It is like Jekyll and Hyde for me. Reading both anchor descriptions I even think that they both appeal to me equally in different ways. This is probably a sign of my inexperience though haha as in if both of them seem vaguely appealing to me then I probably haven't my face punched in the real world within the anchors yet.
One thing that fascinates me though is the idea of a manager who thrives on approaching the goal of team fostering from an engineering/systems-thinking mindset. This second approach almost makes it seem like such a person is combining both anchors.
An example of this is Shopify's Tobi Lutke. He was the initial developer of the product and when it came time to require a CEO he was actually hesitant to take up the reigns. He reluctantly agreed to give it a try under one condition. He would treat running the company like an engineer (see where the loops are improve them/ improve input to output efficiency/ etc) and if such an approach proved unsuccessful then he would back down and return to programming.
It turned out that that approach worked well for him. And I suspect that this is true in many newer companies where technology is a core competency.
One thing that fascinates me though is the idea of a manager who thrives on approaching the goal of team fostering from an engineering/systems-thinking mindset. This second approach almost makes it seem like such a person is combining both anchors.
An example of this is Shopify's Tobi Lutke. He was the initial developer of the product and when it came time to require a CEO he was actually hesitant to take up the reigns. He reluctantly agreed to give it a try under one condition. He would treat running the company like an engineer (see where the loops are improve them/ improve input to output efficiency/ etc) and if such an approach proved unsuccessful then he would back down and return to programming.
It turned out that that approach worked well for him. And I suspect that this is true in many newer companies where technology is a core competency.
But we've done this for a long, long time. We've designed Shopify very well because resilience and uptime are so important for building trust. These lessons were there in the building of our architecture. And then I had to take over as CEO.
When that happened, I made two decisions: one, I'm going to try to learn as much about business as possible. But, if business is very different from software architecture, I'm going to be no good no matter what I do. And so, I ran an experiment to treat engineering principles, software architecture, complex system design, and company building as the same thing. Effectively, we looked for the business equivalent of just turning off servers to see if the system has resiliency. For instance, we used to ask people to use their mouse on their non-dominant hand for a day. We introduced these little nudges to ensure that people didn’t become complacent.
