Ravi Mohan's Blog

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

I won't go seal hunting with you

I told someone a few minutes ago "I think you are very capable and like you a lot but I don't trust you one inch". (Yeah I do say things like that in real life :-D).

After the (very unproductive) conversation was over, I was trying to recollect where that phrase/concept came from. It was certainly not an original thought/phrase and I was sure I read it somewhere. Turns out it was from Edward de Bono who said (paraphrased) "some languages have one word which says 'I like you very much, but I would not go seal-hunting with you'." so one can say (in that language) "I [word] you" where [word] has the meaning of the phrase above.

I forget the book he used the phrase in but iirc, the context was that sometimes if we lack the precise word for something, we need to repeat a long phrase.

This holds in technical conversation too. We don't say "change the structure of the code without changing the behaviour", we say "refactor". In the absence of the word "refactor" we would probably use the longer phrase, till someone got tired of it and invented the word.

Back to seal hunting. In this case, the context was one of doing a startup together and I suggested the phrase as an explanation why a few people don't "openly talk" to him, while the other people do talk to me "openly". Note that this doesn't mean that person X *is* untrustworthy. All it means is that I (and a few other people) *think* that in a crunch, X wouldn't stand by us and would do what's best for him vs what's best for us.

Is not trusting someone a problem? In a normal context, not at all. We all work with people whose competence we admire but we wouldn't want to trust them to keep our objectives and safety in mind when the stakes are high. We just add a double dose of caution, keep our guards up and are careful with words around that person, read the fine print very carefully and so on.

I am not very sure that would work in the context of a startup though. In a startup (from what I've read, not that I've ever founded a startup, though I've been employed in a couple) the pressure is so intense that one doesn't have the time to do all this armor donning and being careful. Founding startups is not like seal hunting -it is like hunting Great White sharks or the aliens from the movie "Predator".The founders absolutely *must* trust each other to do the right thing when the bullets (or harpoons or laser beams) are raining down.

Another thing that I noticed from the conversation was the use of phrases which don't really mean anything but are invitations to games (in an Eric Bernian, Transactional Analysis sense - the person proferring the invitation doesn't often know what he is doing, from a group dynamics perspective).

For e.g the conversation started with "I don't want to jeopardize our friendship but .. " and I was thinking "What friendship? we aren't friends - we were never friends- We are professional acquaintances who speak about technology occasionally and have met at a couple of parties".

To me a friend is someone who you have let into the "inner courtyards" of your life. You can have many positive, enriching relationships which are of a lesser intensity than a friendship, but the word does have a defined meaning and it didn't make sense in this context.

That opening phrase puzzled me for a while, but then I realized that he didn't really mean it either. It is just a phrase the meaning of which depends very much on the context of its usage, in this particular instance meaning something like "I am very uneasy about the fact that people don't relate to me like they relate to you. I am going to vent my feelings a bit but I don't know how you'll react to that, so I'll just use this phrase and hope you believe " maintain friendship" is the reason I am screaming".

Real friends don't need to use those kind of weasel phrases and would say something like "I don't know wtf you are doing, but I am concerned" or something to that effect. I try to avoid these meaningless phrases as much as possible, not because it is a particularly noble thing to do, but because I don't want to clutter a conversation with superfluities. "Say what you mean, mean what you say" is a surprisingly effective, not to mention efficient means of communication.

If you keep an open mind you learn something from the most trivial incident. I learned a few things today. Not too bad for a 20 minute conversation. Not bad at all.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Founding startups is not like seal hunting -it is like hunting Great White sharks or the aliens from the movie "Predator".The founders absolutely *must* trust each other to do the right thing when the bullets (or harpoons or laser beams) are raining down."


Brilliant! And so true!

Anonymous said...

'I told someone a few minutes ago "I think you are very capable and like you a lot but I don't trust you one inch". '

Ouch! I wouldn't want to be on the other end of that. You certainly know some interesting people!

Sonny Gill said...

"Say what you mean, mean what you say" must be the phrase of the day; this is the send time I have come across it today :)

The other one was at - http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/11/programming-conventions-as-signals.html

I finished reading Founders at Work a few days ago, and two ideas came across very strongly. One that you are much more likely to succeed if you have one or more co-founders. And the second was that they have to be the people you can trust absolutely. Common sense, but you listen when an experienced and successful person says that.

Cheers.

Anonymous said...

I posted this comment yesterday . It didn't get through. Trying again.

he he I know exactly who you are talking about - [person name]. A lot of us in [organization] share this view of [person]. [person] sucks upto [people] ...

...details of office politics... [removed by blog owner]

Ravi said...

@anonymous (the one just above this comment),

Your comment didn't make it through yesterday because I deleted it. I let this through after removing all the nasty stuff because I wanted to deal with this kind of thing once and for all.

First, I have no respect for people who remain anonymous. Yeah sometimes you don't want to get a blogger id to comment so you post anonymously I don't mind, as long as the comment adds something to the conversation. This type of comment doesn't do that.


This blog is *not* the place for office politics. I haven't worked in an "office" for quite some time now.

You have no idea who I was talking about, and it doesn't matter to me one bit who is on top of who on what pyramid in whichever organization and how they got there.


If you read the post carefully (try it, it helps improve the intellect) you'll notice I speak of my *perception* of a person (and a conversation).

a)Perception not necessarily == reality
b)Perception is changeable, with new data

You also ignore the first part of a sentence structured in the form "X but Y".Try reading it again.

To conclude this is not mini-msft, where you can explicitly wash organizational dirty linen in public.

If you want something like that set up mini-[your organization].blogspot.com and have at it.

This is my personal blog, where I write about what *I* care about. Any further comments along the lines of the one you posted will be summarily deleted.

So buzz off.

Ravi

Ravi said...

@anonymous(#1)
Thank You

@Joe

Why? I wouldn't mind being told that at all. You are being told "I see you having positives 1,2,3 but I see you having a negative X".

@Sonny,
I completely agree with the two points you extracted out of FAW.

Anonymous said...

"You are being told "I see you having positives 1,2,3 but I see you having a negative X". "

Yes you are right.

Now that I think about it, I guess what I "heard" is "you are untrustworthy" == "you are a bad person" vs "I have reasons to be careful about trusting you in dangerous situations and so I wouldn't want to go into such situations with you".

I looked around my office and encountered a few "I kinda like you but don't really trust you" people, so it does seem you are onto something valid.

Would I mind ambling over to the pub for a pint with these people? Not at all. Would I want to trust my life to these people (in a conflict zone, say)? Most certainly not!

Which was almost exactly what you were trying to say . so..... doh! :-P