One squalid venture, three metaphors and a big violin

I worked for a while for a pretty grubby startup. Lots of extra-marital intra-office hanky-panky. A CEO who never understood what we did and never cared to. Who hid in his office as people were laid off. Who played a round at Pebble Beach with his brother-in-law on company time with investors’ money. Colleagues slashing each others' tires, giving/getting head in the parking lot, telling new hires at welcome drinks what a mistake they'd made by joining. There were good, kind people making heroic efforts, but the culture was top-down shitty. Writing the full story would make my skin crawl. Reading it would make yours. We weren’t on the same wavelength as human beings.

“On the same wavelength” comes from 1920s radio, where transmitter and receiver reached a consensus on where to meet so listener and speaker could connect. The alternative is unpleasant noise and general discomfort. This workplace was unpleasant and uncomfortable. We could never have “sung from the same hymn sheet,” though we tried (everyone contributed a song to a CD for the holidays; the CEO whined that one of the songs was too long and boring). Neither metaphor, not wavelengths nor hymn sheets, hits the spot though.

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Sophie and I saw the Seattle Symphony at McCaw Hall in November. Beethoven and Bruckner. And because I’m a cheapskate and philistine, I bought the cheapest tickets which, in this hall, meant the front row. This was our sightline.

We were five feet from four violinists, and we couldn’t hear any of them. At least not individually. Orchestras predate microphones and loudspeakers so have many instances of the same instrument. Sound is very arithmetic: add lots of small synchronized sounds together and you get bigger ones that can fill a room. Each violin was lost in the sound of Big Violin. Everyone committed wholeheartedly to the collective, to playing their part, no more, no less, which takes respect, resolve, listening, and lack of ego. Everything that wretched startup lacked. The next venture had buckets.

It was a functional family. The founder asked in my interview if I would mind lugging servers around. Not at all; we all stand together. We played fair. Leaders were responsible and accountable, but never superior. Disagreement—and there was plenty—never meant discord or disrespect and it strengthened the strategy and our ability to execute it. Strategy is never easy, but it was no harder than it needed to be. Because we “resonated.”

Resound is a 14th century word, meaning to “re-echo, sound back, return an echo; reverberate with.” It became “resonate” in the 1850s when the stethoscope helped physicians diagnose by listening to sounds bounce around the chest cavity, but resonating only started to mean feelings and emotions in the late 1970s.

You need to be on the same wavelength, share a hymn sheet, but resonating involves a willingness, a shared ownership, that those others might not. It’s no longer obvious where the sound—the idea, the story, the strategy—starts and ends, and it doesn’t matter. All you hear is us. All you hear is Big Violin.

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I went to Yoga with Douglas this morning. He plays the harmonium throughout and finishes with us all—12 of us today—humming “om.” I know, I know, yoga and om, but at least no one’s slashing tires and if they’re getting each other off in parked cars, they’re doing it discretely. Anyway, when we all buy in to the omming, something extraordinary happens. Something like the violins in McCaw Hall. We stop hearing ourselves. We resonate with each other. And all we can hear is us. The om is everywhere but it buzzes right here, deep in here. It comes from listening, committing equally, and backing ego off. It doesn’t happen for you if you keep quiet or try to drown others out. It’s not for faint hearts or loudmouths. It's a sweet spot.