Take Responsibility
There is a saying: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". I am convinced the same is true of effective organizations. One of those key similarities is the requirement that effective organizations require their members to take responsibility.1
When founders say they want to hire "passionate people", what they really mean is they want to hire people who are willing to take responsibility, to truly own, to treat the company and its problems as their own.2 In this sense, it can also be called a form of love. For what is love if not the declaration, "Your problems are my problems"?
By that same logic, we find a life without responsibilities, without cares or burdens, is but an empty and apathetic shell. There is no greater freedom or empowerment than choosing (and being able) to take responsibility and no greater measure of the weight of one's life than the responsibilities chosen to borne. You can choose to take responsibility for something, big or small, today - the freedom to have agency in the world is yours for the taking!345
This is meant to be a living repository of sucessful organizations or leaders that create environments for taking responsibility.6
Admiral Hyman Rickover
Admiral Hyman Rickover is commonly considered the "Father of the Nuclear Navy", created the Office of Naval Reactors within the US Navy and Department of Energy and developed the world's first nuclear powered submarine.
The sense of responsibility for doing a job right seems to be declining. In fact, the phrase "I am not responsible" has become a standard response in our society to complaints on a job poorly done. This response is a semantic error. Generally what person means is: "I cannot be held legally liable." Yet, from a moral or ethical point of view, the person who disclaims responsibility is correct: by taking this way out he is truly not responsible; he is irresponsible.
The unwillingness to act and to accept responsibility is a symptom of America's growing self-satisfaction with the status quo. The result is a paralysis of the spirit, entirely uncharacteristic of Americans during the previous stages of our history.
Rickover during congressional testimony on who was responsible for the success, or failure, of Naval Reactors:
But the lesson, I suggest, is this: You have yet to bring forth an individual in that program who will say to you, "I am responsible." They rotate people and delegate responsibility in the usual military way. You do not have that problem with my program. I have many people carrying out tasks in the program, and I hold them accountable to me for those tasks. But if anything goes wrong in my program, is there any doubt in your minds who is responsible? I will tell you right now, in case there is any uncertainty about it: I am responsible. And I will never try to tell you otherwise. You may call me up before you, and I will answer for whatever happens.
CHAIRMAN: We understand that, Admiral, and we value it.
RICKOVER: Don't be fooled. I heard an Army general testifying the other day to the Atomic Energy Commission about the proposed nuclear-powered battle tank. The commissioners were concerned about safety, and they asked this general some questions about it. He looked them in the eye and said with great earnestness, "Gentlemen, I take full responsibility for this project." But that general won't be around when and if that project ever comes to fruition. He'll be rotated or retired. I won't. That's the difference.
— Rickover Effect, page 166-167
One anecdote of how Rickover distributed overlapping fields of responsibility and how he reprimanded his team for not taking responsibility of seemingly small potential issues. For context: an unknown corrosion product was building up during testing of the first nuclear reactor designs.
"Rockwell: Are there any implications here for safety? Does it matter to you if pumps or valves freeze up or reactor control rods stick?"
"Yes, sir. That would be disastrous, but . . ."
"Dammit, then it's your responsibility to tell me so. One hundred percent your responsibility. It's also 100 percent Marks's, because the pumps and valves are his. And if he weren't out of town, he'd be here and I'd be chewing him out too. And it's 100 percent Panoff's, because he's submarine project officer. And it's 100 percent Geiger's, because he's in charge of the Pittsburgh office. The existence of these other guys doesn't change your responsibility one whit. Do you guys all understand that? I don't want to have to keep going over that point again."
It turned out that the sticking of valves and bearings and the buildup of radioactive corrosion products were two aspects of a real problem, which came within a hairbreadth of dooming the entire pressurized-water reactor concept, the concept on which nearly all of the world's nuclear power plants are based.
— Rickover effect, page 127
Mr. Beast
Mr. Beast is the most subscribed to Youtube channel of all time as of this writing.
From the leaked Mr. Beast playbook: responsibility is never delegated, but always something that must be owned.
people do and it's one of the reasons why we fail so much. I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page. "Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done." Now this person who also has tons of shit going on is aware of how important this discussion is and you guys can prio it accordingly. Now let's say Tyler and you agree it will be done in 5 days. YOU DON'T GET TO SET A REMINDER FOR 5 DAYS AND NOT TALK TO HIM FOR 5 DAYS! Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date. I want less excuses in this company. Take ownership and don't give your project a chance to fail. Dumping your bottleneck on someone and then just walking away until it's done is lazy and it gives room for error and I want you to have a mindset that God himself couldn't stop you from making this video on time. Check. In. Daily. Leave. No. Room. For. Error.
Taking responsibility requires clear ownership:
Communication Lines
It's very important as a company we maintain proper communication lines. On set and off set. There is always someone responsible for everything on the video and if multiple people are responsible for the same thing, then that's a problem and needs to be fixed immediately. Ideally when communicating across departments you go up and then over. If you skip and just go below you.
Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping was the paramount leader of China and the Chinese Communist Party from 1978 to 1989 and was responsible for many of the market reforms that sparked China's incredible economic growth.
Deng recognized the need for greater dynamism in the party bureaucracy, to orient more on economic growth and results, rather than ideological correctness:
On February 29, the last day of the Fifth Plenum, Deng spelled out what he expected from the party—efficient administration. Sounding like a factory manager with a military background, he said, "Meetings should be small and short, and they should not be held at all unless the participants have prepared. . . . If you don't have anything to say, save your breath. . . . The only reason to hold meetings and to speak at them is to solve problems. . . . There should be collective leadership in settling major issues. But when it comes to particular jobs or to decisions affecting a particular sphere, individual responsibility must be clearly defined and each person should be held responsible for the work entrusted to him."
— Deng Xiaoping by Ezra Vogel
And in a separate address from Deng to the CCP leadership at the beginning of his tenure (emphasis my own):
Right now a big problem in enterprises and institutions across the country and in Party and government organs at various levels is that nobody takes responsibility. In theory, there is collective responsibility. In fact, this means that no one is responsible. When a task is assigned, nobody sees that it is properly fulfilled or cares whether the result is satisfactory. So there is an urgent need to establish a strict responsibility system…
When problems arise, it doesn't help just to blame the planning commissions and Party committees concerned, as we do now — the particular persons responsible must feel the heat….
To make the best use of the responsibility system, the following measures are essential.
First, we must extend the authority of the managerial personnel. Whoever is given responsibility should be given authority as well. Whoever it is… he should have his own area not only of responsibility but of authority, which must not be infringed upon by others. The responsibility system is bound to fail if there is only responsibility without authority.
Second, we must select personnel wisely and assign duties according to ability. We should seek out existing specialists and train new ones, put them in important positions, raise their political status and increase their material benefits. What are the political requirements in selecting someone for a job? The major criterion is whether the person chosen can work for the good of the people and contribute to the development of the productive forces and to the socialist cause as a whole.
John Grier Hibben
Presbyterian minister, Mathematician, and President of Princeton University
Responsibility, however, can never be dissipated by diffusion…For responsibility is by its nature something intensive and not extensive. It can be divided among many, but it is not thereby diminished in degree….Dividends can be divided into separate parts, but not responsibility. Responsibility can never be conceived in the light of a magnitude. It belongs to the class of things which, when divided, each part is equal to the whole.
Responsibility in this respect is like pleasure which, when shared, is not lessened, but the rather increased, thus the glory of the whole is each one's share. It can be divided among many without loss. So, also, the appreciation of beauty in nature or in art shows no diminishing returns, although the number who experience the joy of it may be increased without limit.
If a man would escape all responsibility he must place himself wholly outside of the relations of life, for life is responsibility. As we have seen, responsibility remains with us even though we may ask others to assume it; we share it with others, but our portion is the same; when we turn our backs upon it, we find it still facing us; we flee from it, and however far it may be, we behold it waiting for us at the journey's end.
Steve Jobs
One such lesson could be called the "Difference Between the Janitor and the Vice President," and it's a sermon Jobs delivers every time an executive reaches the VP level. Jobs imagines his garbage regularly not being emptied in his office, and when he asks the janitor why, he gets an excuse: The locks have been changed, and the janitor doesn't have a key. This is an acceptable excuse coming from someone who empties trash bins for a living. The janitor gets to explain why something went wrong. Senior people do not. "When you're the janitor," Jobs has repeatedly told incoming VPs, "reasons matter." He continues: "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering." That "Rubicon," he has said, "is crossed when you become a VP." (Apple has about 70 vice presidents out of more than 25,000 non-retail-store employees.)
Elon Musk/SpaceX
Whatever requirement or constraint you have, it must come with a name, not a department. Because you can't ask the departments. You have to ask a person. And that person who's putting forward the requirement or constraint must agree that they must take responsibility for that requirement.
Otherwise you could have a requirement that basically an intern two years ago randomly came up with, off the cuff. And they're not even at the company anymore.
Message to Garcia
The point I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter and did not ask, "Where is he at?" By the Eternal! There is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college in the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this or that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies; do the thing - "carry a message to Garcia!"
Palantir
I recently came across several excellent posts from ex-Palantir Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) describing the unique culture and organizational structure of Palantir:
Much like the sometimes abrasive French waiter cares more about you having the best meal than you do, FDE's are trained to view themselves as owners of their customers' businesses. You must hold yourself accountable to the end results of the customers business and try to act as if you are the CEO, but with zero authority. This alignment constantly demands more of our product. We have a visceral connection to how much more a customer could win if the product could just do a little bit more for them. Instead of a customer facing engineer whose actual job is to reduce scope to shrink the customers ambition down into what a product does today, we own that every single reason the customer might lose is a shortcoming in what our product can do for them. Those shortcomings define our roadmap.
And how Palantir's Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) are empowered unlike others:
I regularly speak with former Palantir FDE's who have taken roles at these companies and describe it as feeling like they are in jail. They are constrained by the business strategy and thus the perimeter of what they can sign up for.
Footnotes
- Note that it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for successful organization building. Hiring the right people is definitely another precondition. ↑
- The cause of Google's inability to ship products could be entirely summarized as this: no one is incentivized or empowered to be responsible for a product. More broadly, many of the ills of corporate America could be described as a lack of responsibility taking: from the pervasive offshoring of responsibility to management consultants, to the forced narrative of AI automating away all work and therefore all responsibility, to the sheer laziness of resorting to lobbying or financial wizardry to maintain market share over building actual products that provide value. ↑
- I recognize that obviously it is not possible to take responsibility for every "insert global problem". Obviously, there are always circumstances that prevent someone from taking ownership and being empowered to be responsible for something. Trust me, I work in government. It is the role of good leaders to, as Deng says, extend authority, so that responsibility is given with the appropriate sphere of authority. These can all be true and yet it can still be the case that far too many people lack the willingness to take responsibility. ↑
- Many of the more personal posts on this substack trace the evolution of how I slowly decided to take greater responsibility in my life: from leaving a startup to take a more active role working on climate policy in the federal government to taking on responsibility for the development of my hometown [constituent organizing][YIMBY][e-bikes], the city where I was born, raised, and that I deeply love. ↑
- And of course, we have very famous instances where individuals in history tried to unsucessfully absolve themselves of responsibility. ↑
- post idea: inventory of anti-responsibility practices, where people are actively disincentized from being held responsible. Egregious examples of management consultants, political appointees, journalists, etc ↑
- h/t Rickover, who circulated this essay to his staff as reading ↑
- This essay has made its rounds in the U.S. military leadership training circuit and so naturally, there is a counter-response on command guidance, titled "Garcia Who". It is also instructive in good leadership and not in conflict with the thesis of this post. From "Garcia Who": More to the point, Col. Rowan did not depart after receiving a one-sentence imperative from President McKinley. In fact, he did not meet with McKinley at all, but rather with Col. Arthur Wagner, head of the Bureau of Military Intelligence, who gave Col. Rowan an extensive briefing on the mission. Careful plans had been made. The U.S. government had gone to great lengths to secure help for Col. Rowan from the Cuban underground in Cuba and Jamaica. Col. Rowan also received subsequent instructions by cable in Jamaica after the war broke out. Throughout his epic journey, Col. Rowan received escorts, supplies and cooperation. This support was not the product of brash improvisation, as Hubbard would have us believe, but of carefully prepared and synchronized plans in conjunction with determined execution by Col. Rowan and others. None of this detracts from Col. Rowan's spectacular performance of a hazardous mission. Andrew Rowan displayed admirable initiative and responsibility, if not to the incredible degree that Hubbard would have us believe. ↑