Take Responsibility
There is a saying: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. I am convinced the same is true of effective organizations. One of those key similarities is the requirement that effective organizations require their members to take responsibility.1
When founders say they want to hire “passionate people”, what they really mean is they want to hire people who are willing to take responsibility, to truly own, to treat the company and its problems as their own.2 In this sense, it can also be called a form of love. For what is love if not the declaration, “Your problems are my problems”?
By that same logic, we find a life without responsibilities, without cares or burdens, is but an empty and apathetic shell. There is no greater freedom or empowerment than choosing (and being able) to take responsibility and no greater measure of the weight of one’s life than the responsibilities chosen to borne. You can choose to take responsibility for something, big or small, today - the freedom to have agency in the world is yours for the taking!34
This is meant to be a living repository of sucessful organizations or leaders that create environments for taking responsibility. Comment/reply any additional examples!5
Admiral Hyman Rickover
Admiral Hyman Rickover is commonly considered the “Father of the Nuclear Navy”, created the Office of Naval Reactors within the US Navy and Department of Energy and developed the world’s first nuclear powered submarine.
The sense of responsibility for doing a job right seems to be declining. In fact, the phrase "I am not responsible" has become a standard response in our society to complaints on a job poorly done. This response is a semantic error. Generally what person means is: "I cannot be held legally liable." Yet, from a moral or ethical point of view, the person who disclaims responsibility is correct: by taking this way out he is truly not responsible; he is irresponsible.
The unwillingness to act and to accept responsibility is a symptom of America's growing self-satisfaction with the status quo. The result is a paralysis of the spirit, entirely uncharacteristic of Americans during the previous stages of our history.
Rickover during congressional testimony on who was responsible for the success, or failure, of Naval Reactors:
One anecdote of how Rickover distributed overlapping fields of responsibility and how he reprimanded his team for not taking responsibility of seemingly small potential issues. For context: an unknown corrosion product was building up during testing of the first nuclear reactor designs.
Mr. Beast
Mr. Beast is the most subscribed to Youtube channel of all time as of this writing.
From the leaked Mr. Beast playbook: responsibility is never delegated, but always something that must be owned.
Taking responsibility requires clear ownership:
Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping was the paramount leader of China and the Chinese Communist Party from 1978 to 1989 and was responsible for many of the market reforms that sparked China’s incredible economic growth.
Deng recognized the need for greater dynamism in the party bureaucracy, to orient more on economic growth and results, rather than ideological correctness:
And in a separate address from Deng to the CCP leadership at the beginning of his tenure (emphasis my own):
Right now a big problem in enterprises and institutions across the country and in Party and government organs at various levels is that nobody takes responsibility. In theory, there is collective responsibility. In fact, this means that no one is responsible. When a task is assigned, nobody sees that it is properly fulfilled or cares whether the result is satisfactory. So there is an urgent need to establish a strict responsibility system…
When problems arise, it doesn’t help just to blame the planning commissions and Party committees concerned, as we do now — the particular persons responsible must feel the heat….
To make the best use of the responsibility system, the following measures are essential.
First, we must extend the authority of the managerial personnel. Whoever is given responsibility should be given authority as well. Whoever it is… he should have his own area not only of responsibility but of authority, which must not be infringed upon by others. The responsibility system is bound to fail if there is only responsibility without authority.
Second, we must select personnel wisely and assign duties according to ability. We should seek out existing specialists and train new ones, put them in important positions, raise their political status and increase their material benefits. What are the political requirements in selecting someone for a job? The major criterion is whether the person chosen can work for the good of the people and contribute to the development of the productive forces and to the socialist cause as a whole.
John Grier Hibben
Presbyterian minister, Mathematician, and President of Princeton University
Responsibility, however, can never be dissipated by diffusion…For responsibility is by its nature something intensive and not extensive. It can be divided among many, but it is not thereby diminished in degree….Dividends can be divided into separate parts, but not responsibility. Responsibility can never be conceived in the light of a magnitude. It belongs to the class of things which, when divided, each part is equal to the whole.
Responsibility in this respect is like pleasure which, when shared, is not lessened, but the rather increased, thus the glory of the whole is each one's share. It can be divided among many without loss. So, also, the appreciation of beauty in nature or in art shows no diminishing returns, although the number who experience the joy of it may be increased without limit.
If a man would escape all responsibility he must place himself wholly outside of the relations of life, for life is responsibility. As we have seen, responsibility remains with us even though we may ask others to assume it; we share it with others, but our portion is the same; when we turn our backs upon it, we find it still facing us; we flee from it, and however far it may be, we behold it waiting for us at the journey's end.
Note that it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for successful organization building. Hiring the right people is definitely another precondition.
The cause of Google’s inability to ship products could be entirely summarized as this: no one is incentivized or empowered to be responsible for a product.
More broadly, many of the ills of corporate America could be described as a lack responsibility taking: from the pervasive offshoring of responsibility to management consultants, to the forced narrative of AI automating away all work and therefore all responsibility, to the sheer laziness of resorting to lobbying or financial wizardry to maintain market share over building actual products that provide value.
I recognize that obviously it is not possible to take responsibility for every “insert global problem”. Obviously, there are always circumstances that prevent someone from taking ownership and being empowered to be responsible for something. Trust me, I work in government. It is the role of good leaders to, as Deng says, extend authority, so that responsibility is given with the appropriate sphere of authority. These can all be true and yet it can still be the case that far too many people lack the willingness to take responsibility.
Many of the more personal posts on this substack trace the evolution of how I slowly decided to take greater responsibility in my life: from leaving a startup to take a more active role working on climate policy in the federal government to taking on responsibility for the development of my hometown [constituent organizing][YIMBY][e-bikes], the city where I was born, raised, and that I deeply love.
post idea: inventory of anti-responsibility practices, where people are actively disincentized from being held responsible. Egregious examples of management consultants, political appointees, journalists, etc
h/t Rickover, who circulated this essay to his staff as reading