All Apologies

I had the great pleasure of attending the IGDA Leadership Forum in San Francisco a few weeks back. It was great. There was a lot of interesting and informative presentations about leadership in the game industry. Especially interesting to me were the presentations of Scott Crabtree, Marc Merrill and Laura Fryer.

Managing Your Team with Brain Science

Scott Crabtree is the only presenter ever that got me to put away my laptop AND iPhone for his entire presentation. He even scented his handouts with a nice orange smell so we’d remember that smell is important to learning. Unfortunately for me, I was asked before the presentation to smell the handout and as he apologized for the odd request, he explained that he was weird. So now I will associate that orange smell with “Scott Crabtree is weird” forever.

But that pre-presentation apology was just the beginning of what would be an hour of apologizing that his brain science ideas were basically not “manly” enough. While he never stated that exact phrase, anything that was “warm and fuzzy” in his presentation was prefaced as such. And yet, he had the scientific proof to back up the idea of wafting the smell of fresh baked cookies through the office when investors toured it to get more favorable results.

Creating a Culture of Awesome

Marc Merrill, President of Riot Games, spoke about his culture of awesome at Riot. It did indeed sound awesome, but he apologized several times for the idealism in his culture during his presentation. Awesome needs no apologies, my friend.

Fiat Lux

Bold, Smart Management

Laura Fryer, on the other hand, had no apologies for her straightforward, yet idealistic approach to management. She spoke of really personal struggles. Still, she made the case for leadership as a truly noble cause and she didn’t apologize for any of her values.

It’s People!!

Leadership means nothing without the people. A few days ago I was having a conversation about the Netflix Culture Deck with a mentor of mine. He also apologized for appreciating the idealism embodied in some of the values. He, whom I admire precisely because he cares so much about the people who work for him.

My frustrated response to his apology was, “It isn’t idealistic at all. It’s Human.”

Valuing things like social interaction, good judgement, honesty, commitment and even the smell of delicious baked goods are what makes us people. What is truly crazy is that by making the aforementioned values  ”ideals” imply a strange conception that people are interchangeable automatons and are stripped of all humanity in the work place. An organization is made of people, like soylent green.

So leaders, stop apologizing, embrace your humanity and lead as a human! It isn’t idealism.

Comment by Jerry
September 18th, 2008 at 9:34 am

When are conservatives going to wake up to the real threat that exists against freedom and liberty in this country. It is the enemy within that Lincoln feared. It is Liberal terrorists, their political arm the Democratic Party, their propaganda machine the mainstream media, and their shock troops in Hollywood. If we wait much longer to recognize and engage this enemy within they will take down the country via assaults on energy production and GNP producing businesses, redistribution of wealth to their ingnorant morally bankrupt voting base, and beating down our weak GOP leadership into irrelavancy. The only thing I haven’t figured out is why they want to destroy their own country unless it is so they can rebuild it into something akin to the communism they miss so dearly where they will be the priveleged elite. It took us 30 years to wake up to Jihadists, the country won’t survive 30 more years of liberal assaults.

http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/09/18/palins-e-mail-hacked/

First, I’m glad this Jerry fellow isn’t my dad. Talk about paranoid. Second, Democrats are not communists. And third, Jerry, I know this will come a great surprise to you in your black and white world view, there are more out there than Republicans and Democrats. I don’t think Anonymous would take kindly to be labeled as Democrats. My guess they are more likely anarchists.

Yes, there are people who want to bring communism to the United States. Those people are not Democrats. I’m sorry Jerry, but you don’t have the monopoly on Capitalism. Have you forgot you’re party has been in power the last 8 years, Jerry?  Its your party, the Republicans, that is “morally bankrupt”. Your party’s ruinous policies have got us to this point.  Democrats don’t want to destroy the country, they want to make it better. And by make it better, they mean for everyone, not just white males.

Jerry, your paranoia is the enemy within you — and within your party. Please open your eyes. You certainly don’t have to vote Democrat, Jerry, but you should at least acknowledge the hipocracy within your own party.

I think this is a very powerful statement:

Look, for example, at the great liberation movements that have served humanity so well — in eastern Europe, Latin America, and South Africa, among women, African Americans, and our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. What we see is simple but often ignored: the movements that transform us, our relations, and our world emerge from the lives of people who decided to care for their authentic selfhood.

The social systems in which these people must survive often force them to live in a way untrue to who they are. If you are poor, you are supposed to accept, with gratitude, half a loaf or less; if you are black, you are supposed to accept racism; if you are gay, you are supposed to pretend you are not. You and I may not know, but we can at least imagine, how tempting it would be to mask one’s truth in situations of this sort — because the system threatens punishment if one does not.

But in spite of that threat, or because of it, the people who plant the seeds of movements make a critical decision: they decided to live “divided no more.” They decide no longer to act on the outside in a way that contradicts some truth about themselves that they hold deeply on the inside. The decide to claim their authentic selfhood and act it out — and their decisions ripple out to transform the society in which they live, serving the selfhood of millions of others.

Now I Become Myself
Parker J. Palmer