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.

  > 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