 Paris, you probably remember the specific moment that you first spotted the Eiffel Tower. Maybe it was on the window of your plane, maybe like me, it was peeking over the buildings from the Jardin du Tuileries. But when you saw it, it probably gave you chills. Chills that said, I'm not here, I'm really in Paris. Even if you haven't been in Paris, you'd like to still recognize the Eiffel Tower immediately whenever you see it, in front of the film. It's the emblem of Paris and of France, and it's almost universally recognized. This summer I had the amazingly good fortune to find myself standing in front of the Eiffel Tower with my family. Now I'm not normally one to foist vacation photos on a room full of strangers, but this picture of my wife took my seven-year-old son as one of my favorite pictures in the whole world. We just finished a picnic on Chantumon, and my son pulled out his trip notebook, and he started to stench. You can see just how captivated he is by the tower, how hard he is working to capture it accurately. The Eiffel Tower does this to the poles you meant, makes you pay attention. Now I know a little bit of the history of the tower already, but as I sat there watching my son draw, I found myself thinking about the circumstances that brought the tower into existence. When it was completed in 1889, the Eiffel Tower, in a thousand feet tall, became the tallest structure in the world, almost doubling the height of the just-completed Washington line. And how did Gustave Eiffel build something so tall using late 1800s technology? Why build such an ostentatious state of peace in the first place? Well, to explain that, I have to tell you a little bit about French history, just a little bit of promise. This is Napoleon III. He is the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. He was elected as the President of France and the Republican government in 1848. But at the end of his four years, he decided that this whole Republican thing wasn't very convenient for him. He did not want to lose the job as President. So he threw himself a coup and decided to declare himself the Emperor, namely France and Empire again. Now, normally the French people, you would expect him to revolt and to react against this, but in the four years that Bonaparte had been the President of France, he had guided France into such a period of prosperity that the people just couldn't be bothered to bolt and decided that this might be okay. That prosperity however ended with the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Napoleon picked a fight with Prussia, one of the states of modern-day Germany to the north, to counter their growing influence and power in the region. He fell off a little bit more than he could chew, though, and he was captured in a massive defeat in the Battle of Sedan on September 4, 1870. You can see our friend Napoleon here handing over disordered commemoration after losing the battle. He was an embarrassment for him and an embarrassment for France. Now, after the capture of Napoleon, the French set up a new republican government, and its first job was to get the Prussians to go home, rather than annex them or the whole northern part of France. And to do that, the government had to pay massive reparations to the Prussian government that plunged France deep into debt. Prosperity was gone, and not only was France broke, but their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War was a huge blow to the collective French ego. By the early 1880s, about 10 years later, France was nearing the back on its feet, and it largely recovered from the defeat and successful reparations from the war. And the republican government enacted, after the end of the Poland and Third's empire, had held its own against plenty of challenges, and was gagging France back in prosperity. On top of that, the 30-year renovation of Paris by Georges Jean Hoselon, replacing narrow, medieval streets with these broad, tree-lined avenues, like most of us are familiar with, in Paris, was nearing completion. The Parisians were ready to show off. And what better way to do that than to put on another world's fair? Across the English Channel, Prince Albert, that was going to Britain's Queen Victoria, had the idea in 1851 to invite all the nations of the world to come to London and show off their industrial progress. Well, the French liked this idea so well that they threw another one four years later in 1855. And then again in 1867. And then again in 1878. This time eight years after Napoleon's defeat in the Battle of Sedan. The 1878 exposition was meant to mark the French recovery from the Franco-Prussian war, but the French were so embroiled in political turmoil that they didn't begin preparing for the exhibition until about six months before. Almost a bit of a shambles, didn't really do a good job of showing off France. And so, in the early 1880s, a movement to host yet another world's fair in Paris was picking up steam. An organizing committee was formed to start making preparations, and the first thing they did was to pick a date. And what better date than the 100th anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille? The Storming of the Bastille was the symbolic start of the French Revolution, the overthrow of the French monarchy. And it's still celebrated every year in France today as Bastille Day, much like we celebrate Independence Day here. Each of the exhibitions held in Paris have been more grandiose than last. And so, the committee also decided that they needed something really special, something to kick this exhibition up a notch. They announced a design competition to design and build a spectacular centerpiece monument for this exhibition. Well, this competition got the attention of these two gentlemen, Boris Foglian and Emile Lundier. Two structural engineers at La Compagnie des Entabes moment we fell. Now, the two of them had just finished working together on this, the Viguerbi Viaduct. At 407 feet above the Trier River below it, it was the highest bridge in the world when it opened in 1884. And they had the idea of using the same engineering principles to build a giant tower as a centerpiece for the exhibition. And so, they got to work. And this sketch by Coglian is what they came up with. You can see here on the margin on the right, there's a sketch of the Notre Dame, the sketch of Liberty, the Art de Triomphe. They were proposing to build a gargantuan tower 300 meters tall, 1,000 feet, the tallest structure in the world. Coglian and Lundier excitedly took the sketch to their boss to pitch the idea. And as you may have guessed from the company name, their boss was none other than Gustave Ithel. Ithel had been a bit lukewarm on this whole competition. His firm had just finished the Viguerbi Viaduct after all, and he was looking forward to a break, none other than a massive project. And on top of that, this country kept spending money on these grand exhibitions. They built all these beautiful buildings, spent a ton of money, and again, they just tear them all down. He felt like to build things of significance. He wanted to build things that would last. The design competition had a requirement that the centerpiece line would be easy to business them. And this was a complete non-starter free fell. Coglian and Lundier had hoped that the grandiose to their idea would be enough to change Ithel's mind and get him on their side, but it just wasn't enough. And so they got this guy involved, Steven Sovest. Sovest was he fellow's chief architect, and he immediately knew his boss's taste really well. And so he suggested several modifications to the design to make it more useful and as that would please him. If you look carefully at Coglian's drawing, you can see the modifications Sovest sketched in the pencil. There's a glass observation put in on the first day. At the very top, there's a couple containing another observation deck and capped by a French flag. In the final design, you can see the three observation decks as well as the lace-like decorative arches that were suggested by Sovest. Now this, this guy, he felt excited. This tower had a purpose. Keep good view of all of Paris from Heidz for easily reserved for balloonists. It would be possible to do weather observations and even make radio transmissions from such a high point. And so he bought the patent for the design from Coglian, Nubia and Sovest, and began the hard work of getting the design selected. The idea was immediately popular with the French fellow who loved the idea of working the just completed Washington line and investing in the abstract marines. It was not however immediately popular with the architects, artists, and most important politicians around Paris. And so it fell when on the offensive. This was his first writing on the subject and if any of you speak French I do apologize. The tour on the third was to a destination exposition that the suites sent, which roughly translates to 300 meter high iron tower for the 1889 exhibition. This particular copy was sold at auction in 2015 for just shy of $10,000 was autographed to General George Boulanger, a prominent politician who would want to be the French War Minister. But he felt was giving copies to literally anybody that would give him an audience. He also went before the société de l'ingénieuse civile, the Society of Civil Engineers to present his idea and scan for questioning. Oh, were they happy to watch? One of the fellow's chief critics was Paul Plenont, the founder and editor of the architectural journal on construction running. Plenont was not impressed with the fellow's design and felt it was counter to the hard work that Hoffsman had just done to beautify Paris in the great motivation. Specifically in the May 1st, 1886 issued his journal, he said, he felt's tower is nothing more than an inartistic scaffolding of crossbars and angled iron. It looks hideously unfinished. Pierre Girard, a powerful politician who would go on to become the French Prime Minister, decried it as anti-artistic, contrary to French genes. It's a project more in character with America where taste is not yet prevalent than Europe, much less France, but probably the most famous protest against the tower was led by this man, Charles Garnier, a prominent French architect. He formed the committee of the 300, one member for each meter of proposed height of the tower, and it was made up of some of the most prominent figures in the arts and architecture in Paris. Their protest, published from a prominent Parisian paper at home, said in part, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a giant black smokestack, crushing hundreds of barbaric boats, Notre-Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of Saint-Pierre, the Petrion, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly train. I mean, I had a flair for dramatic. But it was around this time that Edouard Le Croix was named Minister of Trade and put in charge of wrapping up the design competition. He had been one of those that he felt in lobby with his design, and despite the protests of the artist, he and the rest of the political class wiped the light he felt's design. He liked it so much that in calling for the final proposals, Le Croix amended the competition guidelines to call for a tower of at least 300 meters in height and suggested it might be built out of iron, from obvious minds without design. Now, some of the other entrance included a 300 meter tall lighthouse to display the light of Paris. It was built with granite, and it would have been far too heavy to ever build if that was the idea. A 300 meter tall water sprinkler, in case Paris ever punched into the deck in a drought so that they could water all of these beautiful gardens that Cossum had just installed in Paris. My favorite, a 300 meter tall guillotine, to honor the French Revolution. And after all of this, the 100th anniversary would go a better way to honor it. But in the end, he felt his design was the only one that was practical or even possible to build. And so on June 12, 1886, Le Croix gave an overjoyed he felt in news that his design had been selected. Joy was short-lived, however, as the government bought and he felt an estimate of six million francs, around one million US, for building a tower. The government had initially committed to fund the full tower for whoever won this competition, but they quickly backtracked their offer to 1.5 million francs, about a quarter of what he felt thought it was going to cost to get the tower built. And so he felt it was going to have to secure investors for the remaining four and a half million francs. And to do that, he needed to be able to make money from this tower. And so he requested two provisions from the French government. Number one, he requested that he be able to charge an admission over and above the cost that people were already paying to attend the exhibition. And second, he asked the tower to be allowed to stand for 20 years, not the one year it was originally slated to stand for. So he had time to make his money back. The government agreed in principle this, but this created another interesting problem. The exhibition was to be held in Chantemont on the 7th arrondissement, just south of the Senn River. The Chantemont was the French army's primary drilling ground. Now he felt that he proposed to put his thousand foot tower right here in the middle of the Chantemont. The army was already resigned to losing their drilling ground by the year that it would take to host the exhibition. This happened every time the French politicians got this while here in the second to do one of these things. But having a giant tower in the middle of their primary drilling ground for 19 years after the end of the exhibition, that just wouldn't do. And so after much negotiating it was agreed that the tower would instead be located here in the northwest portion of the Chantemont near the bank of the Senn, leaving most of the field open for military drilling once the rest of the exhibition was dismantled. Now he felt new that this would complicate the foundation, but he had little choice but to compromise if he wanted to get his tower built. French bureaucracy being what it was, it took six anxious months for the contract to be finalized and the funding put in place. But finally on January 8th, 1887, Eiffel had a signed contract with his company. He immediately began gathering supplies and hiring workers, and then on January 28th, 1887, Eiffel's workers began work on the foundation. They had a little over two years into the planned opening of the exhibition to get this tower built. Now I mentioned that moving the tower closer to the Senn complicated foundation work, and here's what I mean by that. Each leg of the tower rests on four six and a half foot thick slabs of concrete, one for each of the principal girders of those legs. The east and south legs of the tower rested on solid ground on the Chantemont side of the site. The west and north legs but were far more complicated because they were on the side of the site closest to the Senn, and the ground here was made of millions of years of sediment to possibly convert much much less stable. So for those two legs, each of the four slabs required two piles featuring 72 feet down to the ground at Bevar. Not only that, the six and a half foot foundations actually had to be poured below the water table of the Senn. You can't pour concrete when there's water. And so this is what he felt his team did to cope with that. You can see these giant iron structures. These are 50 by 20 foot cast iron casons. What they did is filled these with pressurized air and men would work in this pressurized environment digging out the soil, and the casons would slowly sink into the ground with pressurized air keeping water from infiltrating the construction site until they finally got it dug as they needed to be in and were able to pour the concrete foundations. It took a while, it was effective. Five months later, on June 30th, 1887, the foundations were finally finished. This is what the foundation for each of the four legs looked like, but I don't know if something, there were four sets of these foundations. Each foundation came with two bolts embedded into it to bolt the shoe of the primary girder. The bolts looked kind of small in this picture, but to give you context, each of those bolts is about four inches in diameter and 25 feet long. It's a pretty big. And as soon as the foundations were completely fells team immediately began the iron work. You can see here in this picture how the primary girder is attaching an angle to the foundations. And the reason for this is twofold. Number one, they were building on shaky ground and attaching an angle, let them spread the load out both vertically and horizontally. So it would push effectively at an angle instead of going straight down into this wet, soggy ground. But also, this was going to be the tallest thing anybody had ever built. And there was going to be tremendous wind acting on it a thousand feet near. I would ever built anything that had to stand up to the end a thousand feet near. And so the angle of the legs gave the tower more stability against that land. Work on the iron work progressed quickly in large part through the precision of the drawings produced by Eiffel's office. In all they made 1700 general drawings of the tower and further 3629 drawings of specific parts and pieces that they needed. Now give you an idea of how precise these drawings were. Each of the ribbed poles on these drawings were calculated down to the tenth of a millimeter. Each of the angles was calculated down to one second of arc, which is 136 hundredth of a degree. Incredibly precise. These precisely drawn parts were then forged and drilled in Eiffel's factory in Lofa-Waltere on the outskirts of Paris and then brought to the site via porous strong carriage and reported Woodland and his Model T for another few decades. Early 1888 they had reached a critical juncture in the first phase of construction because the rest of the tower would rise from the first platform. It was absolutely critical that the four legs of the tower would be level at the first platform. The tower was so tall that a few millimeters out of truth here could result in a difference of more than a foot at the top of the tower. In the judge's plan for dealing with this was actually brilliant genius. You can't see it in this picture. They built these legs at a slightly steeper angle than they needed to be, a centimeter, to very slightly steeper. And the legs of the tower aren't actually resting on the scaffolding, but we can't see it, but there's actually a set of sandboxes between the scaffolding and the ironwork. And the reason they did this was to allow for millimeter precise adjustments of the angle of those legs. When I wanted to adjust the leg they would take the cork out of the bottom of the sandbox, let some sand run out until it lowered enough, and put the cork back in. And they repeated this process over and over again until they got all four legs of the tower exactly where they wanted them perfectly level. Once they did that, all they had to do was join them together with the platform to lock them in place. And so on March 20th, 1888, the first and most complicated portion of the tower was completed. They still had 800 feet to go though. And only a year to do it. Another problem that, excuse me, another problem they faced is as they built up from the first level, it became increasingly complicated to get the parts they needed up to where they were actually doing the work. That's all of this. They used the first platform in the tower as a staging area. A large steam crank, again internal combustion engines would have come into common use for a few decades. Large steam crank would lift parts from the ground up to the first level. On the first level they had built a small railroad to move these heavy iron parts around to the actual girder of the tower they would go up. And then on each girder of the tower mounted to the elevator tracks was a smaller steam crank, which you can see one in the picture here. These cranes would move up the towers as it was built and they would pick the parts up from the first level platform up to the area where the word was actually taking place and parts were being attached to the tower. By July the tower was complete up to the second model. And if you look at the background here you can start to see some other buildings for the exhibition starting to take place, starting to take form. The exhibition was stated to start, slated to start in eight months and they still had six hundred feet to go eight months one way to go. Another issue we felt the team had to solve was how to rivet pieces together so far off the ground. The Eiffel Tower was assembled almost entirely by riveting. The prefabricated parts were brought to the tower, hauled up, put into place, and tested it. And once the crew were certainly had the assembly right they would begin the tedious process of driving rivets through all of the precisely aligned holes. The problem is that before driving the rivets they had to be heated up to red hot. Now the way this would be normally handled on a construction site in the 1800s is there would be a forge somewhere on site and there would be a rivet buoy that would run with a tent pale full of red hot rivets to wherever construction was taking place. Well if they tried to do that here the rivets would be cold by the time they got them on the tower. And so instead they used portable forges. And you can see the worker using one here in the foreground. This worker in the foreground is heating up the rivets. And if you've never seen a rivet it's essentially a screw with no threads. It's got a head on one end and it's just a straight steel or iron shaft. So he's it up to red hot and they insert it through the two pieces to be joined. Kind of the back is holding the rivet by the head. Now in the front there's a worker on the left here who's holding a tool to shape another kind of rivet and a worker hitting that tool with a hammer. And the two of them together shape the head on the other side of the rivet. The beauty of this process is that as this red hot rivet cools it expands and it creates an incredibly tight joint in the two pieces that it's joining together. Problem is they had to do this two and a half million times because there are two and a half million rivets holding the actual tower together. At the peak of construction there were 24 man crews just like this one working all over the tower. And these little portable forges would go with them all the way to the very top of the tower a thousand feet in here. With all the really complicated stuff behind them other than just sheer height the top part of the tower actually went up quite smoothly. They ended about a hundred feet each month until they topped the tower on March 15, 1889. When the tower was structurally complete and well ahead of the exposition's opening he felt marked the occasion by inviting 15 reporters and Parisian dignitaries to scale the 1,710 steps at the top of the tower to raise the French flag up top. He felt, you can see in the center here, said to a remark at the time, gentlemen, the French flag is the only flag in the world with a 300 meter tall flag home. The reason they had to climb the stairs is because the elevators were not yet ready. This might have had something to do with fact that the most complex passenger elevators ever built. I don't have time to get into it right now but if you want to hear more about that ask me later it's a fascinating story. Despite the fact that the first 30,000 visitors to the tower including Missouri fell here on the left hand to climb 1700 steps to get to the top, the tower was a huge success. He fell was figuratively and literally on top of the world. When it was completed in 1889 the Eiffel Tower at 1,063 feet tall was the tallest structure on earth, more than 500 feet taller than the previous record of the Luscious Mine. That's approximately equal to an 81 story building. The Eiffel Tower would actually hold this record until the talking out of the Chrysler building in New York 41 years later. No structure built after the Eiffel Tower has held that record for longer. It's a remarkable achievement that broke all kinds of new ground and it's the kind of work that we all say we want to be doing right? We want to push the envelope, solve hard problems that no one else has solved, ship amazing software. So what can you learn from Gustave Fell to help us do that? We'll start and ask for the audience participation. I want to try something. I'm going to word up on the screen and I want you without thinking about it to give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down to show your general feelings about the subject. All right everybody, your show's ready? All right here's your word. Lots of thumbs down, a few thumbs up, lots of thumbs down, exactly what I would expect. And I'm glad too because I don't know what we're going to do with the rest of our time together if you all have been like, yeah I love politics, it's my favorite. Most of us would prefer just to keep our heads down in ship code, right? A study published in the Wall Street Journal back in 2011 asked participants about their approach to office politics, giving them these three options. It's best to know what's going on but not to participate directly. Number two, it's best to stay off office politics completely. Or number three, it's best to participate so you can get ahead. Now how do you think people answer? Well between the group that wanted to stay informed but not participate and the group that stayed out of politics altogether, fully 83% of participants picked hands were saying they did not participate in office politics. If you're not alone, I bet some of you have even left jobs because our companies are too political. Now I have but here's the thing, and it took me way too long to come to terms with this. Every organization, you can't escape politics by just moving around enough until you find the right boss or the right company. And the reason for that is that anytime you have more than one person working on something together, you'll have politics. Because politics is nothing more than how humans share power and make decisions together. That means that doing anything meaningful in your company, whether it's as simple as getting to work on something you want to work on, or as complex as completely overhauling your hiring practices to increase diversity of representation, requires you to understand and participate in the politics of your company. I know, thanks Nick. What an uplifting and positive message to end our day on. Let's say with me, politics doesn't have to be negative and gross. There's a couple things he felt does that gives us a great example to follow and how to do politics the right way. Let's rewind back to the work he felt did before the tower was built. Remember this paper that he felt put together to promote his plan for the tower? He went around from official to official, handing out autographed copies and talking about what he wanted to build. What he felt was doing here was actually pretty simple. He was just networking and doing a bit of self-promotion. Now again, how many love networking and self-promotion? These are some of my favorite things too. But they're kind of like politics. They get a bit of a bad rap that they don't entirely deserve. So let me reframe them for you. Networking and self-promotion is really nothing more than making friends and telling stories. Thought is a little less intimidating, right? But that's all he felt was different. He would invite somebody out for lunch or more likely to spend it after an on a terrace of a Parisian cafe polishing off a ball of wine together. And he'd tell stories. He'd regale them with tales of building the Gary Goodfine Act. He might even tell them that when a train passed the bridge was displaced by precisely eight millimeters exactly as his mathematical models have predicted before construction ever started. Cool story. Then he'd show them the final drawing of the tower and maybe talk about how amazing it would be when a tower on French soil passed the height of the great obelisk of the Americans had been working on often on for 40 years. He'd listen to their stories too. And by the end of the conversation he'd made a friend. Now importantly he didn't just do this with people on the Exposition Committee. The fact that this document is autographed in George Belanger tells us that Belanger was in the government and he'd go on to be war minister but he had absolutely nothing to do with the Exposition Committee. He had no decision-making power whatsoever in this design competition. That's what Networking is all about. It's just making friends. Maybe you'll be in position to help each other at some point but that's not the immediate focus. So what does that mean for you? Well maybe you should grab coffee with your product manager. So they're human to you not just somebody who drops things in the top of your backlog and asks for ridiculous unrealistic dates. Maybe you should get lunch with somebody in sales because they're the ones hearing the questions your customers are asking and they have no clue how you do what you do. They would love to hear. The second part self-promotion is about making sure others know what you've been working on and telling stories. Not a braggy way. In an informative way. Now in a perfect world doing good work would be enough but we don't work in a perfect world. Your manager isn't paying nearly as much attention to you as you think they are. So you have to tell them what you've been up to. You have to show them the work that you've been doing. Show them what you've been working on and what you've accomplished is a big part of how you build your reputation at work. With your manager and with other folks elsewhere in the organizations you work in. If you want a promotion or you want to build more influence so you can affect big changes this is a big part of how you do it building this influence. If you want something to help you do this more effectively I can't recommend Dale Carnegie's classic how one friends influence people highly enough. It's full of timeless advice on how to do this well and in a productive and non-scummy way that benefits you and the person you're talking to. For the other thing Eiffel has to see just let's go back to the contract he signed on January 28, 1887. Now if you'll remember the French government had initially proposed to cover the entire cost of the tower but last month they bought and only agreed to cover a quarter of the cost. Now at this point it would have been really easy for Eiffel to play hardball and demand the government live up to his original proposal or he would walk away. Remember he didn't really want to build this tower in the first place he had to be talking to him. But that's not what he did. Instead he did a bit of negotiation. Again another one of our favorite words this probably makes you think goodbye and you just fire and try not to get screwed. So let me refrain it too. Good negotiation is really all about cooperation. Working together to find an outcome that works for everyone. Now Eiffel understood the French government's position and he had empathy for the government representatives he was talking to. Putting on an exposition is expensive and they frankly didn't have the six million frogs together. So instead of walking away he worked with them to find the way to satisfy his need for six million frogs and there he did not give them six million frogs and only gave them a million and a half instead. And he found that mutually beneficial solution in being able to charge admission for 20 years. As inside that turned out to be phenomenal deal for Eiffel. An amazing 1.8 million people ascended the tower during the exhibition paying on average three francs a piece for the privilege of doing so. So the tower had more than paid for itself by the end of the exhibition and he had another 19 years to profit from it. Now when we're fighting for something we want there's a temptation to see that process as a zero sum game. Someone has to lend and someone has to lose. Eiffel needed six million francs to build the tower so it was that or busts. Your executive team wants a piece of functionality delivered by an absurd impossible date so you need to tell them in no uncertain terms that there's no way your team can do that. In reality there's almost always a middle ground where everyone gets most of what they want. Trick is figuring out what it actually is that everyone in the situation wants and why they want it. That's often not obvious. It requires you to exercise empathy and compassion and to ask deep probing and opening up questions let you build understanding. So when your executive team starts pushing for that unrealistic date try to understand why. Look to see if there's a smaller piece of it that you can deliver early that will meet whatever needs driving that push. If you want to learn to do this well grab cocky and herb calling classic you can negotiate anything. Now the title's a little cheesy but this book changed the course of my career when one of my mentors recommended it to me years ago. Cullen teaches a style of negotiation that revolves around understanding everyone's needs especially your elements one of the hardest parts and getting to agree that by finding mutually beneficial ways to fulfill them. But what about that politics? Are there organizations and bosses that are overly political? Absolutely there are. And if you find yourself in an organization that regularly promotes those that play games and those that do good work you might need to leave. Or if you find yourself working for a boss that always takes credit for your good work there might not be enough networking and self-promotion for you to get around that. But if Gustave Felt didn't find the French government too potable to navigate and negotiate life there's a good chance that far as higher than you think it is and you just need to push against There's another way we should consider here as well. Everything I've shared so far has been for us as individual contributors as developers but some of us in this room are managers or team leads. What does this have to do with how we lead our teams? Well a conventional listen around organizational politics for tuned in leaders who care about their teams is this. Now I try not to use profanity on stage but this is such a common term in our industry that I'm not sure saying shit umbrella even counts as saying about word. But that's the common wisdom around politics and leadership. You might have to engage in organizational politics to get your job done but you should shield your teams from politics which Jason Freefield bullshit here so they can keep their heads down and stay productive. Now there is some truth to this constant disruption getting jerked around from priority to priority are counterproductive through your team and helping them stay heads down and writing code eight hours a day is going to feel really productive to them and you too but the full reality is actually more than once. The downside of being in a previous show is that you become a choke point of information for your team. Over time you'll disconnect your team from the mission of your organization entirely and since we know that a sense of purpose is an important motivator for most humans that disconnection quickly leads to dissatisfaction and even leading the company. On top of that you're not designed to bear that load but putting yourself in that spot as a leader is all that guaranteed to burn you out. So what should we do instead? Well one of the engineers on my team Steve Rigard introduced me to an analogy that I like a lot better than he shield. We get the term heat shield from the world of space travel on horrible reentry. Unlike an umbrella a heat shield is not designed to be impervious. An umbrella blocks all the rain that hits it but heat shield blocks just enough heat to make reentry survivable. That's it. It's a carefully calculated compromise. If it blocked all heat the spacecraft would be too heavy to reach orbit in the first place. Not enough and reentry is not survival. The craft burns up on the way back in. If you lead a team this carefully crafted balance is your job. You need to block enough organizational noise so that your team has consistent direction and big blocks of time work but not so much that they lose context and connection. All the noise might make them feel more comfortable but it will ultimately keep them from delivering the value that they're capable of. It also stunned their career growth because as I said earlier, I lost my slide, that I said earlier all organizations are political. If the folks on your team are never exposed to organizational politics they'll never learn how to deal with organizational politics. They'll never learn how to be as effective as they can by working the patterns of powering the organization. So what happened to the Eiffel Tower? It's obviously still here. Well at the end of the 20 years it fell a good promise. The tower was too much a part of Paris's global identity to do anything but leave it right where it should. The Eiffel Tower is still standing 129 years later and while it hasn't been the tallest structure on the planet for a while it remains the most visited paid monument in the world with nearly seven million visitors every year waiting in line for hours to take on the breathtaking views of Paris and Paris. Had you felt not been willing to participate in the politics involved? You wouldn't have the Eiffel Tower. The same is true for you. You can choose to keep your head down and hop from job to job every time you go with the politics. That's a valid choice but doing that is eventually going to stunt your career. Even if you want to stay on the individual contributor track and become a senior technical contributor in your organization you'll need to understand politics to develop the influence that you need to drive technical decisions. If instead of running you accept that politics is a reality neither good nor bad in and of itself and you want to participate in organizational politics in a way that remains true to you and of the things that you value you can find ways to have a huge impact in your organization and maybe even more. If you're a leader you can help your teams have the same impact by helping them with how to navigate politics as well. They seem intimidating but you can do it. I know you can. Good luck. Marty's talk with Katrina's also talking about this idea of trade-offs and solutions not necessarily being like right or wrong without politics. It's interesting I think as you're hitting here at the end what are the patterns I'm going to presume you've observed this over the last 10 or 15 years also is that there are friends in the industry who kind of came up in what I would call our generation and got into this world in 2003 5, 7, 9 and now after 10 or 12 or 15 years have done have been at several places have been around two years here one year there two years there and you see in the end typically a dissatisfaction. I think there is a danger for people as they amass good of experience and get maybe a little bit of reputation then out and all of a sudden everyone wants to be your friend every company wants to hire you for you specifically if we're like oh no get up it's over we need a new job for me right tomorrow possibly by next Friday we would have a great job right where we find out we find a job yeah you know even a person like you um but how do you know how do you know when it's time or when the like the situation is such that I can't or shouldn't do it like if I take the message of get in like play the game fight the battle make the change how do I split between or how do I differentiate between the situation that's worth it and the situation that's not it's a great question and it was a very long long question yeah okay you're good it's a good one and it's it's difficult to know and I think those signals are different for everybody this is good yeah because I can turn that off why don't I do that it is a little flashy now we use the touch bar for something let me do that very often that was cool so I think I think the signal is different for everybody for me one of things I've always looked for about when is it time for me to go is do I feel like I've learned everything that I can learn here in this position everything or like 95 percent that's 95 percent yeah enough that I'm hitting the point of dimension returns there's not much left that I'm going to learn the position I'm in and I don't have a great roadmap to get to the next position to stretch myself even further as a leader the thing I look for is when it gets to the point that I can no longer be an effective heat shield I can no longer make a positive difference in the organization and create an environment for the team that I'm leaving can thrive that's another sign for me that it's it's time for me to go the challenge there is is not trying to be a hero because you can't do the thing where you become the showman you take on the organizational mode when you try to block everything and make the same environment for people working for you even when you're dealing with all sorts of things over your head and I put myself in that position several times in my career and every time I've done it it's like burnout which is what I didn't have section to talk about why like why is burnout just uh is burnout fatigue or like what makes what's the difference between like working hard and getting burned out emotionally trying putting getting so much of yourself to your job that you have nothing left to give to things outside of work so when I noticed that my job I mean everybody's job that has like goes in ways right so there's going to be peaks where your work life is going to spill over into your family life or your life with your friends or whatever there's going to be times if that happens but if you get to the point where you're hitting an asymptote and you're you're right at the top of the graph and you're almost on a stressed out wreck and taking your frustrated sound your family and what not that's when you're hitting burnout you fit your max capacity you don't have anyone loading one of the things that's really interesting to me in a company that's grown from one or two or three to now like 32 is to see that the organization can change out from under you in a way right that there are is is it your experience that there are people that are suited to a small uncertain fast moving thing and uh better suited to a slightly slower but like safer large thing and how do I figure out what kind of person I am I don't know what kind of person are you Jeff let's see a question so I've been looking for all kinds of tips um I don't know I in some ways I think it's unfair to call a large safe because inevitably in a large organization Microsoft I just can't acquire you anytime absolutely no in a large organization it does take it takes more work to get anything in time because there's inertia that you have to become there's politics that you have to deal with and people have varying capacities and appetites for dealing with that stuff like I I like that get help on the things I've enjoyed so far as shipping software the scale of you to ship software but we don't generally get to do that in a small company so you have to pick the set of trade-offs that are right for you at that point in your career it's gonna vary over the course of your career it's not it's not a static answer for anybody I've done plenty of time in startups too and I love inventing the entire company out of thin air and you know I also love having a legal team to go to when I have a question to ask and not having this round round and pay how they do that how do you know when you have been in those leadership positions when how do you recognize when you are the uh the fire cannon for the shadows like that now other people have to defend against like how do you or how do you try and avoid being I'll go fire fire fire how do you avoid being the fire cannons of other people's huge shield you have to build enough report and uh relationships people that they'll tell you you have to have checks and friendly relationships in the organization where when you do get to that point when you are being overbearing they will give you some corrective guidance and help you steer back the same thing when you're starting to get frustrated and you're starting to tune out you need the signal then at the same the same way so I'm gonna tell you hey you're I can tell you're getting tired here maybe you should take a few days I think though those are opposite sides of the same fluctuation I don't have a better answer than that at the end I think a warning sign for me is when uh people don't hear you when like the words you say are like listen to but not heard yeah and that's that shows me that there's like a there's a disconnect right of the reality you perceive the reality you perceive not saying that like yours is worse and theirs is better or theirs is worse and yours is better or whatever but when that's like a sign of the of the relationship getting stretched and I think to your point about like Dale Carnegie and all these kinds of things when we when I talk to people about getting jobs being jobs I think is like Marty said there's a lot of similarities to parenthood there's similarities to like partnerships and dating and all those that you know I was just talking with somebody who has a job and they want a new one and I said like don't quit the one you've got more like nobody wants to date a single person but when you've got somebody you're like hey you must be have decent if someone is willing to talk to you right um so take away tip for you don't quit your job until you have a new one and the bad side there you're like what if they find out I'm trying to get a new job you wouldn't quit anything so um I can't remember how I got that it's the same it's the same patterns right it's the same patterns that aim for like effective life partnerships and I need for effective work partnerships right and I think that's uh I think you made a good point of that doesn't always feel comfortable like why should I have to do this right you know but that was me for a long time I I lived the first decade of my career like thinking politics was toxic and I needed to find an organization that wasn't political I'm finally happy when I found that organization and my career changed dramatically when I figured out that there was no such thing the way it comes up for us with with teaching people is like I didn't come in for this I came to code you know like okay that'll get you through several of your first days of the job and then as soon as like some decisions have to be made there's more to it like it is rare um you know we're talking about feedback this morning so hopefully it is rare that there are my answers and so it is most often in case of there are discussions and leading to agreements compromises collaborations so well it feels unfair that your voice doesn't get heard for free it feels bad to have to do that work to get your voice heard but that's a thing that you have to do you have to build that great building also like the engineer's policy right of like if you build a good thing everyone will recognize if you build a good thing customers will just come and maybe if you will find out one time you will band together with some of your friends and be like we can do this and then you'll build a thing and you'll be like oh shit no one cares turns out I should have done a copy with that sales person maybe like I could learn how to do this right but you have to talk to customers and find those things out before I write millions of lines of code yeah yeah or I mean I hope this doesn't get too personal but building like a medical record system and then getting to the point where it turns out the people in the medical offices would rather use paper than the system that the company built you know and it's like damn there was a big miss in here that wasn't next but four weeks okay let me try to clean the mess up questions hi uh nick here um this maybe a silly question I've always heard it referred to as the Eiffel Tower is it really the Eiffel Tower nope it is the Eiffel Tower in in English but the man who built it is Gustav Eiffel some American imperialism yeah they're like willing to use the correct name uh I'm Ellen um my first question so you don't speak French no okay it's not really legit to me so Katrina how was it you're the judge you actually speak French I'll take I'll take that as a compliment from Katrina uh well good job thank you my real question is can you talk more about the shit umbrella that you refer to and like how much as a employee should you be able to expect or should you push for from your manager in terms of like transparency and then is there ever like a line as a manager that like sharing too much um or like sharing too much that's unproductive in a way yeah no absolutely there's definitely a line where you're moving beyond a helpful amount of information and into a randomizing amount of information so the feedback that comes from as a manager the feedback that comes from over your head in an organization will often go back and forth it's just like the thought processes that happen in your brain as your brain tries to make a decision you'll lean one way then you'll lead another direction then you'll lean another direction and finally a decision will come to be made well if I as a manager am passing on all of these vacillations back and forth my team is going to change directions every time I share one of those and so doing that in a heat shieldy way is letting them know that this conversation is happening and that the organization is trying to make a decision we don't have one yet but these are the two directions that you can kind of start thinking to be prepared for what we might do next doing it in a shut down by the way is to not say anything until the decision is made and just completely block that information because you want the people as a leader you want the people on your team to be thinking about those things you want them to be thinking about what's next before you get there now as someone who's wanting to give feedback to a manager you should make sure that you're hearing things that are going on in the broader organization and if you're not you should just ask general broad questions about so what's going on over your head what what are the things that the organization is considering right now another really effective technique that i personally as a manager really enjoy is when one of my one of the people on my team comes to me and says here's what i'm seeing and here's my read on this situation how accurate am i and that that's always really fun for me because sometimes they've seen things in spotted patterns that i haven't even put together yet one of my uh or like two two questions i use for myself to figure out like what do you umbrella what do you shield and what do you pass through are how directly does it affect you as as the person on my team like are you directly affected and can you directly affect it and because if you are not affected and you can't affect it then i'm just sharing my anxieties with you right and that does you no good it like inhibits your ability to do other work if you're affected but you can't affect it then i have to decide like what's the degree of risk and you're probably better off still not knowing about it does that make sense like uh if it's gonna it's gonna hurt or it's gonna change your work but you can't do anything about it then there's really no point it's it's like to me a little bit of weakness to say like oh have some of my problems you can't do anything about it but if you can do something about it then to be more closer to a transparent or or like some past degree of pass through so that you can start thinking about and really i think your point was really important there about being under the shit umbrella can be comforting in that i get to just do the thing i signed up for but long term it is like stunting your growth right because if you want to be uh like i know you're going to be like many people's boss someday so uh but like if you're just shielded from all that all the time it's not allowing you to grow those muscles right to get back to like kivi you can't just like snap in to high performance in a thing if those skills have like atrophied or never developed in the first place right so by letting people bear some of that load when appropriate it's essentially like training you on ramping you to then be the next team lead yeah thank you very much for your talk by the way your friend was perfect i speak french i have two questions the first one um one thing that really resonated with me from your talk is how much pushback he got like when those 300 people like made a commission and all and i wonder if you could talk a bit to that and what are the parallels in our world like when you do something that is really different or that really challenges the status quo maybe the amount of pushback that you get is a sign that you're on to something and if the current like structural structures we have in our organizations actually allow for people to take on this kind of projects um yeah and actually those were the two questions because i think like it was beautiful that you shared the drawing that your son did and how sometimes this kind of new projects or like really meaningful creations can resonate with people from around the world and how we can learn from young people to recognize the beauty of that um so yeah i that's the part that really made me question is like are we pushing the envelope not only terms of teaming with organizations politics but also in terms of things we do and how big we think thanks that's a great question i think one of the things you have to keep in mind is that as humans we are generally wired to be afraid of change in general of any kind we don't like change and we haven't been working in organizations very long as as a species we have been banding together in businesses and doing things together for very long and so organizations take on some of the same thought patterns that happen inside our heads so organizations generally are built to be afraid of change as well um so no matter what you're proposing you're going to get some pushback um i think you're right that you can sometimes judge how interesting an idea if you're onto something by how much pushback you get uh other times you can judge that you're really not on something and that pursuing that path is really not good and there's not an easy way to know that i think it's a matter of knowing the people that are giving feedback to you having trusted people that can hear your ideas and tell you when you're onto something and when you probably you're not onto something and should probably not pursue something um if you're in a spot on a organization where you can trust your leaders they can give very good feedback on that because they're they've often been there longer than you have to understand the cultural patterns of your organization in ways that you don't understand yet so they can tell you oh yeah we we tried something like that three years before you joined and here's how it happened and it didn't go very well here's why we didn't keep doing it it might be worth trying again but you should you should make it different in this way or this way so i think it's it's a lot about just finding trusted people to let those ideas with you talk about deal Carnegie and so forth i think people can take very shallow synopses of some of those ideas right of like oh if i say people's name a lot they'll like me and so forth and that's somewhat true but as you're saying here understanding someone else's burden is an exceptional way to like build fraternity collaboration with them right and when you can come to your boss and it's like here's this thing i'm noticing as you said or i'm wondering about this thing like is this a problem you know is this a problem we've been dealing with for three years or have we ever tried to attack this problem all suddenly uh someone willing to like bear some of my low bear a little bit of my anxiety in a collaborative contributing way i'm more than happy to like welcome you in you know i've been thinking of everything i could possibly do or everything we might be ready to do or able to do or have the resources to do if you're willing to help brainstorm on this problem like let's go you know and congratulations you're now in charge of whatever i think is something hi i'm dj thanks for the talk um i don't have a question i would like to hear your comments on compromise in software something i've seen this kind of thing you happen a lot in my organization the biggest difference is that the thing that we end up building would not last 120 years because that is a compromise we often have to develop is we got to do this fast we can't do it to the quality and what we're going to be like so how do you think that that like compromise happens in a good way so one of these days i'm going to do a talk about economics aimed at exactly this because i think ultimately it's an economic question you have to understand that when when a company hires one of us as a software engineer they're they are hiring us but they're also paying our salary for software that we will build for them so they're in essence buying some kind of product and the company has to decide what it wants to get out of its investment does it need software that's going to last 129 years probably not does it need software that we're going to outgrow in six months maybe if it's an nvp that we're just going to put in front of customers to see if we'll even buy the thing sure as long as we have the agreement up front that okay once we prove this out of video this is the thing that we actually want to do we're going to rebuild this the right way and not throw it together real quick just as a growth time so i think ultimately it's a question of how long does it need to last how resilient does it need to be what number of users does it need to support now six months a year from now beyond that you're getting a crystal ball territory really can't figure that out anyway one of the things saying that says in practical object oriented design and ruby is that you should focus on making your software easy to change because that one that will make it more robust over time because as you learn things as you get feedback from customers as you understand more about how resilient it needs to be you'll have ways to mold and modify the software that'll make it fit the purpose you needed to fit that point that you didn't know when you started building hypothesis uh party was talking about the difference between like junior to mid-level and senior level legal about hypothesis that um moving from junior to mid is when you can start to anticipate and correctly predict the ways that the technical problem will change and from mid to senior is when you can anticipate the way the business problem will change right in the like domain of what everything you're trying to do and to your point here right like we have to build a lot of strength walls before we build monuments you know and I think in a danger in a way like as you as we're saying the same challenges of hopping team to team or company to company or whatnot it's also easy to get to a spot where you're like I have five years of experience Marty told me once I'm in the top half of experience in the industry and so I'm entitled to certain things right and in most industries if you go like I have five years experience they're like oh you're like an intern that's cool I think we can get confused by the fact that five years in maybe I get paid $130,000 or whatever means I'm fancy right it's like ah you haven't really proven that much even if some potentially ill-advised people will throw you a lot of money well and the other the other thing about that is the average tenure of a software developer in an organization is 18 months right now so most of us have 18 month chunks of experience maintaining any given system we don't have a long longitudinal experience running something for five years in wrestling with the system watching them all over time and so in some ways because we move around so often we're losing that expertise as an industry and I don't know how to solve that problem I see the effects of it but I don't know how to solve it statement ten years ten years is probably too much yeah I think the right amount of time is like around four five six somewhere it's like you probably have learned a lot of the things that they're all talking about like you're closing in that 80-85% which you can get out of it and then it's interesting the people the only people I know who have been at a software company doing a software job for more than 10 years are scared to leave because they don't think anybody will want them yeah it's like I only know right it's interesting thank you Nick yeah thanks for having me