A YouTube monologue by Stephen Scoggins (uploaded Nov 3, 2023) that uses a Mars mission metaphor to critique common hyper-growth business playbooks. The speaker argues that reaching milestones (getting a vehicle to Mars) is hollow if the team and people are sacrificed, and advocates for growing organizations by investing in team development and sustainable leadership practices.
Chapters
Let's imagine that NASA launches a program to put a team on Mars, and that capsule lands on Mars, videos are on, and they open it, and the crew is all dead. I don't think you're gonna have the people standing up and clapping and celebrating and saying, we got the vehicle to Mars, right? I mean, part of it is like getting the team to Mars and getting the team home. That's kind of what growth has felt like to me, like, in the last 10 years, where it's just like we have this goal and we're going to get there, even if it means we burn through our company three times and all the people and we lose them all. And it just felt like that playbook on how to run a business was going to expire. And so I wanted to share a different playbook that we had sort of executed and experienced and some other folks around. How can you grow the organization by growing the team? Honestly, I think we have a whole generation of leaders that don't know how to do that because they've grown up. You know, people just think, oh, you can switch from the hyper growth top line to profitable culture. All these things. It's not so simple.