On ownership

It’s been a bit.

As expected, a weekly cadence has proven to be ambitious. It’s hard to say exactly what I was up to. If you ask me, I’d respond “I was busy”, but if you continued “with what”, I’d have a hard time answering. And whether that be a deficit in my short-term memory or a symptom of the modern workplace, the affliction remains.

There’s a number of thoughts rampaging about. Noisy neighbors, I call them. I’m acquainted. I accept them at times, ignore them on others, and use them on occasion.

I’d like to write them all. But for some, I can’t.
Time is a lens; recent events are inevitably blurred. Those older are not necessarily clear, but do develop the resilience to weather repeated dissection and analysis. At the end of that process, the thought disappears. The neighbor ceases his noise. He settles.

Today is less an effort to expound on my now. It’s to talk about an idea I’ve thought about far too much for far too long. Ownership.

“I’m an obsessive owner.” - so I wrote in my annual review.
Five years ago, I wrote the same words in my review then.

As a word, ownership means the “state of being an owner.” At Amazon, it’s one of our leadership principles:

Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job.”

It’s not hard to think of why a company would want to promote it. It empowers your employees, indebts loyalty and makes them work harder. At first blush, it seems as if there’s very little downside to having all of your employees be owners (or at least think they are).

But viewed from the lens of management theory, it’s paradoxical. Ownership gives power to the employees. At first, in theory only, as though employees may act like owners, they aren’t truly. But eventually, in practice as well. The strongest owners will realize what they own and what they don’t, seeding discontent as to their scope.

The alternative to ownership is to delineate. Leadership owns the product, the business, and the bottom-line. Workers deliver on the tasks assigned; they’re evaluated based off their performance and expected to do nothing outside of guidelines.

And thought that might seem barbarically industrialist, it’s not a bad system either. Leaders own repercussions; if the performance of your firm goes down and your clients are mad, that is your burden to bear. If your restaurant fails to flip a profit, you still have to pay your employees their wage. If your startup fails, you lose everything, your employees still get their salaries. You own both the upside and the downside.

Employees are given stability in exchange for autonomy. The scope of their work is rigid and less readily influenceable, but their work and their wage is guaranteed. I don’t have to care about my company and its idiot management, all I have to do is some data analysis and be netted my salary. If no customers come during rush hour, that’s a boon not a curse. I don’t have to exceed expectation, all I have to do is meet it.

So in a sense, a top-down environment encourages work-life balance. Work is work, life is life; separate the two and act to minimize the former. That might seem ironic, especially in lieu of draconic workplaces where expectations are high and supervisors are stringent, but it holds some truth. It’s surprisingly nice to be told what to do.

Bottom-up environments are different. It’s tempting to only think about the benefits. Imagine the freedom, imagine the autonomy of only doing what I want to do! And while that is the primary reward reaped, the repercussions are necessarily cruel.

If you let your employees do whatever they want, you pick winners and losers. The former is rewarded, they’re given more scope, more resources, and fast-tracked promotions. The latter is penalized; if you don’t contribute value, you’re cut. It hinges heavily on talent and competition. Weakness in a peer is not to be remedied, it’s an opportunity.

Ironically, these systems are also inherently exclusionary. Although there’s nothing explicit, bottom-up environments tend to self-select the people it prefers by its criterion. There’s a certain breed of individual that tends to succeed. This isn’t to say that top-down environments are inclusionary, they most certainly aren’t as they expect you to conform to the culture they set, but they are more explicit about it.

This essay has taken a surprising analytical bent.

All that said, it doesn’t really matter. Regardless of what’s optimal, I do what suits me. I act on principle over probability. And though you may be able to convince me that a certain strategy is optimal, I will usually ignore it and simply do what I think is right.

That’s ownership. That’s caring about your work: owning it and living by it.

Where that comes from is a good question.

One aspect is personality. I was raised in a family where academic excellence was king. I was told to do a lot: near every waking hour of my youth was micro-managed by my parents. Wake up at 6, leave the house by 6:30, study till 12, eat till 12:30, study till 6, eat dinner till 6:30, study till 10, go to bed and repeat.

That lack of control made me obsess for the opposite. I wanted freedom - and would do anything to achieve it, including a few flawed attempts at running away from home. So bluntly put, I don’t take well to being told what to do. I condone it from those I respect, but even then, I will disagree on directives I think unjust.

The need for independence is what defined my childhood. I craved it - financial independence, emotional independence, professional independence; and worked rabidly to achieve it. Now that I have it, my obsession with it certainly has petered, but it still stands as a hallmark character trait.

There’s other aspects of personality that tie into it. Perfectionism is one, the insistence on doing things well and wanting to do things my way. Empathy and sensitivity is another, the need to feel involved with not just your own work but that of those around you. Sheer egoism is another, the desire to own things out of pride alone.

But ownership can also be taught. If you treat your employees as workers, that’s all they’ll ever be. If you treat them as owners, they’ll grow into leaders.

My principal engineer was the one who taught me that. There’s a phenomenon in the tech industry where companies spend copious amounts of money and time recruiting the smartest college graduates, then proceed to baby them by giving them trivial tasks and treating them as children.

He did the opposite. From the get go, he treated me like he treated himself. He gave me projects that he knew I’d fail on and held me to his bar, not any other. He treated me like an owner - and nothing else made me work harder.

This approach doesn’t work for everyone. There’s downsides to it. For one, you are intentionally encouraging failure. I don’t mean that purely from the perspective of giving engineers projects with big scope that they may or may not deliver on (and then secretly have ways to guarantee success). I really mean it.

Ownership makes people fail. It makes them personally responsible for failure and incents them to grow. And that is a cruel, albeit fair, thing.

To end on, there’s an admitted irony here. Ownership is the “state of being an owner”, it doesn’t mean you are. I act as an owner, but I’m not really. I acknowledge that, yet still choose to bear that farce. The reason why is because I would rather be, or attempt to be, than be complicit to hierarchy.

Freedom isn’t free. You have to fight for it. Be it now or in the future, in petty corporate politics or in matters of consequence, there are times where you have to stand up and fight. It feels pointless at times. More than anyone, I doubt why I do the things I do for a company or a country I disagree with.

But still, I do.
And whether it be naiveté or absurdity, I refuse to change.