 Well, good afternoon, everybody. Here we are, the end of RubyConf. You have made it. Congratulations. Thank you so much for choosing to end your conference with me. I am honored that you are here. My name is Nicholas Means. I am a senior engineering manager recently joined GitHub. That is my personal OctaCat. I have stickers if anybody would like one. If you've gotten a vulnerable dependency alert on any of your GitHub repos, that's the work that my team does. If you have thoughts on those features and functions, come talk to me. I'd love to hear your thoughts. If you're looking for a job, I've got a spot open for an engineering manager on one of my teams. And it would be great for somebody who's just getting into engineering management or somebody who wants to move from writing code to working with people. So if that's you, come talk to me. If it's not you, we have a bunch of other stuff open too. I'd be happy to point you in the right direction. I also co-host a bi-weekly podcast on engineering leadership with Brandon Hayes, the guy who talked right before me. We also have another co-host, Travis Swicegood. I learned something from every single conversation. It feels like peer mentoring more than recording a podcast. If you listen to it, it's like being a fly on the wall for one of our conversations. It's a lot of fun. And you can check it out wherever you get your podcasts. And with all that out of the way, if you know me, I've always got a story to tell, and today is no different. So let's get going. If you've ever been to Paris, you probably remember the moment that you first spotted the Eiffel Tower. Maybe it was out the window of your plane. Maybe, like me, it was from the Jardin de Tullery, peeking up over the buildings. Regardless when you saw it, it probably gave you chills that said, I'm really here. I'm really in Paris. Even if you've never been to Paris, you likely still recognize the Eiffel Tower immediately, whenever you see it in print or in film. It's the emblem of Paris and of France. And it's almost universally recognized. Well, 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 my wife took of my then seven-year-old son Holden is one of my favorite pictures in the whole world. We had just finished a picnic on the Champ de Mars right in front of the Eiffel Tower. And my son pulled out his trip notebook. And he started to sketch the Eiffel Tower. This is actually the fourth sketch of the Eiffel Tower he did, because he really wanted to get it right. You can see how captivated he is by the tower, how hard he's working to capture it accurately. He's so focused. The Eiffel Tower does this to you. It pulls you in, makes you pay attention. Now, I knew a little bit of the history of the Eiffel Tower already, but as I sat there watching my son draw, I found my mind wondering to the circumstances that brought the Eiffel Tower into existence. When it was completed in 1889, the Eiffel Tower at just over 1,000 feet tall became the tallest structure in the world by almost doubling the height of the Washington Monument, which had just been completed. How did Gustave Eiffel build something so tall using late 1800s technology? Why build such an ostentatious statement piece in the first place? Well, to understand that, we have to know a little bit about French history. Just a little bit, I promise. This is Napoleon III, not the famous Napoleon, but his nephew. He was elected as the President of France in 1848. And at the end of his four-year term, like his uncle before him, he decided that he wasn't ready to go. And so he threw a coup for himself and declared himself the emperor. Now, the French people weren't thrilled about being under an emperor again. They really wanted to be part of a republic. But he led France into such a period of prosperity that they just couldn't be bothered to revolt and overthrow him. That prosperity ended with the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. Napoleon picked a fight with Prussia, part of modern-day Germany, over the growing power and influence that they were gathering in the region. But he bit off more than he could chew. And he was captured in a massive defeat at the Battle of Sedan on September 4th, 1870. You can see our friend Napoleon III here handing over his sword after losing the battle. It was an embarrassment for him and an embarrassment for France. After the capture of Napoleon, the French set up a new republican government. And this new government's first job was to get the Prussians to go home rather than annex all of northern France. And to do that, they had to pay huge reparations that plunged France deep into debt. Prosperity was gone. And now, not only were they broke, but their defeat in the Franco-Prussian war was a huge blow to the collective French ego. Well, fast forward 10 years to the early 1880s. France was nearly back on its feet. It had paid its reparations and had largely recovered. And the republican government enacted at the end of Napoleon III's empire had held its own against a variety of challengers and was guiding France back into prosperity. The 30-year renovation of Paris by Georges-Rugine Haussmann had just been finished, replacing narrow, medieval streets with broad tree-lined avenues like this one that bears his name. Paris was ready to show off. And what better way to do that than to host another world's fair? Prince Albert, the husband of Britain's queen Victoria, had the idea in 1851 to invite all of the nations of the world to come to London and to show off their industrial progress. The French liked this idea so much, they hosted one of their own four years later in 1855. And then again in 1867. And then again in 1878. Eight years after Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Sedan. Now the 1878 exposition was really meant to mark the French recovery from the Franco-Prussian War. But the French were so embroiled in political turmoil trying to get the republican government to stick that they really didn't begin preparing an earnest for this exhibition until about six months before. So it was a bit of a shambles. You can't really throw a world's fair in six months. And so in the early 1880s, a movement to host yet another world's fair in France was picking up steam. An organizing committee was formed to start making preparations. First thing they did was to pick a date. And what better date than the hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille? The storming of the Bastille is the symbolic start of the French Revolution to overthrow the monarchy. It's celebrated as Bastille Day in France, much like Independence Day in America. It's the same sort of holiday. Now each of the exhibitions held in Paris had been more grandiose than the last. So the committee also announced a competition to design and build a spectacular centerpiece for the fair. Now that competition got the attention of these two gentlemen, Maurice Cochaline and Emile Nouguier, two structural engineers at la compagnie de Tables-Montiffel. The two of them had just finished working together on the beautiful Garabit Viaduct. At 407 feet above the Trier River below it, it was the highest bridge in the world when it opened in 1884. They had the idea of using the same engineering principles to build a giant tower as the centerpiece for the exhibition. So they got to work. And this sketch by Maurice Cochaline is what they came up with. You can see the sketches in the margin of a few famous objects on the right to kind of show the scale here. There's Notre Dame at the bottom, the Statue of Liberty above it, and the Arc de Triomphe a little higher up. They were proposing to build a tower 300 meters tall, 1,000 feet, the tallest structure in the world. Cochaline and Nouguier excitedly took their design to their boss to pitch. And as you might guess from the name of the company, their boss was none other than Gustave Eiffel. Now Eiffel had been a bit lukewarm on the whole competition. His firm had just finished the Garabit Viaduct and he wasn't really eager to take on another giant project. He wanted a few quiet months to kind of calm down after that effort. And what's more, his city kept spending money on these giant exhibitions. They'd build a ton of beautiful buildings and as soon as it was over, they would tear them all back down. Eiffel liked to build things of significance, things that would last. The design competition requirement that the centerpiece monument be easy to dismantle was a complete non-starter for him. He just wasn't interested. Cochaline and Nouguier had hoped to change his mind and get him excited about the competition with the grandiose-ness of their idea. But it wasn't enough. And so they got this guy involved, Steven Sauvest. Sauvest was Eiffel's chief architect and he suggested several modifications to the design to make it more useful and aesthetically pleasing. If you look carefully at Cochaline's drawing, you can see the modifications that Sauvest sketched in in pencil. You can see at the first level, there's a glass observation pavilion. More importantly, at the very top, there's a cupola with another observation deck and a French flag up on top. In the final design, you can see the three observation decks as well as the lace-light decorative arches suggested by Sauvest. Now this, this got Eiffel excited. A tower where people could view all of Paris from heights previously reserved for balloonists. It would be possible to do weather observations and even to make radio transmissions from such a high point. And so he bought the patent rights for the design from Cochaline Nouguier and Sauvest and began the hard work of getting the design selected. The idea was immediately popular with the French public. They loved nothing more than the idea of dwarfing the just completed Washington Monument and besting the upstart Americans. It was not, however, immediately popular with the architects and artists and most importantly politicians around Paris. And so Eiffel went on the offensive. This was his first writing on the subject and if you speak French, I apologize. The Tour en Faire de 300 m de Hauteuil destinée à l'exposition de 1829 roughly translated a 300 meter high iron tower for the 1889 exhibition. This particular copy, which sold at auction in 2015 for about $10,000, is autographed and addressed to General George Boulanger, a prominent politician who would go on to be the French war minister. But Eiffel was giving copies to anyone who would give him an audience. He also went before the Société d'Ingenieux Civil, the Society of Civil Engineers to present his idea and stand for questioning, which the engineers present were more than happy to do. One of Eiffel's chief critics was Paul Planat, the founder and editor of the architectural journal La construction moderne. Planat was not impressed with Eiffel's design and felt it was counter to the hard work that Haussmann had done to beautify Paris and the great renovation. Specifically in the May 1st, 1886 issue, he said, Eiffel's design is nothing more than an inartistic scaffolding of crossbars and angled iron. It looks hideously unfinished. Pierre Turard, a powerful politician who would go on to become the French prime minister, decried it as anti-artistic, contrary to French genius. It's a project more in character with America, where taste is not yet very developed, than Europe, much less France. Charles Garnier, a prominent French architect, led the most famous protest against the tower, forming the committee of 300, one member for each meter of height of the proposed tower. And it was made up of some of the most prominent figures in the arts and architecture in Paris. Their protest, published in the prominent Parisian paper Le Tom, set in part, imagined for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack. Crushing under its barbaric bulk, Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dom of Les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream. You had a flair for the dramatic. But it was around this time that Edouard Lacroix was named Minister of Trade and put in charge of wrapping up the competition. Lacroix had been among those that Eiffel had lobbied with his design. And despite the protests of the artists, he and the rest of the political class in Paris quite liked Eiffel's design. So in calling for final proposals, Lacroix amended the guidelines to call for a tower at least 300 meters tall, and to gently suggest that it might be built of iron. An obvious nod to Eiffel's design. Now some of the other entrants included a 300 meter tall water sprinkler, in case the beautiful gardens that Haussmann had just installed ever got damaged by drought. There was a 300 meter tall lighthouse to display the enlightenment of Paris that was to be built of granite and would have been too heavy to ever build. The best was a 300 meter tall guillotine in honor of the French Revolution. And there were other practical designs as well that were not this far-fetched, but in the end, Eiffel's design was the only one that had been thought through and was practical or even possible to build. And so in June 12th, 1886, Lacroix gave an overjoyed Eiffel the news that his design had been selected. That joy was short-lived, however, as the government balked at Eiffel's estimate of six million francs, around one million US at the time, for building the tower. The government had originally committed to fund the full tower, but quickly backtracked to an offer of 1.5 million francs instead, one quarter of the cost of the tower. Eiffel would need 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 the tower. And so he requested two provisions in the contract. Number one, that he be allowed to charge admission for going up the tower, in addition to what people were already paying to get into the fair. And number two, that the tower remained intact for 20 years, not the one year it was originally slated for, so that he would have more time to make his money back. The government agreed in principle to this, but this created another problem. You see, the exhibition was to be held on the Champ de Mars in the 7th erroneousment just south of the Seine River. The Champ de Mars was the French army's primary drilling ground. And Eiffel had proposed to put his 1,000 foot tower right in the middle of it. The army was already resigned to losing their drilling ground for the year that it would take to assemble and hold the exposition. It happened every time the French government decided they wanted to hold an exhibition. They were kind of used to it. But having a giant tower in the middle of their drilling ground for 19 years after the exhibition ended, I just wouldn't do. And so after much negotiating, it was agreed that the tower would instead be located in the northwest portion of the Champ de Mars near the bank of the Seine, leaving most of the field open for military drilling once the rest of the exposition was dismantled. Now Eiffel knew this would complicate his foundation, but he had little choice but to compromise if he wanted to get the tower built. French bureaucracy being what it was, it took another 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 in his hand. He immediately began gathering supplies and hiring workers, and on January 28th, 1887, Eiffel's workers began work on the foundation. They had a little over two years until the planned opening of the exposition. Now, I mentioned that moving the tower closer to the Seine complicated the foundation. Here's what I mean. Each leg of the tower rested on four six and a half foot thick slabs of concrete, one for each of the principal girders. The east and south legs of the tower rested on solid ground on the Champ de Mars side of the site. The west and north legs, however, were far more complicated because they were on the site of the site closest to the Seine. The ground here was made of millions of years of sediment deposited from the river, much less stable. Each of the four slabs for each leg required two piles to be driven 72 feet down to reach the bedrock below the sediment. And it required the six and a half foot foundation slabs to be dug out and poured below the water table of the Seine. Water infiltration was a huge problem as they were doing this. So Eiffel's team used these giant 50 by 20 foot cast iron casons. They pumped them full of compressed air to force water out so that they could work in dry, in dry conditions and pour concrete in it be able to dry. The casons start on the surface and sink further and further down as the workers dig the foundation out. Five months later, on June 30th, 1887, the foundations were finished. And this is what the foundation for each of the four legs looked like when it was completed. Each foundation pier has two bolts embedded into it to bolt the shoe of each primary girder. Now the bolts look tiny in this picture, but they're actually about four inches in diameter and 25 feet long, so pretty significant. Eiffel's team quickly began the ironwork and you can see here how the primary girders attached to the foundation pier. Now the reason for the angle is twofold. First, it takes the load coming down the tower and spreads it out into both vertical and horizontal loads so you're not putting such a strong vertical pressure into the ground. This is important when you're dealing with river sediment, say. The second reason is it makes the tower more resilient to winds 1,000 feet up in the air. Remember that this is twice as tall as anything anybody has ever built and it has more wind exposure than anything anybody has ever built. So they have to build it strong to cope with the winds. Work progressed quickly in large part due to the precision of the drawings produced by Eiffel's office. In all, there were 1,700 general drawings made and a further 3,629 drawings of specific pieces. The position of rivet holes was calculated down to one-tenth of a millimeter and angles were calculated down to one second of arc which is 1,300th of a degree, very precise. These precisely drawn parts were then forged and drilled in Eiffel's factory in Leville-Walparais on the outskirts of Paris and they were brought to the site on a horse-drawn carriage. It would be another 30 years or so before Henry Ford would invent his Model T. Early in 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 be level. The tower was so tall that a few millimeters out of true could result in a significant variance at the top. And Eiffel's way of dealing with this was ingenious. Each of the four legs was built at a slightly steeper angle than it needed to be. Couple of centimeters, very small difference. And you see the scaffolding there that is supporting each of the legs. The scaffolding is not directly attached to the legs. There's actually a large sandbox where each leg of the tower rests on the scaffolding. And the reason they did this was because it allowed for very precise adjustments of height and angle. There was a small cork at the bottom of the sandbox. They would pull the cork out, let some sand run out, put it back in, measure, if it needed to move more, they would let more sand out until they finally got to the point that all four legs were precisely aligned exactly where they wanted them to be. Once they were all level, it was as simple as building the platform to it. It was as simple as joining the legs together by building the first level platform that locked them into 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. Sorry, my remote's going haywire here. All right, as they built up from the first level, it became increasingly complicated to get the parts they needed up to where they were working. So to solve this, they decided to use the first level of the tower as a staging area. You can see the large crane resting on the first level there and a couple of shacks there for the workers. They would use that large steam crane to lift parts of the tower up to the first level. And they built a small railroad on the first level. So once the parts arrived, they could carry them to whichever of the legs of the tower they were to be used to build. And then you can see there's another crane on each leg of the tower. These cranes are actually mounted to the elevator tracks in the legs. So they moved up the tower as construction progressed. So they would wheel the parts around on the railroad, use the cranes to lift them up to where they're actually building the tower, and on and on they went. By July, the tower was complete to the second level. And if you look in the background here, you can start to see other buildings for the exposition are starting to take form as well. The exhibition was slated to start in eight months and they still had 600 feet to go. Another issue we felt steam had to solve was how to rivet pieces together so far off the ground. The Eiffel Tower was assembled almost entirely by riveting. The way this worked is the prefabricated parts were brought to the tower. They were hauled up and put into place. And once the crew were certain they had the assembly right and everything aligned, they would begin the tedious process of driving rivets through all of the precisely aligned holes. Now rivet, if you've never seen one, looks basically like a screw with no threads. So the way this process worked, there's one worker in the front here who's heating the rivets up to red hot. They had to be hot, soft, and malleable. Then there's a worker behind the girder who would use the head of the rivet to insert it through the beam. And the worker here on the left is holding a tool to shape another head into the other end of the rivet. And then the worker here in the center is swinging a sledgehammer to apply the force necessary to create that head. So these red hot rivets would cool and expand and create a very tight and very solid joint. The problem is, like I said, these rivets had to be heated to red hot to do this. Normally, this worked on a construction site. There would be one worker that was manning a forge heating the rivets. And somebody running the hot rivets to the place construction was actually happening in a 10 bucket. Well, if you did that here, they would be cold by the time they got to the top of the tower. And so they just decided to bring the forges with them up the tower. So they had 20 of these portable forges all over the tower. And they repeated this riveting process two and a half million times because it took 2.5 million rivets to assemble the Eiffel Tower. There were 24 man crews working all over the tower and they would go all the way to the very top 1,000 feet in the air. Well, with all the really complicated stuff behind them other than sheer height, the top part of the tower went up quite smoothly. They added about 100 feet each month until they topped out the tower on March 15th, 1889. When the tower was structurally complete well ahead of the exposition's opening, Eiffel marked the occasion by inviting 15 reporters and Parisian dignitaries to scale the 1,710 steps to the top with them to raise the French flag up top. Eiffel, who you can see in the center here said to have remarked at the time, gentlemen, the French flag is the only flag in the world with a 300 meter tall flagpole. Now, the reason they had to climb the stairs is because the elevators were not yet ready. And this might have had something to do with the fact that they were the most complicated passenger elevators ever built to this point. But despite the fact that the first 30,000 visitors to the tower, including Monsieur Eiffel here on the left, had to climb all the way up the steps, the tower was a huge success. Eiffel was figuratively and literally on top of the world. When it was completed in 1889, the Eiffel Tower at 1,063 feet was the tallest structure on earth, more than 500 feet taller than the previous record holder of the Washington Monument. The Eiffel Tower is approximately equivalent to an 81-story building. It would hold the height record until the Chrysler building in New York was topped out 41 years later. No other structure subsequently has held the record for as long as the Eiffel Tower did. It's a remarkable achievement that broke all kinds of new ground. It's the kind of work that all of us say we want to be doing, right? We want to push the envelope, solve hard problems, do things no one else has done, ship amazing software. So what can we learn from Gustave Eiffel that will help us do that? Well to start, I'm gonna try something. I'm gonna put a word up on screen and I want you without thinking about it to give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down to show me just your general thoughts on the word. Do a little bit of sentiment analysis here. All right, so everybody have your thumbs ready? Okay, here's your word. Predictably, there are lots of thumbs down and I'm glad because, and you can put them down now. I'm glad because I don't know what we would do with the rest of our time together if any of you have been like, yeah, I love politics, it's my favorite. Most of us would prefer to just keep our heads down and write code, right? A study published in the Wall Street Journal back in 2011 asked participants about their approach to office politics and they gave them three options. Number one, it's best to know what's going on but not participate directly. Number two, it's best to stay out of office politics entirely or number three, it's best to participate so you can get ahead and here's how people answered. Between the group that wanted to stay informed but not participate and the group that stayed out of things altogether, fully 83% of participants picked an answer saying that they did not participate in office politics. You're not alone. I bet some of us have even left jobs because our companies were too political. I certainly have. But here's the thing, and it took me way too long to come to terms with this. Every organization is political. You can't escape politics by just moving around enough until you find the right boss or the right company. Anytime you have more than one person working together on something, 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 or whether it's as simple as getting to work on work you wanna do or as complex as completely overhauling your company's hiring practices to improve diversity and representation requires you to understand and participate in the politics of your company. I know, what a positive and uplifting note to end the day on, right? But stay with me, politics doesn't have to be negative and gross. There's a couple of things Eiffel does that give us great examples to follow in doing politics the right way. Let's rewind back to the work Eiffel did before the tower was ever built. Remember this paper that Eiffel 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 Eiffel was doing here was actually pretty simple. It's just networking and self-promotion. Now, how many of you love networking? There's your extroverts. And how about doing self-promotion? Most of us don't, there's not a lot of hands going up except for Sam. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Networking and self-promotion are kind of like politics. They get a bad rap that they don't entirely deserve. So let me refrain them for you. Instead of calling it networking and self-promotion, let's call it making friends and telling stories. Because that's really all Eiffel was doing. He'd invite somebody to lunch or more likely to spend an afternoon together on a Parisian terrace polishing off a bottle of wine together. And he'd tell stories. He'd regale them with tales of building the Garabit Viaduct. You might even tell them that when a train passed, the bridge was displaced by precisely eight millimeters, exactly as his mathematical models had predicted before construction ever started. Then he'd show them the final drawing of the tower, maybe talk about how great it would be when a tower on French soil passed the height of the great obelisk the Americans had been working on off and on for 40 years. And you listen to their stories too. And then by the end of the conversation, he'd have made a friend. Now, importantly, he didn't just do this with people that were involved with the exhibition. The fact that this document is autographed to George Boulanger tells us that. Boulanger was in government and would later go on to be the war minister, but he had nothing to do with the exhibition at all. He had no decision-making power. And that's what networking is all about. Just making friends. Maybe you'll be in position to help one another someday, but it's not an immediate focus. So what does that mean for you? Grab coffee with your product manager so they're a human to you, not just someone who drops things at the top of your backlog and sets unrealistic deadlines. Get lunch with someone in sales because they're the ones that are hearing the questions your customers are asking, and they have no idea how you do your job. They'll be fascinated to hear your story too. The second part, self-promotion, is about making sure others know what you've been working on. Not in a braggy way, in an informative way. In a perfect world, doing good work would be enough, but your boss is not paying nearly as much attention to you as you might think they are. They're juggling so many things. So you have to tell them what you've been up to. Showing 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 boss and with other folks, and it's how you help your boss build your reputation for you by sharing the good work you're doing. If you want a promotion or to build more influence so that you can affect big changes, this is a big part of how you do it. If you want something to help you learn to do this more effectively, I can't recommend Dale Carnegie's classic How to Win Friends and Influence People Highly Enough. It's full of timeless advice on how to do this well in a productive and non-scummy way that benefits you and the person that you're talking to. For the other thing Eiffel has to teach us, let's go back to the contract he signed on January 28th, 1887. Now you remember, the French government had initially proposed to cover the entire cost of the tower, but at the last minute, Balkton agreed to only cover one quarter of the cost. Now at that point, it would have been pretty easy for Eiffel to play hardball and demand that the government live up to its original proposal or he would take his ball and go home, but that's not what he did. Instead, he did a bit of negotiation. Now this is another word we all love. It probably makes you think of buying a used car and trying not to get screwed. But let me reframe it. It's really just cooperation. That's all a good faith negotiation is, working together to find an outcome that works for everyone. Eiffel understood the French government's position and he had empathy for the government representatives that he was talking to. Putting on an exposition is expensive and they frankly didn't have the six million francs to give him. So instead of walking away, he worked with him to find a way to satisfy his need for six million francs to build the tower and the French government's need to not give him six million francs to build the tower. He found that mutually beneficial solution in his being able to charge admission for 20 years. And as a side note, that turned out to be a phenomenal deal for Eiffel. An amazing 1.8 million people went up the tower during the fair, each paying an average of three francs for the privilege. So the tower had paid for itself before the fair was even over. Now when working for something we want, there's a temptation to see that process as a zero sum game. Someone has to win and someone has to lose. Eiffel needed six million francs to build the tower so it was that or bust. Your executives want a piece of functionality delivered by an absurd date so you need to tell them in no uncertain terms that it's absolutely impossible. In reality, there's almost always a middle ground where everyone gets most of what they want and need. The trick is figuring out what it actually is that everyone in the situation wants and why they want it. It requires you to exercise empathy and compassion and to ask probing open-ended questions that let you build understanding. So when your product manager starts pushing for that unrealistic date, try to understand why. Look to see if there's a smaller piece of it you can deliver early that will meet whatever need is driving the push. If you wanna learn to do this well, I would recommend a copy of Herb Cohen's classic You Can Negotiate Anything. Yeah, 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. Cohen teaches a style of negotiation that revolves around understanding everyone's needs, especially your own, and getting to agreement by finding mutually beneficial ways to fulfill them. But what about bad politics? Are there organizations and bosses that are overly political? Of course there are. We've all met a lumber in our career. If you find yourself in an organization that regularly promotes those that play the game instead of those who 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 Eiffel didn't find the French government too political to navigate and negotiate with, there's a pretty good chance that that bar is higher than you think it is, and it's really your own comfort that you're pushing up against. But this is the lead rubious track, right? So what does this have to do with those of us who are in leadership positions or aspire to be? Well, the conventional wisdom around organizational politics for tuned in leaders who care about their teams is this. I try not to use profanity on stage, but this is such a common term in leadership circles that I'm not sure that saying shit umbrella even counts as cussing. But that's the common wisdom around politics and leadership, right? You might have to engage in organization politics to get your job done, but you should shield your teams from politics, which Jason calls bullshit here, so that they can keep their heads down and stay productive. And there is some truth to this. Constant disruption and getting jerked around from priority to priority is counterproductive for your team, and helping them stay heads down and writing code eight hours a day will probably feel really productive to them and to you too. But the full reality is a little bit more nuanced than this. The downside of being an impervious shit umbrella 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. And since we know that a sense of purpose is an important motivator for most humans, that disconnection will quickly lead to dissatisfaction and probably even leaving the company. What's more, you can't carry this load. You just can't. If you put yourself in this spot as a leader where you feel the responsibility to shield your team from every bit of organizational politics that happens above them, it's all but guaranteed to burn you out. So what do we do instead? One of the engineers on my team, Steve Rickard, introduced me to an analogy that I like a lot better than shit umbrella. Heat shield. Now we get the term heat shield from the world of space travel and orbital reentry because of course we do, it's one of my talks. Unlike an umbrella, a heat shield isn't designed to be impervious. An umbrella blocks all the rain that hits it. But a heat shield blocks just enough heat to make reentry survivable. It's a very carefully calculated compromise. If it blocked all the heat, the spacecraft would be too heavy to ever reach orbit in the first place. Not enough and reentry isn't survivable. And this is your job as a leader. You need to block enough organizational noise so that your team has consistent direction and big blocks of time to work, but not so much that they lose context and connection. Blocking all the noise might make them feel comfortable, but it will ultimately keep them from delivering the value that they're capable of. It'll also stunt their career growth because as I said earlier, all organizations are political. If the folks on your team never have the opportunity to see organizational politics, they'll never learn to build their influence and sell their ideas or negotiate for the things that they think are important. As a leader, you have an obligation to help your teams learn how to navigate your organization. It's a skill that will serve them for the rest of their careers. So by the end of the 20 years, if I would have been promised, the tower was too much a part of Paris' global identity to do anything with it, but leave it right there. If else tower is still standing 129 years later. And while it hasn't been the tallest structure in the world for a while, it remains the most visited paid monument in the world with nearly 7 million visitors each year paying to go up, to wait in line for hours to take in the breathtaking views of Paris that it offers. Now had Eiffel not been willing to participate in the politics involved, we wouldn't have the Eiffel Tower. It wouldn't be there. The same is true for you. You can choose to keep your head down and hop from job to job every time you get a whiff of politics, but doing that will stunt your career. It'll stunt your team's careers as well. Even if you wanna stay on the individual contributor track and become a senior technical contributor, 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 when either good or bad in and of itself and you learn to participate in organizational politics in a way that remains true to you and true to the things that you value, you can find ways to have a huge impact in your organization and maybe even the world. You can help your teams have the same impact by learning these skills. It may seem intimidating, but I know you can do it. Good luck.