Against Best Practices

Dan Morena, CTO at Upright.com, made the point that every startup was unique and therefore every startup had to find out what was best for it, while ignoring whatever was considered "best practice." I wrote what he told me here:

https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/dan-morena-is-a-...

My summary of his idea:

No army has ever conquered a country. An army conquers this muddy ditch over here, that open wheat field over there and then the adjoining farm buildings. It conquers that copse of lush oak trees next to the large outcropping of granite rocks. An army seizes that grassy hill top, it digs in on the west side of this particular fast flowing river, it gains control over the 12 story gray and red brick downtown office building, fighting room to room. If you are watching from a great distance, you might think that an army has conquered a country, but if you listen to the people who are involved in the struggle, then you are aware how much "a country" is an abstraction. The real work is made up of specifics: buildings, roads, trees, ditches, rivers, bushes, rocks, fields, houses. When a person talks in abstractions, it only shows how little they know. The people who have meaningful information talk about specifics.

Likewise, no one builds a startup. Instead, you build your startup, and your startup is completely unique, and possesses features that no other startup will ever have. Your success will depend on adapting to those attributes that make it unique.

Wow what a fantastic little article. Thanks for writing and sharing that.

Likewise, people do business with people, not with companies. Assert that “society” is merely an abstraction invoked for political gain to become an individualist.

The army that is conquering is carrying best practice weapons, wearing best practice boots, best practice fatigues, best practice tanks, trucks, etc.

They're best practice aiming, shooting, walking, communicating, hiring (mercs), hiding, etc...

The people that are in the weeds are just doing the most simple things for their personal situation as they're taking over that granite rock or "copse of lush oak trees".

It's easy to use a lot of words to pretend your point has meaning, but often, like KH - it doesn't.

  > No army has ever conquered a country

Napoleon and his army would like to have a word with you…

I get the analogy but I think it can be made a lot better, which will decrease people who dismiss it because they got lost in where the wording doesn’t make sense. I’m pretty confident most would agree that country A conquered country B if country B was nothing but fire and rubble. It’s pretty common usage actually. Also, there’s plenty of examples of countries ruled by militaries. Even the US president is the head of the military. As for army, it’s fairly synonymous with military, only really diverting in recent usage.

Besides that, the Army Corp of engineers is well known to build bridges, roads, housing, and all sorts of things. But on the topic of corp, that’s part of the hierarchy. For yours a battalion, regiment, company, or platoon may work much better. A platoon or squad might take control of a building. A company might control a hill or river. But it takes a whole army to conquer a country because it is all these groups working together, even if often disconnected and not in unison, even with infighting and internal conflicts, they rally around the same end goals.

By I’m also not sure this fully aligns with what you say. It’s true that the naive only talk at abstract levels, but it’s common for experts too. But experts almost always leak specifics in because the abstraction is derived from a nuanced understanding. But we need to talk in both abstractions and in details. The necessity for abstraction only grows, but so does the whole pie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_organization

This is frequently not true. There’s examples all through history of weaker and poorer armies defeating larger ones. From Zulus, to the American Revolution, to the great Emu wars. Surely the birds were not more advanced than men armed with machine guns. But it’s only when the smaller forces can take advantage and leverage what they have better than others. It’s best practices, but what’s best is not universal, it’s best for who, best for when, best for under what circumstances

Often not true. Often they are just "good enough" weapons, etc.

That doesn't defeat my point- is the smaller/poorer army using best practices?

When all things are the same, the army with more will win.

When all things are not the same, there are little bonuses that can cause the smaller/poorer, malnourished army to win against those with machine guns. Often it's just knowing the territory. Again though, these people are individually making decisions. There isn't some massively smart borg ball sending individual orders to shoot 3 inches to the left to each drone.

  > That doesn't defeat my point- is the smaller/poorer army using best practices?

I don't agree, but neither do I disagree. But I do think it is ambiguous enough that it is not using best practices to illustrate the point you intend.

  > malnourished army to win against those with machine guns

With my example I meant literal birds

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War

Seriously? From whom do I buy a computer or a car or a refrigertor?

The Zulus won a pitched battle or two, but lost the war.

The US president, a civilian, is in command of the US military. This is, in fact, the inverse of a country being run by its military.

Also true in the UK. Even in a war the UK armed forces are ultimately tasked by and report to politicians.

> people do business with people, not with companies

Many of my interactions are with electronic systems deployed by companies or the state. It's rare that I deal with an actual person a lot of the time (which is sad, but that's another story).

Its true everywhere except for military dictatorships.

> I’m pretty confident most would agree that country A conquered country B if country B was nothing but fire and rubble.

I think we can all agree that if that is the case, you’ve in fact conquered nothing.

Edit: Since we say opposite things, maybe we wouldn’t agree.

> It’s best practices, but what’s best is not universal, it’s best for who, best for when, best for under what circumstances.

I’m pretty sure building an organization on a free for all principle is anathema to the idea of an organization.

It's a cute analogy, but like all analogies it breaks after inspection. One might try and salvage it by observing that military "best practice" in the field and Best Practice at HQ need not be, and commonly are not, the same, either for reasons of scope or expediency. Moreover, lower case "practice" tends to win more, more quickly. Eg guerillas tend to win battles quickly against hidebound formal armies.

For a startup, winning "battles, not wars," is what you need, because you have finite resources and have an exit in mind before you burn through them. For a large enterprise, "winning wars not battles" is important because you have big targets on your back (regulators, stock market, litigation).

One might paraphrase the whole shooting match with the ever-pithy statement that premature optimization is the root of all evil.

my irony detector is going off, but it's feeble. do I need a better irony detector?

So.. how would you make it a lot better?

Occasionally something novel and innovative beats the best practice. In that case it usually gradually gets adopted as best practice. More often it doesn't, and falls by the wayside.

> If you are watching from a great distance, you might think that an army has conquered a country, but if you listen to the people who are involved in the struggle, then you are aware how much "a country" is an abstraction.

Most things of any value are abstractions. You take a country by persuading everyone you've taken a country, the implementation details of that argument might involve some grassy hill tops, some fields and farm buildings, but its absolutely not the case that an army needs to control every field and every grassy hill top that makes up "a country" in order to take it. The abstraction is different to the sum of its specific parts.

If you try to invade a country by invading every concrete bit of it, you'll either fail to take it or have nothing of value at the end (i.e fail in your objective). The only reason it has ever been useful or even possible to invade countries is because countries are abstractions and it's the abstraction that is important.

> The real work is made up of specifics: buildings, roads, trees, ditches, rivers, bushes, rocks, fields, houses.

Specifics are important - failing to execute on specifics dooms any steps you might make to help achieve your objective, but if all you see is specifics you won't be able to come up with a coherent objective or choose a path that would stand a chance of getting you there.

Sure, they (eventually) lost against the British, but they won against many of the southern African tribes before.

That's a straw man. The actual argument is about the danger of applying "best practices" uncritically, not about doing away with leadership.

"Do X because it's best practice" is very different than "do X because you were commanded by your rightful authority to do so."

I was being genuine.

  >> Also, there’s plenty of examples of countries ruled by militaries. Even the US president is the head of the military

Maybe I should have reversed the order of these two. I didn't intend to use the US as an example of a country ruled by a military but rather that military is integral and connected directly to the top.

I think the word you're looking for is "nation", not "country". A country is the land area and would be conquered in that example, while a nation is the more abstract entity made of the people. It's why it makes sense to talk about countries after the government falls, or nations without a country.

More people should be.