Guiding Principles For a Career
In his LinkedIn commencement address1, Reid Hoffman offers some great advice about the value of real relationships and your network. His principles have served me well in life. For example, if I hadn’t co-founded a CTO networking group and did a favor for one of the long time members, I would have never had the opportunity to help create Siri.
Two other things that have served me well are:
1. Have a Guiding Philosophy for work. One of my heroes is Doug Engelbart, who invented collaborative computing, hypertext as an interface, the mouse and menu user interface paradigm, and the mouse itself. As one of the best and brightest engineers with access to the very first interactive computers on the internet, he chose to dedicate his career to help solve the wicked problems of his day: global conflict, massive inequality, and global habitat destruction. He started his career in the 1960s, and he saw that the only real solution to those problems is to help human beings think better collectively. All of his inventions were a way to help people work better together online. I have adapted Doug’s guiding principle to the era of AI. I call it Humanistic AI, and it is the idea that we should make AI that collaborates with people instead of competing with them, and augments them instead of automating what they already do well. This philosophy led me to create my first company in collective intelligence in the 1990’s and was a guiding force behind the design of Siri. Humanistic AI continues to be my guide as I make choices about whom to work with — such as Cognixion and the Center for Human Technology.
2. Impact is what matters. We often hear about the importance of company objectives, key performance indicators, followers, financial success, and other easily measured outcomes. While these are important signals within systems that matter, they are not actually metrics of true value, which is harder to measure. Of the many good ways to align one’s work with values, I have found it useful to think about human impact as an objective. How many people’s lives would be improved by the product or service? How many people would be delighted to use it? How much of a difference would it make on every life? What is the leverage of what I can do on this impact — in other words, with the time I have to offer, what use of that time would maximize human impact?
Using Impact as an objective has a compounding effect when combined with collective action. When you envision a clear path to impacting many human lives, you attract others to help make that happen. It’s not the only motivator, but it’s one that people can be inspired by and be aligned on. For example, at Apple, everyone was aligned on the same impact objectives: to improve the user experience (“surprise and delight”) or help people “live a better day” (literally this was the phrase and we meant it). Every feature decision, design choice, triage over bugs to fix, and allocation of our time could be evaluated in the light of human impact.
For those of you graduating this week, my advice is: enjoy the potentiality of the uncertain future ahead, and get a good compass to guide you on the journey.
Originally posted to LinkedIn here at the invitation of Reid Hoffman. Here is a link to Reid’s commencement address.