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Last Friday was my last day at LinkedIn. After almost four and a half years at the company, I decided to embark on a different type of experience, fraught with risk, uncertainty, and instability. Smart choice? We’ll see.

Working at LinkedIn was a truly important experience for me. As I wrote to coworkers on my last day:

I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity that I have been given here – it is the best job I’ve ever had. I ate free food, moved desks many times, and was gifted the chance to help build a fresh product and business that truly matters. Along the way I made great friends, experienced some of the best moments of my life (even got married!), worked in a fantastic team, and learned every day. It has truly been a privilege to work with all of you at this great company.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that LinkedIn was the first time in my relatively short professional career that I led something that mattered in a meaningful way. For that, I am grateful.

There are tangible, tactical things that one learns in every role. My time at LinkedIn was no exception. I learned important and actionable skills at each role that are not diminished just because they can be found in a book.

But as a product person and product leader, most of the learning is intangible and tacit. I’ve heard friends called it an “apprenticeship.” The most important things that I learned while at LinkedIn? Three simple ones:

1. Influence Wins

You can tell people what to do against their will or you can productively influence people to arrive at the same truth. The former is called ‘being a dick’ and doesn’t help over time. The latter is called David Hahn‘ing someone.

2. Sense of Urgency

Jeff once asked me in a meeting whether I felt I had demonstrated the proper sense of urgency in a particular effort. I had never been asked that before and it definitely made an impression on me, because I realized later that I had not. I now ask myself that question just about every day.

3. Relationships Matter

One of the most productive Product people I know (link) also happens to be the most well-liked professional I’ve ever met. It took a few months for me to recognize those were not only related, but one caused the other.

Thank you to LinkedIn, for a great 4+ years.

I’m finally getting around to reading The Innovator’s Dilemma from Clayton Christensen, though I’ve heard the branded term enough to understand the general gist of the book.

Two pretty choice quotes that I’ve liked a lot from just the first few pages of the book:

There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets.

And a similar, though perhaps more descriptive, quote:

First, disruptive products are simpler and cheaper; they generally promise lower margins, not greater profits. Second, disruptive technologies typically are first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets. And third, leading firms’ most profitable customers generally don’t want, and indeed initially can’t use, products based on disruptive technologies. By and large, a disruptive technology is initially embraced by the least profitable customers in a market.

The continuing saga of the BP oil fiasco is a simultaneously depressing and absurd episode. It’s as if a car crash was going to occur at a particular intersection outside your office window every day for 6+ weeks.

This disaster has all the key ingredients to fan populist anger. Think about it:

• Technical hurdles that sound simple, leading to public Monday Quarterbacking
• Corporate ineptitude
• Corporate arrogance and finger-pointing
• Massive environmental impact
• Opportunity to use the crisis for political gain or grandstanding

To top it off, the repeat failures just seem to give all the interested parties multiple opportunities to go off (“Missed it? There’s another train leaving tomorrow when BP screws something else up.”).

Assuming that the ongoing leak/spill does get resolved and that expensive clean-up slowly happens (and it’s telling that I even have to write ‘assuming’), I wonder what will happen to BP’s brand. Brian thinks it’ll recover like the Star Wars kid, but as I wrote there (copied below), I would be concerned about too much lasting damage to the BP brand. Maybe it won’t matter in this case, but if this lasts long enough, people may just start to associate BP with general ineptitude and take their business across the street.

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From a business perspective, I would be incredibly worried about my brand if I were them. Even without a corporate death penalty for them, I’m failing to remember a case where a company had such a crisis that just did not go away.

You’re right, the continuing nature of it is harmful. Most crises happen once, horribly, and then there is clean-up [product recall, oil spill clean-up, apology, etc.]. This one has continued long enough to reach multiple news cycles, to the point where the public is having the perceived ineptitude/arrogance actually reinforced: “Wait, this shit is STILL going on? WTF?!”

It’s as if Toyota had a problem with brakes on one model of the Prius, and then every few days (for months) it was announced that another vital part of the vehicle (or other vehicles) were also having issues (“And today, we find out the Camry’s windshield wipers will snap, break through the windshield, and stab passengers in the eyes. Oh, and Toyota has yet to apologize.”).

You’re right, even Jack in the Box recovered from undercooked beef killing several children, but it took years and years. I wonder what happens when a company’s brand hammered so continuously for such an extended period of time. Maybe it won’t matter for a gas company that relies less (?) on brand loyalty and more on distribution channels and retail location. Maybe?