So it is absolutely an honour to be back on
this stage again. I was thinking earlier today to four years
ago, the first time that I got to come to Lead Dev London, and, in thinking back on
what has happened in my career over the last four years, that was a watershed moment for
me to realise that there was a whole crowd of people in the world that cared about engineering
management and doing it really well. And so I'm I am thankful that this event exists,
and I'm thankful that we get to spend time together today. Let's start out with a hand for Meri and the
organisers for putting on such a great event. [Applause]. So, like Meri said, I'm a Senior Engineering
Manager at GitHub, and I'm incredibly grateful they've given me the time to be here with
you today. If you've got an alert or a pull request for
a vulnerable dependency on one of your repositories, that's the work that the wonderful humans
that I work with do, and I would love to hear your thoughts on any of those features. I also have a bagful of stickers, so, if you
have stickers, I will happily share people. I love to tell stories. That's what I'm going to do right now, because
we've just had a mind-blowing amount of amazing information give to us today, so at the end
of the day, it's nice to sit back, relax, and enjoy a story. That's what I aim to give you. So I'm going to start, if you've ever been
to Paris, and most of you probably have given the proximity, you remember the moment that
you first spotted the Eiffel Tower. Maybe it was out your plane window, peeking
out the windows of the Jardin des Tuileries. It gave you chills that said I'm really in
Paris! Even if you've never been to Paris, you likely
still recognise the Eiffel Tower any time you see it on print or in film. It's an emblem of Paris and France and universally
recognised. This past summer when I was over for Lead
Dev last year, I had the amazingly good fortune to be standing in front of the Eiffel Tower
with my family. I'm not one to foist a family vacation photo
on a room full of strangers but this picture my wife took of my then seven-year-old son
was one of my favourite in the world. We finished a nice lunch on Champ de Mars. My son took a long time drawing the Eiffel
Tower. This was his third iteration, the third drawing
he did in the span of about 30 minutes because he just wanted to get it right so badly. The Eiffel Tower does this to you. It pulls you in and makes you pay attention. I knew a little bit of the history of the
tower already. As I sat there watching my son draw, I found
myself looking up at the tower and wondering about the circumstances that brought it into
existence. When it was completed in 1889, the Eiffel
Tower at 1,000 feet tall became the tallest structure by doubling the height of the just-completed
Washington Monument. How did Gustave Eiffel pilled such an ostentatious
piece in the first place? We need to know a little bit about French
history. This is Napoleon the Third, the nephew of
Napoleon Bonaparte. He was elected as President of France in 1848,
and at the end of his four-year term, he decided that he wasn't ready to go and so he threw
a coup for himself and declared himself the Emperor. Now, the French people weren't exactly thrilled
about being under an Emperor again. Most wanted a republic, but Bonaparte led
people into prosperity that led them not able to revolt because they were too happy and
enjoying themselves too much. That prosperity ended abruptly about the Franco-Prussian
war in 1870. They picked a fight to the north to counter
their growing influence and power in the region. He was captured in a massive defeat at the
Battle of Sedan on 4 September 1870. You can see Napoleon handing over his sword. It was an embarrassment for him and France. After the capture, they set up a new republican
government and got the Prussians to go home. The only way the French got them to leave
was by paying huge reparations to pressure. Those reparations plunged France deep into
debt. The prosperity was gone. Not only were they broke, but their defeat
in the war was a huge blow. It was a huge blow to the collective French
ego. Fast-forward ten years. By the early 1880s, ten years later, France
was nearly back on its feet. It had largely recovered from the defeat and
subsequent reparations after the Franco-Prussian war and the Republican government enacted
after the defeat held its own against plenty of challenges and was guiding France back
into prosperity. What's more, the 30-year renovation of Paris
by Georges-Eugène Haussmann replacing the streets with broad tree-lined streets was
named after him. Paris was ready to show off. What better way to do that than put on a World's
Fair. Prince Albert had had the idea in 1851 to
invite all the nations of the world to come to London and though off their progress. The French liked the idea so much that they
hosted their own one in three times and again in 1868 eight years after Napoleon's defeat
at the Battle of Sedan. It was meant to mark the French recovery from
the war but the French were so embroiled in domestic politics they didn't start preparing
for the exhibition until about six months before it started. The whole thing was a bit of a shambles. And so in the 1880s, a movement to host another
world fair in France was picking up steam. An organising committee was formed to start
making preparations and the first thing they did was pick a date and what better date than
the 100th anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille. The Storming of the Bastille is the symbolic
start of the French revolution and celebrated every year in France, so the 100th anniversary
of this was a big deal. Each of the exhibitions in Paris had been
more grandiose than the last, so the committee also announced a competition to design and
build a spectacular centrepiece monument for the fair. And that competition got the attention of
these two gentlemen, Maurice Kochelin and Émile Nouguier, two structural engineers. The two had finished working together on the
beautiful Garabit Viaduct, at 470 feet above the Truyère river below it was it was the
highest bridge in the world for 1884. They had the idea of using the exact same
engineering principles to build a giant tower as the centrepiece of the exposition and got
to work. And this sketch is what they came up. You can see the sketches of a few famous objects
on the right to show the scale - the Statue of Liberty, the Arc de Triomphe. They were proposing a tower 300 metres tall
- 100 feet the tallest structure in the world. Kochelin and Nouguier took the boss to their
boss to pitch. As you may guess, their boss was none other
than Gustave Eiffel. He had been a bit lukewarm on the competition. His firm had finished the viaduct and not
looking for another project. His beautiful city, Paris, kept spending money
on the grand exhibitions. They built buildings and tear them back down. He felt he wanted to build things of significant,
things that would last. The design competition had a requirement that
the centrepiece monument be he's a to dismantle and that was a complete non-starter for Eiffel. Kochelin and Nouguier hoped to change his
mind but it didn't work. It we don't enough. Kochelin and Nouguier got this guy involved,
Stephen Sauvestre, who suggested several modifications to the design to make it more useful and aesthetically
pleasing. If you look carefully at Kochelin's drawing,
you can see the modifications sketched in in pencil. There's a glass observation pavilion, and
at the top of the tower, a cupola containing another observation deck and capped by a French
flag. In the final design, you can see the three
observation detection, as well as the lace-like decorative arches also suggested by Sauvestre. This got Eiffel excited. A tower where people could view all of Paris
from heights previously reserved to balloonists? It would be possible to do weather observations
and make radio transmissions from such a high point. And so he bought the design patent from Kochelin
and Nouguier and Sauvestre and began the hard work of getting the design selected. Now, the idea was immediately popular with
the French public. They just loved the idea of dwarfing the just-completed
Washington Monument and besting the upstart Americans! It was not, however, immediately popular with
the architects, artists and most importantly politicians around Paris. And so Eiffel went on the offensive. This was his first writing on the subject,
and, if you speak French, forgive me: "Tour en fer de 300 mètres de hauteur destinée
à l'Exposition de 1889". Roughly translated as 300 metre high iron
tower. This particular copy was sold at auction in
2015 for justify of £8,000 was addressed to Georges Boulanger, a prominent politician
but Eiffel was giving copies of this to anyone who give him an audience. They were happy to ask him questions. One of Eiffel's chief critics was Paul Planat. Now, Planat was not impressed with Eiffel's
design and felt it was counter to the work that Haussmann had done to beautify Paris. Specifically in the 1 May 1886 issue, he said,
"Eiffel's design is nothing more than an inartistic scaffolding of crossbars and angled iron." Pierre Tirard, decried it as "Anti-artistic,
contrary to French genius. A project more in character with America where
taste is not yet very developed than Europe, much less France." [Applause]. Charles Garnier, a prominent French architect,
led the most famous protest against Eiffel's tower, forming the committee of 300. One member for each motor of the proposed
tower's height. It was made up of some of the most prominent
figures in the architecture and arts world in Paris. They said in part, imagine for a moment a
giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smoke stack, crushing under
its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Louvre, all of our humiliate the monuments will disappear
in this ghastly dream. He had a bit of a flair for the dramatic. But it was around this time that Édouard
Lockroy was named Minister of Trade and put in charge of the exhibition and therefore
wrapping up the design competition. Lockroy had been among those Eiffel had lobbied
with this paper. Despite the protests of the artists and architects,
he and the rest of the political class were really coming around to this idea of building
a tower that was twice as tall as the ones the Americans had built. And they quite liked Eiffel's way of doing
this. In calling for final proposals, Lockroy called
for the tower to be at least 300 metres in height and maybe it might be built of iron. Some of the final entrants included a 300-metre
lighthouse built of granite to signify the enlightenment of Paris which would have crushed
itself under its own weight, another a 300-metre tall water sprinkler in case Paris plunged
into drought so they could water the new gardens that Haussmann had installed. My favourite, though was was a nod to the
fact that this would be the 100th anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille. To honour that, someone proposed a 300-metre
tall guillotine! [Laughter]. Eiffel's design was the only one that was
practical or possible to build, and so on June 12, 1886, Lockroy gave Eiffel the news
that his design had been collected. His joy was short-lived, however, as the government
balk at the estimate of £800,000 for build the tower. The government had originally committed to
fund the full tower but quickly backtracked to an offer of 1.5 million francs, a quarter
of what he felt it was going to get it done. Eiffel would need to secure investors for
the remaining 4.5 francs, and to do that, he needed to be able to make money from the
tower, and so he requested two provisions from the French government: number one, that
he be allowed to charge admission for going up the tower above and in addition to the
money that people had paid to get into the fair, and number 2, that the tower remain
intact for 20 years and not the one year as originally slated for so he would have more
time to make his money back. The government agreed in principle but this
created another problem. You see, the exhibition was to be held on
the Champ de Mars in the 7th Arrondissement. It was the French army's primary army drilling
ground and Eiffel proposed to put his tower right in the middle of the Champ de Mars. The army were resigned to losing the ground
during the exposition. It couldn't be avoided. But having a gigantic tower for 19 years? It wouldn't do. After much negotiating, it was agreed that
the tower, located here in the north-west portion of the Champ de Mars leaving most
of the field open for military drilling once the exhibition was dismantled. Eiffel knew that this would complicate his
foundation, but he had little choice but to compromise if he wanted to get the tower built. French bureaucracy being what it was, it took
another six anxious months for the contract to be finalised and the funding to be put
in place. But then Eiffel had a signed contract in his
hand. He immediately began gathering supplies and
hiring workers, at on January 28th, 1887, Eiffel's workers began work on the foundation. They had two years until the planned opening
of the exposition. I mentioned that moving the tower closer to
the Seine complicated the foundation work and here's what I mean by that. Each leg of the Eiffel Tower rests on four
six and a half foot slabs of concrete, one for the principal girders of each leg. The east and south leg rested on solid ground
on the Champ de Mars side of the site. The west and north side were on the site closest
to the Seine. The ground there was made of millions of years
of sediment government from the river, much less stable. Each of the four slabs for the two legs on
that side of the site required two piles to be driven 72 feet into the ground to hit bedrock. Then once they had done that easily little
task, they had to build the six and a half foot thick foundation slabs below the water
table of the Seine, so water infiltration was a huge problem for them. This is how they involved it. Eiffel and his team used his giant caissons,
and they started at the surface, and as they dug out the foundation, they slowly sunk into
the ground. As they sunk into the ground, they filled
them with compressed air to stop the water infiltrating until they poured the concrete
which was dried and cured. Five months later on June 30th, 1887, the
foundations were finished. This is what the foundation for each of the
four legs looks like. It each has to bolts embedded into it to bolt
the shoe of the primary girder. They are about four inches in diameter at
25 feet long. They're not small. As soon as this was done, Eiffel's team quickly
began the iron work. You can see how the primary girder appears
as an angle. The angle here is two fold serving two purposes. Number one, it takes the vertical load of
the tower to be borne vertically and horizontally when you're building on unstable ground. Also remember, this was the tallest thing
that anybody had ever built. They thought they knew how much strength they
need to counter the winds 1,000 feet in the air but they didn't know for sure, but angling
the legs into the ground gives the tower more lateral stability to withstand the winds. Work proceeded quickly due to the precision
in Eiffel's office. There were 100 drawings made and a thousand
6, 329 drawings of specific parts and pieces needed to build the tower. In each of these drawings, each of the rivet
holes was calculated down to one tenth of a mill either and one second of an ark. Incredibly precise. These precisely drawn parts were forged and
drilled on the outskirts of Paris and brought to site via horse drawn carriage. Henry Ford wouldn't invent his Model T for
a few more decades. Early in 1888, they reached a first stage. Because the rest of the tower would rise from
the first platform, it was critical that the four legs of the tower be level at the first
platform. The tower was so tall that a few millimetres
out of true at this point could result in a foot or more of variation at the top of
the tower. Eiffel's plan for dealing with this was ingenious. Each leg was built at a very slightly steeper
angle than it needed to be, and we're talking a centimetre or two. You can't see it in this picture, but the
legs aren't resting on that scaffolding that you can see there. At the critical point of support where each
leg meets the scaffolding, there's a sandbox. The reason the sandbox is there is because
it allows them to make millimetre-precise adjustments in the height of the legs. They would pull the work out. A little bit of sand run out, plug it up. Repeat that process over and over again, until
they got all four of the legs of the tower level. Once they got them level, all they had to
do was join them together with the platform to lock them in place. So it was on 20 March 1888, the first and
most complicated portion of the tower was completed. They still still had 800 feet to go and only
a year to do it. As they built up from the first level, it
became increasingly complicated to get the parts they needed up to where they were working
and to solve this, they decided to use the first-level platform as a staging area. This would work is it they had a large steam
crane on the first level. Internal combustion engines wouldn't become
commonplace for a few decades. It would lift parts from ground level up to
the first properly. The first platform they built a small railroad,
a circular railroad and place the parts on it and truck them round to whichever leg they
needed to haul that part up. If you look closely, you can see more small
steam cranes up at the very top up where they're actually building. These were mounted to the elevator traction
of the tower and so they followed the elevator all the way up. By July, the tower was complete up to the
second level. If you look in the background here, you can
see the other buildings of the ex position starting to take form as well. At this point, the exposition is slated to
start in eight months and they still have 600 feet to go. Another issue they had to solve was how to
rivet pieces together so far off the ground. It was assembled almost entirely by riveting. The prefabricated parts were brought to the
tower, hauled up, put into place, and once they were certain they had the assembly right,
they would have the tedious process of driving in the rivets by hand. It is basically a screw with no threads, and
a small steel shaft. The way it works is when you've got the rivet
in the hole, you form another head on the other side of the rivet to lock the two pieces
together. In order to do this, you have to heat the
rivet up to red hot so that it is malleable. In most construction sites there would be
a forge heating up the rivet and rivet boys. That's not an option here, because if they
do this at the Eiffel Tower, if they make it up to where they're doing the construction,
they will be cool again and not malleable. Instead they used portable forges. There is a worker heat ing rivets up in the
port able forge. On the left, there's another worker that is
holding a tool to shape that second head in the rivet. Then there's a fourth worker swinging a hammer
to apply the force necessary to mould that red-hot metal into a second head. As the metal cooled, it would contract and
form an incredibly tight bond. It's an incredibly secure way to construct
something. But when you're doing it by hand, it's tedious. They had to do this 2.5 million times because
there are 2.5 million rivets in the Eiffel Tower. In all at the peak of construction, there
were 24-man riveting crews and the portable forges would go to the very top. With all the really complicated stuff behind
them other than just the sheer height of the tower, the top part of the tower went up quite
smoothly. They added about 100 feet each month until
they topped the tower out on 15 March, 1889. When the tower was structurally compete pretty,
Eiffel invited reporters and dignitaries to scale the 1,710 steps to the top with him
to raise the French flag at the top. Eiffel is said to have remarked at the time,
"Gentlemen, the French flag is the only flag in the world with a 300-metre flagpole." The reason they had to climb the stairs is
because the elevators weren't ready yet. This might have had something to do with the
fact that they were the most complex passenger operators ever built. Actually, I don't have time to tell you about
them today, but if you would like to hear about them, come and find me, and I will tell
you about the elevators. But because of this, the first 30,000 visitors
to the tower, including Mr Eiffel here on the left, had to climb the 1,710 steps to
the top. Despite that, the tower was a huge success. Eiffel was figuratively on top of the world. When it was completed in 1889, the Eiffel
Tower, at 1,063 feet was the tallest structure on earth, 500 feet tall remember than the
Washington Monument. It's the same height as an 81-storey building. It would hold that record as the tallest structure
in the world until the Chrysler building was topped out 40 young years. It held the record for 41 years. No structure built subsequent to that has
held the record for that long. It's a remarkable achievement that broke all
kinds of new ground. And it's the kind of work that all of us say
we want to be doing, right? We want to push the envelope. We want so solve hard problems that no-one
else has solved. We want to ship amazing software. So what can we learn from Gustave Eiffel that
will help us do that? Well, to start, I want to try something: I'm
going to put a word up on screen, and I want you without thinking about it to give me a
thumbs up or thumbs down to show me your general feelings about the subject. Get your thumb ready. Okay. Here's your word. Lots of thumbs down. A few scattered thumbs up. Exactly what I would expect. I'm glad too because I don't know what we
would do with the rest of our time together if we were like I love politics, it is my
favourite. Most of us would prefer just to keep our heads
down and write code and lead our teams, right? A study published in the Wall Street Journal
back in 2011 asked participants about their approach to office politics, giving them these
three options. Number one, it's best to know what had an
is going on but not to participate directly. Number 2, it's best to stay out of office
politics completely. Or number 3, it's best to participate so that
you can get ahead. How do you think people answered? Between the group that wanted to stay in form
but not participate, and the group that stayed out of things altogether, fully 83 per cent
of participants picked an answer saying they didn't participate in office politics. So you're not alone. I bet some of us have even left jobs because
they were too political. I know I certainly have. Here's the thing: and it took me way too long
to come to terms with this: every organisation is political. You can't escape politics by just moving around
enough until you find the right boss or the right company. And the reason is that any time you have more
than one person working together on something, you will have politics, because politics is
nothing more than how humans share power and make decisions together. It's all it is. That means that doing anything meaningful
in your company, getting to work on things that you work on or complex as overhauling
your company's hiring practices requires you to understand and participate in the politics
of your company. There's no other way to do it. I know. What a positive and uplifting to end our day
on! [Laughter]. But stay with me. Politics doesn't have to be negative and gross. There's a couple of thing that Eiffel does
that give us a great example to follow in doing politics the right way. Let's remind - let's rewind back to the work
he did before the tower was built. Remember this paper that Eiffel put together
to promote his plan for the tower? He went around from official to official handing
out autographed copies, talking about what he wanted to build. What Eiffel was doing here was pretty simple:
just networking and self-promotion. How many of us love networking and self-promotion? Just really love it? It's kind of the same bucket as politics but
they get a bad rap they doesn't entirely deserve. Let me reframe these two terms for you. A little less intimidating, right? That's all Eiffel was doing. He would invite somebody to lunch, or more
likely to spend an afternoon on the terrace of a Parisian cafe polishing off a bottle
of wine together, and he would tell stories. He would regale them with tales of building
the Garabit viaduct and that the bridge was only displaced by eight millimetres when a
fully loaded train past, just as his mathematical models predicted. Then talk about the French tower, and how
the tower would pass the height of the great obelisk that the Americans had been working
on. By the end of the conversation, he would have
made a friend. Importantly, Eiffel didn't just do this with
people on the exhibition committee. The fact that this document is autographed
by Georges Boulanger tells us that. Boulanger was in government and would go on
to be war minister but he had absolutely no decision-making power for the exhibition. That's what networking is all about. Just making friends. Maybe you'll be in position to help one another
at some point but that's not an immediate focus. What does that mean for you? Grab coffee with your product manager. So they're a human to you and not someone
that drops things in your backlog and sets unrealistic dates. Get lunch with someone in sales because they're
the ones hearing the questions that your customers are asking, and most have absolutely no idea
how we do what we do. They love to hear us talk about it. The second part, self-promotion, is about
making sure others know what you've been working on in a non-bragging informative way. In a perfect world, doing work would be enough. Your manager's busy, not paying nearly as
much attention to you as you think they are so you have to tell them what you've been
working on and what you've accomplished is a big part of how you build your reputation
at work with your manager and other folks. If you want a promotion, or build more influence
so that you can effect big changes, this is how you do it. If you want something to help you to learn
something more this effectively, I can't recommend this book timely enough. It's full of timeless advice on how to do
it well in a productive non-scummy way that benefits you and the person you're talking
to. It's a very authentic book. The other thing Eiffel has to teach us, let's
go back to the contract he signed on January 28th, 1887. The French government proposed to cover the
cost of the tower but at the last minute balk agreed only to cover a of the cost. At this point it would have been easy for
Eiffel to play hardball, but that's not what he did. Instead, he did a bit of negotiation. Now, this word probably makes you think of
buying a used car and trying not to get screwed, so let me reframe it as well. Co-operation. That's really all a good-faith negotiation
is: working together to find an outcome that works for everyone. Now, Eiffel understood the French government's
position, and he had empathy for the government representatives that he was talking to, putting
on an exhibition is expensive and they frankly didn't have the six million francs to give
him. So instead of walking away, he worked with
them to satisfy his need for six million francs to build this tower and their need to only
give him 1.5 million of those francs. He found that mutually beneficial solution
in him being able to charge admission for 20 years. As an aside, that turned out to be a phenomenal
deal for Gustave Eiffel. An amazing 1.8 million people ascended the
tower during the exposition, and they paid an average of three francs for the privilege,
so if you do the math, Eiffel had made his money back by the end of the exposition. The rest of the 20 years were pure profit. Now, when working for something we want, there's
a temptation to see that process as an a zero-sum game. Someone has to win and someone has too lose. He needed 6 million francs to build tower,
it's that or bust. Your executive needs functionality delivered
by a date and you tell them it can't be done, absolutely impossible. In reality, there's almost always a middle
ground where everyone gets most of what they want. The trick is figuring out what it actually
is that everyone in the situation wants, and why they want it. It requires you to exercise empathy, and compassion,
and ask probing and open-ended questions that help you build understanding. So when your executives start pushing for
an unrealistic date, try is to understand why. Look to see if there is a smaller piece of
functionality you could meet early. If you learn how to negotiate well, Herb Cohen's
classic, You Can Negotiate Anything. The title is a little cheesy, but this book
changed the course of my career. Cohen teaches a style of negotiation that
resolves around understanding everyone's needs, especially your own which is off the trickiest
part, and getting to agreement by finding mutually beneficial ways to fulfil them, and
this book is one of my most important tools as manager. I use these principles all the time. What about bad politics? Are there organisations and bosses that are
overly political? Of course there are. If you find yourself in an organisation that
regularly promotes those that play the game instead of those doing good work, you might
have to leave. Or if you find yourself working for a boss
that always takes credit for your good work, there might not be enough networking and self-promotion
to get around that. But if Gustave Eiffel didn't find the French
government too political to navigate and negotiate with, there's a good chance that bar is higher
than you think it is. There's another layer we need to consider
here as well before I wrap up: everything I've shared for us so far has been for us
as individuals, but this is lead developer, right? What does this have to do with how we lead
our teams. The convention al wisdom around tune -in leaders
who lead tear teams is this. I try not to use profanity on stage but this
is such a common term in leadership circles I'm not sure even saying "shit umbrella" even
counts as cursing. That's the common wisdom from politics and
leadership. I will give you a couple of seconds to read
this tweet. Basically, what Jason is saying here is you
might have to engage in organisational politics to get your job done, but you should shield
your teams from politics which Jason calls bullshit here, so they can keep their heads
down and stay productive. There is some truth to this. Constant disruption, getting jerked from priority
to priority is counterproductive for your team, and heads down writing eight hours of
code will feel productive to them and you too, but the full reality is more nuanced. The downside of being an impervious shit umbrella
is you become a choke point for information to your team. Over time, you will disconnect your team from
the mission of your organisation and think you're doing good things all the time. Since we know that sense of purpose is an
important motivator for most humans, that disconnection can quickly lead to dissatisfaction,
and even leading your company. What's more, putting yourself in that spot
as a leader means you're bearing a burden that no human is designed to bear. You're all but guaranteed to burn out in that
position. So what do we do instead? One of the engineers on my team, Steve Ricard,
introduced me to an analogy I like a lot better than shit umbrella. It's heat shield. We get the term heat shield from space travel
and orbital re-entry. An heat shield didn't designed to be impervious. A heat shield blocks just enough heat to make
re-entry survivable. It's still pretty warm in the cabin when they're
coming through the atmosphere. It's a carefully calculated compromise. If the heat shield blocked all of the heat,
it would be too heavy to reach orbit in the first place. Not enough, and re-entry isn't survivable. Guess what? This is your job as a leader. You need to block enough organisational noise
so that your team has consistent direction in big blocks of time to work but not so much
that they lose context and connection. Blocking all the noise might make them feel
comfortable but it will ultimately keep them from delivering the value that they are capable
of delivering, and it will also stunt their career growth. As I said earlier, all organisations are political. If the folks on your team never have the opportunity
to see organisational application, they will never learn their influence or sell their
ideas or negotiate for what they think is important. As a leader, you have an obligation to help
your teams navigate your organisation and that's a skill that will serve them for the
organisation and the rest of their careers. So, what happened to the Eiffel Tower? It's obviously still there. By the end of the 20 years Eiffel had been
promised, the power was too much - the tower was too much of part of Paris's global identity. It defaulted over to the French government's
ownership and standing right where it was built 129 years later. And while it hasn't been the tallest structure
on the planet for a while, it remains the most visited paid monument in the world with
nearly million visitors waiting in line for hours to take in the breathtaking views of
Paris it provides. If you've been to the Eiffel Tower, you know
how long those lines get. Had Gustave Eiffel not been willing to participate
in the politics involved, we wouldn't have the Eiffel Tower. The same is true for you. You can choose to keep your head down and
hop from job to job every time you get a whiff of politics but doing that is going to stunt
your career, even if you want to stay on the individual contributor track and become a
senior technical contributor, you will need to understand politics to develop the influence
you need to drive technical decisions. Now, if instead of running, you accept that
politics is a reality, neither good nor bad, and you learn to participate in organisational
politics in a way that remains true to you and the things that you value, you can find
ways to have huge impact in your organisation, and make even the world. You can help your teams have the same impact. It may seem intimidating, but you can do it. I know you can. Good luck.
