Sleepless Nights and Corporate Fights

Show Notes

This one starts where a lot of our episodes start lately: tired. Dan walked me through the 18-month sleep regression — the kid who used to take two stories and a kiss on the forehead now needs you in the room for what feels like hours — and his answer to it was the same answer he gives to everything. Stay consistent with your processes. We drifted from there into the stuff that actually makes a summer feel like a summer: my daughter starting two-day-a-week pre-K, Dan's trip back to Indiana to catch the Hoosier state in full green glory instead of the usual holiday gray and brown, and the genuinely useful discovery that a farmer's dozen is fourteen. One up on the baker. I'm choosing to believe that's real.

Dan's trip home turned into our first real topic, because you can apparently see Eli Lilly's new LEAP facility from I-65 north of Lebanon. We got into the weeds on it — the campus is going to draw something like 800,000 gallons of water a day, which is why the state is building a pipeline out to the Wabash aquifer, and why the folks downriver are nervous. I tried to talk Dan down from a big number to a small one: Lebanon's population is around 17,000, not the 75,000 he guessed. It used to mark the halfway point on the drive to Indianapolis, and now it's basically a far-flung suburb, which is its own little parable about how the northern Indy sprawl just keeps rolling out past Carmel and Noblesville. We compared it to our own household water bills, learned a new word for what snow does in dry Denver air — sublimation, skipping the liquid stage entirely — and generally did the thing we do, which is chase a number until it stops being scary.

The economics chunk was the Harris housing proposal, and I'll be honest, this is the one where we earned our show's name in real time. The headline I'd heard was a $25,000 check to first-time buyers, which sounds straightforwardly inflationary — all that does is push the price of every house up $25,000. But reading the actual proposal on-mic, it turned out to be more layered than that: down-payment help targeted at first-generation buyers plus a first-ever tax credit for builders who put up starter homes. Dan and I landed in the same uncomfortable, honest place — it's not a grand slam, it's not stupid, it's somewhere in the middle, and you sort of have to run the experiment to know how it plays in a complex economy. These days I'll take singles and doubles. We detoured into Estonia, where you log in, the government tells you what you owe, and you're done in a few minutes — government as a service, as Dan put it, and yes, that's a real thing they actually do.

Then we got to the question Dan really wanted to ask, the one that gives the episode its title. A listener — one of our dozen or so, bless them — wrote in about a corporate fight. HQ asked him to support some initiatives, including a trip to a manufacturing show in Chicago, and when he went to his own boss for approval, the boss said that's not your job. Dan and I spent a long time deconstructing it: the game of telephone HQ is trying to avoid by talking to people directly, the budget and headcount politics a local manager might be sitting on that the listener can't see, the genuinely weird possibility that "HQ" is just a couple of analysts two years out of an MBA and a McKinsey stint, throwing directives over the wall. I compared the whole thing to a kid asking one parent for a lollipop, getting told no, and going around the corner to the other parent. Sometimes you really are caught between two adults who didn't coordinate.

But underneath the listener's specific mess was the thing that actually sets my blood boiling: that's not my job as a posture. I've heard it as a manager, and it's a gut-punch, because I'm usually right there in it with you — it's not strictly my job either, but we've got to get this done, and we're on the same team. Dan's instinct was that those people need to change the scenery; they're often just burned out or in the wrong role. I wanted to give more grace, because I think every one of us has been that person for a stretch. We talked through how you'd even screen for it — cross-functional histories over ladder-climbers — and Dan told this great story about a firm where the interview starts the second you meet the doorman, and whether you ask where to put your water cup on the way out is part of the test. Take the cup with you and you've failed a different way: you were too dumb to just ask.

We put this one out into the world hoping something we said jogs something for someone. The kid will sleep eventually, the number is never as scary once you put commas in it, and nobody on a good team ever has to say that's not my job.

— Sean