It's in the stories

It’s been a few weeks since I listened to this German podcast episode about the downfall of a company called Schlecker and I keep thinking about an anecdote one of the hosts shared.

The anecdote isn’t about Schlecker, but about its competitor, the dm-drogerie markt, which is not only a very successful company, but also one of the most beloved brands in Germany. Some part of that is probably due to dm’s founder and CEO Götz Werner, who’s done and said quite a few unusual things. Unusual in the German corporate landscape, at least. Saying publicly that the well-being of his employees is more important to him than shareholder value, for example. Or that he doesn’t see salaries as “personnel costs” (which is what it would be called on a balance sheet in Germany), but as “employee income”. Or creating a company that has free-to-use diaper changing tables, including free diapers and wet wipes and all of that. (My wife and I changed our kids’ diapers quite a few times in our local dm and, of course, walked out buying something we didn’t intend to buy when walking in.)

The anecdote goes like this. The host of the podcast, a journalist, was shadowing Werner — at this point already CEO of one of the most successful German companies and probably one of the richest people in Germany — for a day and together they walked into a dm store. Routine visit. Werner walked around the store, noticed something, and asked an employee to get him a broom. Wait, are you going to sweep the floors now, the journalist asked. Werner took the broom and used it to adjust ceiling lights above a product shelf so the products are properly lit. But Herr Werner, the journalist said, you surely can’t be serious, is that a good use of your time, going into stores and poking at lights with a broom?

Werner said to the journalist: the woman who handed me the broom, the woman at the cash register — they won’t ever forget that I just walked in here, took a broom, and adjusted the lights. They will tell their colleagues and they in turn will tell their colleagues. And they’re all going to pay attention to the lights from now.

I’ve got anecdotes like this too.

When I was working at UPS over a decade ago, unloading trucks in the night shift, we had a shift leader that would give us Braveheart-like speeches before a big night. Around Christmas time, say, when we’d expect double the volume of packages. He’d stand in front of us and assign us to our positions that day, giving us specialty names and stroking our egos: “Marco and Thomas, you’re beasts at sorting and I’m counting on you today, I need you because we got big shipment going to north east. Andy and Lukas and Thorsten - you’re the unloading A-Team and I need you guys to go all-in today. This is going to hurt, sorry, but we’re going to get through this.” Now you know how you can get me to break my back: tell me I’m part of the A-Team. One night when we were still going at it at 3am, our shift leader would hop into the trucks with us and help us unload — urgently, furiously, dripping with sweat.

I’ll never forget that. I also told all new colleagues about our shift leader and now I told you.

I’ve got stories like this about many people I’ve worked with — team leads, CEOs, CTOs, Head-Ofs, colleagues. Things I’ve experienced myself or stories that coworkers told me.

I’ve got a story about a CEO who flew across the Atlantic, landed, and immediately replied to a message that I had sent because I was worried about a few things, hopped on a call with me while he was in a taxi, and talked to me for an hour while driving into the city, and never, not once, breaking eye contact. I shared that story with quite a few people. They all said: yes, he’s a machine.

I’ve got a story about a CEO who sat in a 1:1 with me, a very difficult and exhausting 1:1 in which he stayed calm and kind and kept a smile the whole time. I asked him: how come you’re smiling, am I not a pain in the ass right now? And he said: you won’t believe this, but I pull energy out of conversations like these. I didn’t and still don’t believe it, but I keep thinking about it.

I’ve got a story about a Head of Engineering sending me fish because he thought I’d get a laugh out of it. I’ve got a story about a manager who would always, always, always start meetings on time — no matter how many people were still out of the room. I’ve got a story about a CEO ending meetings on time, even cutting executives off mid-sentence. I’ve got a story about a CEO who hacked together a small prototype in HTML and jQuery for a whole day and when we asked why he didn’t just ask us to do it he said he doesn’t want to distract us.

Sometimes, I think that this is what it’s all about: stories.

And that, maybe, leadership is the act of producing the right stories, the anecdotes that are repeated by those around you, that carry the message you want out there.

Joy & Curiosity

This is a new section of Register Spill that I want to experiment with, true to the original idea of this newsletter containing “what I’d send you if you were to ask me what’s on my mind this week.“ In this section I want to share things from the previous week I find interesting.

• I loved this article by Jimmy Miller on the “best, worst codebase” he worked on. I love that he said he missed it: “I miss that direct connection. The fast feedback. The lack of making grand plans. The simple problem and code connection.” Reminded me of a friend who once said, dismissingly: some programmers truly believe that good code will get them into heaven. Jimmy ain’t one of them.

• Murat Buffalo with some great advice: “A bee that doesn't produce honey is just a pest.  Producing something small each week is key to keep your muscles from atrophy.”

• This post by Nicholas Carlini on how he uses AI was refreshing. Refreshing like a walk from the booth at the Hammer Fair, where a Hammer sales person told you all about the new hammer and what it can do for and how life-changing it is, over to the construction site where a guy says: this is a hammer and this is how I use it to smash nails into a wall.

• Murat, again: “Manage the stories you tell yourself” — Reminded me a lot of Derek Siver’s wonderful Useful Not True.

• “PostHog is a web product and cannot be installed by CD. We did once send some customers a floppy disk but it was a Rickroll.” — I loved that.

• I’ve been paying for a domain since 2003. We’ve now entered the age of the Internet in which we can say: “my dad has been buying his domains here for decades, so I’ll buy my domains here too”

• Insightful comment by Francisco Tolmasky on programming language development not being lead by application developers. That rings true and I have a lot of thoughts on that but I don’t want to name names in a paragraph like this. The pragmatism in that thread reminded me again of something a friend once said. When someone was making fun of Go for not having a package manager (this was in 2014), he replied: "turns out, it’s not a big issue”

• Enjoyed Casey Muratori riffing on RAII and smart pointers. Especially liked the admission that there are phases we all have to go through, that we can’t skip, no matter what.