Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

In this job, respect is always more important than being liked. You can’t please everyone. Trying can be ruinous. CEOs have to make incredibly unpopular decisions—lay people off, kill projects, rearrange teams. Often you’ll have to take decisive action, hurt people to save the company, to cut out a cancer. You can’t skip surgery because you don’t want to upset Team Tumor. Delaying hard decisions, hoping problems will resolve themselves, or keeping pleasant but incompetent people on the team might make you feel better. It may give you the illusion of niceness. But it chips away at the company, bit by bit, and erodes the team’s respect for you. It turns you into a babysitter. And kids may like the babysitter at first—it’s nice to go to the local park, to watch movies and eat pizza. It’s fun for a while. But eventually kids want to go further, do more. They want to go skateboarding. They want to explore. So they might start testing their boundaries to see what they can get away with. They might roll their eyes when the babysitter tells them what to do. Because a babysitter is not a parent. All kids need someone they respect who truly knows them. Who gives them a push at the right time, who helps them grow.