A personal reflection

While spending a Friday afternoon listening to our “all-hands” company presentation, our ex-CEO turned board member Alexander took the stage to share his latest reflection on our industry. He talked to us about the growing influence of Substack, a platform optimized for journalists to curate newsletters and monetize their dissemination. But in order to become a go-to platform for those journalists, Substack first had to make a name for themselves. Their growth strategy included paying some renown journalists to use their platform to disseminate their work. They made sure to not divulge which of their curators were actually being paid or not, so that their service would remain seen as genuine. This strategy has apparently allowed them to grow their paying subscriber base from 100K to 250K in just 3 months. An interesting example for Blendle, as our own newsletter is sent to hundreds of thousands of Dutch users, under an active subscription or not.

He continued by sharing another interesting article that he had come across this past week, an interview of Daniel Ek, Spotify’s CEO. The interview is set out in an interesting context, where it feels like we’re in the boardroom, between the journalist (Sriram Krishnan), Daniel Ek, and his board members. The interview unfolds as Krishnan questions Ek about his daily routine, and his approach to management. While reading it, I have had mixed feelings. On one hand, I found some of his stories quite impactful, while others sounded very privileged. I will try to point to some passages throughout the following parts of this post.

The hard worker rethoric

Ek mentions a personal youth story (very common among successful CEO’s attempting to connect with the mass) of him as a child, trying to fix his computer. The young Ek fails to repair his machine but keeps on trying, determined, and finally succeeds in turning his computer back on.

It’s been one of those things that has stuck with me throughout my life. I realized at a young age that even for problems that are messy and complicated, if you put enough direction, energy, and focus into solving them, it’s very possible to figure them out.

While this sounds like it could fit in any Hollywood bio pic’s scenario, I have to admit that there is truth in there. Most of the time, what will distinguish good laborers from great laborers will be this determination to push extra hard when hope is at its lowest. Or, as it has been popularized in many variations of the following image:

Freedom in delegation

Ek spends some time to emphasize the importance of nurturing long-term strategic thinking. He devotes a considerable amount of his time to think about the future. Not next quarter, not next year, but 5 years from now. This comes at the cost of having less time to spend for imminent managerial decisions, and calls for delegation

I want my leadership team to feel empowered, and not need to run things past me to review and approve. I trust them and the analytical way they look at things

Having the opportunity to solely focus on long-term strategy reminds me of an important argument stating that the main difference between rich and poor is the ability for the former to have long-term vision, without having to be anxious about securing basic needs. The same can be applied to sociology of organizations - where lower level employees fulfill the short-term operations. It is simply a luxury to be able to delegate your decisions to powerful directors.

Some very entitled bubbles

At some point, Ek describes how much enthusiasm he got from the Facebook birthday celebrations

I love the frequency with which they do this. I love, love – and have stolen straightaway – the part where they celebrate the Faceversaries and actually have people come and tell their stories. It shows people that you can make a career within the company. That’s super important: showing people that there’s a path.

This comes off to me as a privileged, closed-off network of entitled employees who reinforce their own narratives and rituals. It is precisely in these kinds of gatherings that the success stories of neo-capitalism are venerated, and passed on to the other members of the organization who are looking to mimic it.

Let me offer a counter point. Shouldn’t such companies, which are digital leaders impacting a large portion of the western population, try to offer relativity in their course of action? Why not try to mitigate their own narratives with some other, different approaches. Let’s take the example of all those who choose not to be career-centric individuals but rather community-centric. All of the women and men who decide to become teachers, social workers with the ambition of making our society a more open-minded one aiming to elevate all its peoples in solidarity.

In essence, if you want to promote diversity, you also need to offer different narratives than the ones from neo-capitalist success stories.

The peak of hypocrisy is reached when Ek mentions the following

If you think about a pyramid, there’s a fellow Swede who ran SAS, Scandinavian Airlines, who said the right way to think about leadership is you’re not at the top of the pyramid. You should invert the pyramid and envision yourself as the guy at the bottom. You are there to enable all the work being done. That’s my mental image of what I’m here to do at Spotify.

Krishnan seems to drink those words without much after-thought. Wouldn’t we learn more about an organization if we could also hear the voices of those at the bottom of the pyramid? Aren’t those people’s opinions the most relevant to truly understand what’s happening within those organizations?

If you take a peek at the Glassdoor reviews of current and former employees, you will enter a void of some very contradictory experiences that differ greatly from the visionary model highlighted by Ek. It would be very insightful to go a step further and understand the narratives that shaped the journey of low level workforce.