Creating Passionate Users

"Dignity is deadly." - Paul Graham

What goes away when a company moves past the start-up phase? Living only on take-out and caffeine. Working in a [small] living room. Crazy, stupid, unprofessional behavior. Wearing nothing but shorts and ripped t-shirts.

Is this a good thing?

Hacker-turned-start-up-investor Paul Graham doesn't think so. In his keynote at the internal Amazon developer's conference in Seattle (that I was speaking at last week), he had a list of 40 bullet points of things Big Companies could learn from start-ups. He doesn't have an essay up for this, but he has a wonderful, somewhat related essay that I'm hoping you've all read by this time on What Business Can Learn From Open Source. (If you're new to Paul Graham, he can be an "acquired taste". Very smart, often controversial, rarely politically correct. Almost always thought provoking--or at least hurl-your-mouse-across-the-room provoking.)

My head was already spinning by bullet point six, but the one simple thing that stuck in my head was "dignity is deadly." Specifically this thought (I'm paraphrasing):

When you evolve out of start-up mode and start worrying about being professional and dignified, you only lose capabilities. You don't add anything... you only take away. Dignity is deadly.

At one point, Sun wasn't much more than creative genuis Bill Joy ("Oh, I think I'll just whip up BSD Unix on my own..."), and troublemaker Scott McNealy. Yet by the time I got to Sun, using the word "cool" in a customer training document was enough to warrant an entry in your annual performance eval. And not in a good way.

I cannot count the times I heard the word "professionalism" used as justification for why we couldn't do something. But I can count the few times I heard the word "passion" used in a meeting where the goal was to get developers to adopt our newest Java technologies. What changed? More importantly, was it a positive change? Was it a completely necessary change?

Why do we go from the business equivalent of the unruly-but-creative teenager to a stuffy parent? Can't we be something in-between? Why not the motivated, fun, creative 30-year old? (I'm not being ageist here -- this is a metaphor). If we're forced into becoming the "parent", why can't we at least be the cool parent from down the street? And by "cool", I mean the truly cool, not cool simply because they supplied the beer. (The 37 Signals folks always have a lot to say on this "stay small and act like a start-up" approach as well)

Some argue that by maintaining strict professionalism, we can get the more conservative, professional clients and thus grow the business. Is this true? Do we really need these clients? Isn't it possible that we might even grow more if we became braver? Seth Godin cautions that today, "Safe is risky, and risky is safe."

I'm somewhere in the middle of this. I'll use the word "ass" as in "kick-ass". But when I use the "F-word", well, there you have it. It's the "F-word", not the actual spelled-out word. hugh macleod, on the other hand, has a take-no-prisoners view. He'll do whatever the hell he pleases, always being 100% true to who he is, and when someone warned him that if he didn't cut back he'd never get the Big Clients, his response was: "Do you honestly think I'd have a good working relationship with clients who are offended that I used the word 'penis' in a cartoon?" He doesn't want those clients, and apparently... he hasn't done too badly recently finding clients who like him just the way he is--pure authentic hugh--thank-you.

Yes there is a "Business Case" for maintaining certain levels of professionalism, dignity, and political correctness. And that's cool... as long as we're all recognizing at every turn that in some ways we are losing the tools we have available to us. That this need to meet professional expectations restricts us... perhaps even more than it enables a higher level of... what? Profits? Business? Clients? Respect?

The Head First book series was an attempt to use virtually everything brain-friendly that we were not allowed to do at Sun. And when Head First Java first came out, it immediately became the number one selling Java book, and still is today, just over two years later. I'm not at all suggesting that some of what's in Head First would have been appropriate for an official Sun course document, but could they have incorporated 20% without sacrificing dignity? Maybe.

By the time we ran things through the deadly professionalism filters, the life, passion, joy, and in this case--brain-friendliness--had been sucked out.

When "we just can't DO that here" takes away more than it adds, we should reconsider. But, people scream, "we can't afford to say f*** 'em to some of our biggest potential clients!" And I wonder... can we afford not to?