"People look for tricks to live longer," Ezekiel said, "But you can't live a life of consumption and greed, then balance it out with superfoods. You have to live in an integrated way: an active life; a kind life; a community life.

"When someone in the village needs a new house, we all come together and build it. When someone slaughters a pig, we all come together and share it. No-one eats too much, but we all have enough. And we take it in turns to provide."

"During my life," he said, "I was not a grand person – a person of significance, or anything like that – but I have always been a good friend. You have to love yourself, and others. Because if you love a friend, you cannot wish anything bad on other people. That stops things going bad for you from the inside."

As we left, he patted my hand and nodded towards Dre. "And it's very important to love a good woman," he said.

I had read about these longitudinal studies where people are followed for decades from childhood to find out what makes people happy, successful. My gist of the takeaway from all that was that, at the end, it is only the relationships that one had which matters. In current times, when the sense of community is degrading, we could be missing out on the critical elements of what makes us happy in the long term.

Now if I combine the sense of community also to the conditions before - company existing for the people, creating conditions for a strong community bonding, being kind to each other, maintaining peer relationships - how should it work? Is it utopian? Does it violate any of the fundamental nature of human beings in which case such endeavours would ultimately fail? Need to take this thought experiment further some day.