Reid Hastings (Netflix founder) uses a different analogy.
He compares a company as a high performing "sports team". With the idea being, you're working towards a collective goal. You each have you're own role. But if you're not performing, you get cut. Just like any athlete would get cut.
The problem with the "family" analogy is it implies "unconditional love" regardless if you're messing up, failing, not performing.
I challenge the idea that people in a company are working towards a collective goal.
- The goal of those with lots of equity, like the founders and investors, is that "collective goal" of company profit.
- The goal of one employee may be to keep their job, provide for their family, and spend as much time with their family as possible.
- The goal of another employee may be to learn as much as possible.
- The goal of another employee may be to get promoted up as high as possible (for social and/or financial gains).
- The goal of another employee may be to do as much social good as possible, regardless of what the effect is on the bottom line.
If a company is like a sports team, then I think it's like one that is thrown together in gym class where each student has a different goal.
- One student may actually be competitive and want to win.
- Another may care a lot about their grade, and only try when the teacher glances over at them.
- Another may just be concerned with not getting sweaty and ruining his/her hair.
- Another may be selfish and want to, in basketball for example, be a ball hog and take every shot.
- Another may just be having fun, and not be too concerned with winning.
I understand that executives may _want_ their employees to act as if they are on a competitive sports team - working really hard together towards a common goal, and then heading home at night to relax and recharge. But the fact that executives want it doesn't make it an accurate description of reality.
Some sports execs want to increase their stadium attendance. LeBron wanted a trophy. Some play to get paid, some focus on staying healthy.
I think it's a fine analogy even when you add the nuances. Not all companies are good teams though - sometimes you have the marching band deciding what plays to run so they can play their favorite song, to mix analogies...
I don't try to improve my family as a first-order activity. I will offer help if they ask, but not everybody wants every dinner or vacation to be a discussion of the shortcomings and how to mitigate them or of their strengths and how they need to find more opportunities to use them.
I don't try to change the goals of my family. If my daughter wants to go backpack through the wilderness, or my mom wants to move to Vietnam, that's cool. At work, it's important that we all want (e.g.) the company to grow by 75%+ this year and we need to set goals on how to get there. If my coworkers want to get to profitability instead, it's not an incorrect course of action, but I will debate with them until we're all shooting for the same goal.
Families can be quite a bit more live-and-let-live. Teams need to be invested in the same general direction.
>I don't try to improve my family as a first-order activity. I will offer help if they ask, but not everybody wants every dinner or vacation to be a discussion of the shortcomings and how to mitigate them or of their strengths and how they need to find more opportunities to use them.
Then again, and I'm just being pedantic here, that's also the case with most companies. It's not the job of most employees to "improve" the company or talk about how its "shortcomings and how to mitigate them" etc. Usually they just have some specific tasks to do, and the other things are more for management.
>I don't try to change the goals of my family. If my daughter wants to go backpack through the wilderness, or my mom wants to move to Vietnam, that's cool.
On the other hand, most people try to influence the goals of their family, e.g. if somebody's kid is a slacker that fails at school and plays videogames all day, they try to get them to shape, etc.
>At work, it's important that we all want (e.g.) the company to grow by 75%+ this year and we need to set goals on how to get there. If my coworkers want to get to profitability instead, it's not an incorrect course of action, but I will debate with them until we're all shooting for the same goal.
I don't think this applies to most employees. It's not at all important that all are agreeing "for the same goal", as management decides those goals.
Why use an analogy at all? We have a shared notion of professional behavior, of the compromise between an employee's self interest and his fiduciary duty to his employer, and of a number of other things that are irrelevant to families and to sports teams.
The only reasons to have an analogy are you are 1) dealing with people who lack the acculturation to hold a professional job, or 2) you are trying to distort the notion of a company in your favor.
> The problem with the "family" analogy is it implies "unconditional love" regardless if you're messing up, failing, not performing.
On the flip side, the family analogy is used by the companies to their advantage as well. If working for "family", we all might accept less pay (for the good of the "family") and would do shitty work (underemployment; someone has to take out the "trash").
Not just "on the flip side", that's exactly the side by which the idea of "company as family" is used for.
No employee was spared if he was messing, not performing etc. because he invoked "but we said that this company is a family, so they must protect me unconditionally".
It was always the other way around: the company saying they're like family when asking to exploit employees more.
So the problem with the family analogy is exactly the inverse of what the parent says (and is precisely what TFA says).
A company is nothing like a sports team. Sport teams are mostly a lose-win proposition but companies can be win-win where each company thrives and supports the other within an ecosystem. Sports teams produce no value (you could argue entertainment is value I guess but I don't mean it in this sense). An employee's impact lasts significantly longer than any player on a sports team. Code I write today will run the next 20 years. Lebron's dunk today means nothing tomorrow.
A company is an "idea", as Yuval Harari says it is something, fiction, a story, we invent to create a shared purpose. It can be like a sports team (some of which presumably are incorporated), it can be like a tribe, it can be like a family. We can make whatever we want of it. I think companies would do better with a more tribe-like story than with a sports team like story.
There are pretty large economic impacts generated by sports teams and/or sporting events. While the rest could be debated (i.e. events meaning something in 20 years), there's not really any way to say sports don't produce anything of value. This is true for both professional and college sports.
Sports teams are lose-win only if you look at the events of the field. If you consider the sporting industry, then having a Babe Ruth on the Yankees in a very good thing even if you're the Red Sox, as it increases fan interest in general.
Absolutely! They do not own me and I should never have to feel obligated to stay late and work extra hours for them. I have a life out side of my job. I want to keep it that way.
It really depends on the league. There are lots of soccer players in America only making 60k or so a year despite playing at the highest level of soccer and being fully professional.
Sorry, would you rather me say “tier”? It occupies the top spot in the league pyramid and is fully professionalized.
That MLS isn’t of the highest quality should be obvious to anyone concerned, especially considering I’ve used it as a low paying contrast to “professional sports teams”.
He compares a company as a high performing "sports team". With the idea being, you're working towards a collective goal. You each have you're own role. But if you're not performing, you get cut. Just like any athlete would get cut.
The problem with the "family" analogy is it implies "unconditional love" regardless if you're messing up, failing, not performing.