This phrase—”give me something to hate”—was said to me this week in the context of work. The speaker said it with care. I took it as intended. Here is why I think it’s a great command:
- As a producer of creative work, I fall into the pattern of wanting my product to be excellent right away. It should be loved at first glance. If I’m as good as I think, no one should second guess me or my results. In reality, of course, this mindset is complete bunk. Effective design is iterative; it goes back and forth, edit after edit, review after review, as it homes in on its final form. And even then, it’s probably far from perfect, but good enough to get the job done.
- The person who said this phrase to me is a recently retired Army officer. He said he’d issue this order to his troops to get them started working. At some point during the work, he would perform what he calls a “vector check,” which is just another way of saying “are we headed in the right direction?” If the team was not headed in the right direction, that wasn’t a completely bad thing; they were at least certain about what they didn’t need to complete. Flexibility and agility were key.
- “Give me something to hate,” then, is a disarming phrase. Use it on those who report to you, or those whom you work with, or even yourself. It’s an unassuming invitation to start something interesting, even if the end product is nothing like the original idea or source material. This is good. This is, in fact, ideal. It frees you to consider more possibilities than you would have normally,
- I suspect some “Death by PowerPoint” is caused by the curse of the first draft or the recycled deck. Slideware makes it easy enough for any of us to bang out some stream-of-consciousness bullets or dredge up an old file, replace some names and numbers and call it a day. We then present these rough drafts to our audiences. Sure, you might be lucky enough to have these actions are movements in the right direction, but you’ve essentially given your audience something to hate.
- In summary, make sure all the hatin’ occurs further upstream and never reaches the lectern. Your audience will love you for it.
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I love this post. I find that to create content, the hardest part isn’t getting it perfect; it’s just getting started. Check out my response:
http://blogs.msdn.com/inside_office_online/archive/2009/10/05/give-me-something-to-hate-he-says.aspx
Great post. In a related thought, a salesperson with a 100% closing ratio isn’t asking enough people to buy! Getting ideas on to paper (sorry, I still use paper) is still the first step. A first draft is the beginning of the process, not the final product. Good managers must encourage the kind of open communication outlined in this post. This is even more important when the only person we are managing is ourselves.
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