What If Crunch Was a Good Thing
Mark Rober's latest video just came out. If you don't know who Mark Rober is, he's a brilliant engineer who helped build a Mars rover, then joined Apple, then started a YouTube channel, and then started a toy company. In his latest video, he showcases Zipline, a company poised to revolutionize on-site delivery in a way that feels very sci-fi and very possible all at the same time.
In his video, Mark didn't spend a lot of time talking about what Zipline will do. Instead, most of the video explores what they started doing six years ago in Rwanda. My son and I watched the video snuggled together Sunday morning. He turns 13 in five days, so those snuggle moments won't be around much longer. As we watched the video, I noticed that I kept saying "wow," and "amazing," and "unbelievable." I was watching those drones catapult into the air every 90 seconds and take life-saving medicine hundreds of miles across Rwanda and then return to headquarters all on their own. I watched Mark pack the medicine. I watched the drone shoot into the air. I watched the medicine drop to the hospital's front door. I watched the drone return and get caught by a hook and prepped for its next mission. Yet, it was still so unbelievable…and amazing…and just wow.
I watched my son out of the corner of my eye. I watched him laugh at Mark's funny jokes. I watched him study the drone. I watched him see the kids who stood at the fence watching the drones launch and return. I watched him as one kid showed off a drone he had built out of cardboard and scraps. I watched him wonder and dream and imagine. I watched him be inspired.
In that video, Mark interviewed the CEO of Zipline, who said "Our key insight was we were dumb. And, we basically always assumed we were dumb." How cool is that? Mark expanded on that by saying "All the best engineers I have ever known have that same level of humility. Knowing there's no better way to learn than to test and to break stuff."
The title of this blog is shamelessly stolen from Mark's toy company, Crunch Labs, which is all about helping kids learn to think like an engineer, including the inevitable "crunch" of failed attempts. What if we all thought like that? What if we celebrated failure? What if we built our corporate cultures around that concept? What if crunch was a good thing?
There are, of course, many companies who do have this culture to one degree or another. They recognize that crunch isn't just good, it's essential…and beautiful…and liberating…and makes the world a better place. It frees us to dream and wonder and be inspired. It launches drones. It saves lives.
It saves lives in Rwanda. It saves lives around the world. In researching for this blog, I ran across a company called Ribbon. Their mission is to "power every [health] care decision to be accessible, affordable, and high quality." How cool is that? It gets better. One of their values is "Stay hungry, keep improving." They elaborate on that: "We are humble. We will make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and be better because of those mistakes." Amazing. "Even if you break production or make a mistake that costs $30k in extra AWS costs (true story, it's happened), we won't point fingers." Unbelievable. "We practice blameless postmortems and find that building stronger safeguards against future failures helps bring the team closer." Just wow.
Crunch truly is a good thing. It's one of the modern practices that we champion at Tenger Ways. We're a brand new company focused on bringing modern practices to CIO organizations, including operational IT, business applications (e.g. Salesforce, NetSuite, Dynamics, etc), and enterprise data. We've already had the opportunity to work with some great companies who want to better embrace modern practices, including crunch. We have created - and continue to refine - solid frameworks based on our decades of experience at large enterprises and small startups that help companies adopt modern practices. In the spirt of YouTube, please like, subscribe, and comment! Likewise, please message me if you know of a company that could benefit from Tenger's services.