I have a confession
Welcome to the 15th edition of Some of the Things, where I share some of the things I've been thinking about, learning about, and exploring across work, tech, wellness, and life.
Hi Friends,
I have a confession. When I started my consulting company last year, I had all sorts of doubt and uncertainty about whether it was the best path for my career. Having worked for enterprise B2B SaaS companies for a long time, I felt like I was turning my back on my identity as a product person and software engineer. I love the software business model of near infinite leverage. But for a number of reasons, I chose the path of the service organization, and while I still identify as a product person, I’m starting to appreciate different aspects to consulting. Here are 3 ways my thinking has evolved about running a Service Organization:
Service Organizations Need Product Skills. I am passionate about the DevOps movement and using modern engineering practices to help teams get more work done, better and faster. I know exactly what that looks like inside a product organization, but what does flow look like for a consulting company? Ivan Krnic, Director of Engineering at CROZ and host of 0800 DevOps podcast recently published a great article about exactly that: Flow in a Service Organization. Ivan argues that service organizations would benefit from more product thinking. Product Thinking is intuitively and constantly working yourself out of a job. It’s writing code to do what a human would have done before. In a product org, it’s so obviously beneficial to get computers to do all the work. That’s precisely the business model of a SaaS company. But the business model for most service organizations is continued reliance and dependence on humans. When I pivoted to consulting last year, I wrote about being the anti-consultant and how the ultimate definition of success is when a client no longer needs us.
A Hedge Against AI Disruption? Seems like all anyone can talk about these days is AI and the many jobs and industries that ChatGPT will disrupt. On a recent All-In podcast, the guys were talking about how AI will come after all the professional class jobs first - lawyers, software engineers, marketers, accountants, etc., but that service jobs were safe. ChatGPT will take the doctor’s job before the nurse’s. I’m not overly concerned about job security or disruption personally, but it did get me thinking about the nature of service. I’m surprised when a company hires me to do technology work they can easily learn and do on their own. But why should I be? I can easily find online tutorials about how to paint my house, but I’m still going to hire painters. People still want service and they still want to work with people they trust. AI won’t replace that anytime soon.
A Learning Opportunity. If anything working at a learning company taught me, it’s to embrace continuous learning. I could have stayed in the product world and deepened my skills, but by shifting to a service organization I’m learning so many new skills and having experiences I would never have been exposed to.
Lesson learned, I’m going to avoid tying my identity to any one thing and continue to be open to the rock wall of life.
Now, onto the some of the other things I’ve found interesting over the past few weeks since my last update:
Work
New Trend Alert: Fractional Leadership. Fractional roles are where former c-level execs or other highly specialized roles work part time on a contract basis for several companies - usually startups - instead of taking one full time gig.
Cool Internet Things
Really enjoyed this fascinating video about animation and how innovation happens. The themes in this video are universal. Someone innovates, everyone copies, innovation feels stale. Repeat. Someone needs to take a risk to support new innovation.
Elo everything - I don’t know why but I found this site oddly entertaining, and I keep coming back to it. The leaderboard can be questionable at times, but it changes often. And now I know what elo means.
How Money Works - How to think about money, its original purpose, what it’s lacking, and its future. Fintech Brain Food 🧠 is one of my favorite newsletters because of Simon’s talent for making fintech understandable to people outside of fintech.
Spirituality
Tibetan Buddhists believe there is a transition between death and reincarnation, called the bardo, which can take up to 49 days. We had an end of 49 days service for my mom recently at the Buddhist temple where she grew up. I’m not religious, yet I can still take comfort in traditions. I love believing she has been reborn.
Should we be worried about under population?
“Critically, it is not the number of people that matters most, but the ratio of young people to old people. Young people make things and buy things; they stimulate the economy. Old people do neither and take resources from the government. If you don’t have enough young people, you can’t support the old people and your society collapses.”
The way
describes the population debate sounds an awful lot like a ponzi scheme. But it’s OK as long as humans keep progressing. If you buy this premise, and we think about humanity like fluid mechanics (shout out to my favorite civil engineering course from college C E 261 at PSU), we’ll need some combination of three things: 1.) more young people, 2.) fewer or less dependent old people, 3.) more and better technology. And we absolutely need more women voices in this conversation because we need a solution for increasing the birth rate that doesn’t set women back or restrict our rights to equal education, capital and choice.I turned 45 since my last update and someone dropped this bomb about midlife by Brene Brown. It hit hard. In a good way, mostly.
A note to my subscribers:
Hello new subscribers and welcome back old friends! I started this substack 6 months ago as an experiment to see if developing a writing a habit would help clarify my thinking and/or provide any other benefits. You can read about my original intentions in my first post here.
I write about twice a month and share musings, meditations, and links to things I’m finding interesting as I build out my consulting company, raise my kids, and have fun creating and learning in the worlds of crypto, tech, science and wellness.
Thank you for supporting my writing and journey. If you’d like to get in touch you can reply to me here or find me on twitter and farcaster.
Until next time, keep putting good into the world. —adrienne🌏❤️