The Lucky One

some thoughts on leadership and delivery from my kitchen

I was contemplating taking this week off from posting, but had such a flood of thoughts over the past few days that I wanted to write them down and share.

Lessons in the Kitchen

I spent the long (US Holiday) weekend at home and volunteered to cook a nice meal. One of our family members is vegan, but as someone who was vegetarian for twenty years, I had a reasonable plan - and I had a few big moments of reflection (or reminders) in the kitchen that day worth exploring and sharing.

Orchestration

The first is how much I love the orchestration of cooking. I cook a lot in general, but usually, it’s just one or two things for dinner. I love cooking five things at once and the art of adjusting timing so that everything ends up (more or less) ready at the same time (and with only one oven). I love to compare this to actual orchestration projects I’ve done where I use instrument combinations to get a particular sound, but also keep in mind instrument range, breathing (for wind instruments), cues, and breaks. But over the last decade, I’ve realized that coordinating the creation of a large meal is a lot more like leadership - where you have to balance guidance and coaching with velocity and shipping and everything else that goes into the art of helping humans perform better.

Creativity and the Customer

For better, or for worse, I learned to cook from my mom. She had hundreds of books filled with recipes, and she’d often read them cover to cover like a novel, but I never saw her look at a recipe in the kitchen. She read the books for ideas and inspiration, but used her experience and taste in the kitchen. I’ve been cooking before the internet, and while I couldn’t afford to buy books, so I’ve learned the same way. I had ideas of what to make and some experience, so away I went.

It helps that I knew that the people eating dinner were pretty tolerant eaters, and that I knew they’d be comfortable with my experiments, but I still tasted often, experimented with whatever produce and spices I could find, and adjusted as I went. I tested the food, and made decisions based on those tests. Ultimately, only the customer (my family) can evaluate the quality of the food, but I can test for a few things myself before they taste anything.

There’s a sort-of obvious parallel here to delivering software. We do what we can to understand the customer and their tolerance for new ideas, we test to make sure it’s what we think is good enough, and then let them use it in order to evaluate quality. If I was cooking for dozens (or thousands) of people, I’d ask a few early tasters for opinions, just as I’d get feedback from early adopters on new software before rolling it out to the world.

Energy

When I talked about my Wonderland hike, I reflected on how fantastic it was to just let my mind wander aimlessly, but I didn’t reflect enough on how much time by myself energizes me. I know that the stereotypical American Thanksgiving involves a house full of people getting in each others way, but my other family members were busy with some other things around the house while I cooked. I was alone for several hours while I peeled things, cut things, cooked things and seasoned things. And it was awesome.

I don’t hate people, but I know that I get my energy from being alone with my thoughts. I’m already reading too many books at once (I will catch up!), but I did take a moment to go look at my notes on Quiet, by Susan Cain. It emphasizes the value of quiet, reflective time, and how it can be a source of personal power and energy. One of my highlighted quotes from the book is:

Solitude matters, and for some people, it's the air they breathe.

It was nice to have some clean air to breathe, and once again I’m reminded that when I feel load, anger, anxiety, or any other stress, that for me, time alone is worth it.

Epilogue

Dinner was great, we ate together, had some good wine, and played Settlers of Catan. And I just finished the last of the leftovers while I wrote this.

-A