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Inspired by my recent favorite podcast The Rest is History, I finally read the copy of The Gallic Wars that I had lying around. It is Julius Caesar’s account of conquering the various peoples of Gaul and bringing their territory firmly under Roman rule.

The book is surprisingly readable and relatable, even two thousand years later. The fact that it was Caesar’s own account of his campaigns is really fantastic. Even though you can’t take it all at face value, how often, even in the modern era do we have a first hand account from someone of Caesar’s stature?

I love the fact that Caesar wrote these accounts in order to raise his own status in Rome. The image that came to mind for me are the giant status updates that teams send inside of tech companies to keep everyone up-to-date on project status and build momentum. Julius Caesar was literally doing this!!! And he became dictator for life!

Caesar comes across as charismatic. His ability to project confidence and rally his teams despite the odds ahead of them is compelling. You can see why the men wanted to follow him. He both pushed them and related to them. Like a character from The Sopranos or The Wire, you root for him despite the human cost of his actions. He claims to have killed a million Gauls. Historians consider this to be an exaggeration… but still, this is who you find yourself rooting for!

The high point of the book is the Siege of Alesia, where the Romans surround their foe Vercingetorix in Alesia and then put a wall around their siege in order to hold off the force that had been sent to relieve Alesia. Absolutely astounding and not the sort of thing that works out for a lesser general. If you’ve never heard of this, take the time to read the wikipedia article. It’s worth it.

Vercingetorix is a tragic figure in his own right. His appeals to liberty and self rule resonate today. He is clearly a talented leader, going toe-to-toe with Caesar. And yet he comes on a little too late and is not quite able to unify the Gallic tribes enough to prevail. I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a novel / movie / Netflix show made from his perspective yet.

I’m not a military historian, but I was struck by how often Caesar created advantages for himself by showing up places where his enemy didn’t expect him to be or by understanding what his enemy was going to do via intelligence. He also does a great job of weighing the cost of inaction — frequently the risks he takes are due to his assessment that delaying an engagement is an even greater risk.

Despite the readability, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re already interested in the topic. I am a total dork for Roman history and I still got lost in the names of tribes, commanders, and local rulers.

“The new always looks so puny — so unpromising — next to the reality of the massive, on-going business.” — Peter Drucker in Innovation and Entrepreneurship

No matter how big the ambitions are for something, they always start small. But big companies have big expectations. This incongruence makes starting new things at companies particularly challenging.

Some types of these expectations:

• Big companies expect big results. If you’re a start up, a $1B market opportunity looks life changing; if you’re Apple, not so much. This creates a tension where interesting ideas that look small today don’t get funded unless someone is willing to promise big results. The incentive here is to overpromise because if you overpromise, you might get lucky and more or less hit expectations. But if you underpromise, you won’t get funded and you never even get started. So you overpromise because you have to, but overpromising creates pressure to generate results where the opportunities might not yet exist.

• Your teammates have expectations about their jobs. Your ability to define their your role is extremely important within larger companies. If you don’t define what you’re responsible for and what you’re not responsible for, you won’t get anything worthwhile done. But starting something new frequently requires small amounts of a specific types of skills. You don’t need someone to do full time content marketing or partner management, you just need someone to roll up their sleeves and work on a specific project. So on the internal start up, you run into a lot of people saying “that’s not my job” or “I’m sorry, I don’t have time for this.” This is a particular challenge for less common functions where the model is to embed someone in the team (vs. project based or on demand staffing), because if you don’t have enough work to justify at least a quarter of a persons time for the foreseeable, you risk not getting anyone at all. This also shows up in small ways where people push back on owning specific projects almost reflexively — after all, in their last role at the same company this would’ve been someone else’s job and a major part of their success to date has been their ability to define their role.

• Performance assessment. Even if the people you’re working with are willing to do whatever it takes to succeed personally, the institution is going to push back against this. As companies get bigger, they develop career ladders. These ladders define the skills necessary to progress at a given level within a given function and inevitably describe what success looks like in the core business better than whatever new thing you’re working on. This will be a problem both for people on your project, who risk paying a penalty for doing work that isn’t at their level and people considering joining your project and comparing it against the career trajectory offered by other options.

So how do you succeed in spite of this? I can’t claim special expertise, but here’s what I’ve observed to work:

• Understand the incentives. If you understand it, you see it coming, and avoid the worst of it. Some of it you can mitigate with planning and some of it you just have to accept. This is the tax you pay in exchange for not having to build something new while chasing funding and setting up IT systems.

• Reward effort. The people you’re working with are multifaceted. Most people, particularly those in high demand professions, aren’t optimizing purely for the next promotion or personal prestige. If you’re excited about them going outside of expectations to do what’s best for the team, they’re more likely to keep doing it, even in the face of incentives to do otherwise.

• Create a safe haven for experimentation. Progress on new things isn’t linear and people need the space to mistakes. It’s much easier to do this without needing to create the artifice of consistent results. So make that space where you can. If you’re more junior, this might look like a side project outside of your formal OKRs. As you get more senior, give your people the space to dabble around in areas that have the potential to be productive without demanding that they show results.

• Even better, have a plan to create the artifice of consistent results. Teams and leaders that are really cooking are actively experimenting with one part of their portfolio while banking results with another part of their portfolio. By doing this, they’re able to shield the experiments from the need to produce results right away and can use the lessons they’ve learned to drive the next set of results.

From Bloomberg:

A full 50% of office visits globally were just once a week in the second quarter, up from 44% in the first quarter, according to data from Basking.io, a workplace-occupancy analytics company. At the same time, fewer people made the commute four to five days a week, especially in large cities.

I’m surprised that the norm here is 1 day a week. Right now I assume that most people live close enough to an office to make this work and are basically coming into the office to have all their 1/1s in person.

I think the longer term equilibrium for jobs that can be remote is going to be ~1 week per quarter mandatory in person together with the rest distributed. I do think that some people will choose to go in more often, especially if there is a critical mass of people that live nearby.

We’ll see!

I appreciated this observation from Austin Vernon’s post on the potential for Geothermal energy: When it comes to low information environments, just trying stuff is powerful. Only the simplest models are worth using.

He gives this example from fracking and low quality sand:

Models that predict frac (sic) job performance have consistently lost to some engineer saying forget it and upping how much sand and water gets pumped downhole. Besides failing to predict the success of slickwater, models didn't account for the success of low-quality sand. Until recently, the industry used only the most spherical sand at great expense. Theoretically, spherical sand should drastically improve permeability over wonky sand. Sourcing this sand from places like Wisconsin became a problem once oil companies started using trains worth of sand in a single well. Eventually, companies sourced local, low-quality sand at a much lower cost and rarely saw performance decreases. They bought more sand on the same budget and made better wells. Each formation eventually reaches a limit where further intensification doesn't help. The industry always finds that point empirically.

This reminds me of a theme from one of my favorite books, Range: when planning a career, there’s not a great way to know in advance what is going to fit for you, so experiment — have hobbies, change jobs, take on projects.