Maybe You Care
Christoph Haase went from being Managing Director and Creator of the Company of the Future - feted throughout Europe - to “Bruised Procrastinator and stay at home Dud”. Now he works with founders and startups that challenge the status quo, “Because the status quo is what I once tried to change. And the status quo is who brought me to my knees.”
"Ask me how I got here and I’d tell you my story.
But who cares about my story? Who cares how I got here? Who cares where I’m going?
Then she asked: “Would you write a piece? About finding purpose?”
She cared.
A piece about finding purpose.
Why not.
“Of course.”
Because I care. I still care. More than ever.
And caring is the first piece.
Caring
Many people don’t care. They don’t care about anything but happiness. Their happiness.
Their money. Their reputation. And a partner with a nice butt.
That’s happiness, they think.
But they don’t care. They just are.
If you don’t care you have nowhere to go. If you have nowhere to go you’re not going anywhere. And if you’re not going anywhere you’re not getting anywhere.
So you just stay where you are.
That’s bad.
Because staying where you are is going backwards.
How’s so? Ok, I’ll tell you.
This is something I understand now. Back then I didn’t.
So let’s start there. With entropy. It’s important.
Entropy
You see, at its core, the universe is ruled by increasing entropy. That’s what it’s called. It’s the growing lack of order and predictability. Or better put, the gradual decline into disorder and chaos.
Increasing entropy means there is nothing true being held constant and not changing. The normal pattern is toward deterioration. Disarray. Chaos. Turmoil. Things like that.
Humans can work to combine materials and energy into a lower entropy state. Into a state that is more organised and predictable.
But even then, humans cannot hold anything constant.
Have you ever looked at government, society and even morality from this perspective? Or a company for that matter (I’ll get to that in a moment). If left alone, they all naturally deteriorate, descend into chaos, or even completely disappear.
The rule of increasing entropy literally applies to everything, everywhere, all the time.
On the biggest imaginable scale, the popular theory of The Big Freeze states that the universe (if left alone;) will cool as it expands, eventually becoming too cold to sustain life.
Smaller scale. Look at your house. Where everything constantly, magically and most wondrously turns into a mess.
It’s not your kids. Not your husband. Not your dog. It’s a law of nature. It’s the principle of increasing entropy that scatters clothes and makes dust bunnies.
Anyway, the point is we constantly need to repair and refurbish our current systems. Just to keep the present situation stable. The status-quo.
Underline this: constantly repair and refurbish just to keep the status quo. The status-quo!
Sounds familiar?
Does anything feel to you like it’s constantly being repaired but never improving? How about everything?
Your government? Your workplace? Your relationship?
It’s a fact.
If we want to improve, evolve and grow, we must embrace it. Change is inevitable. And to achieve positive change we have to design, initiate and actively push for transformation. For the better.
Constantly.
Once you see this you can’t not care.
I can’t.
Where was I?
Right: if you don’t care you have nowhere to go. If you have nowhere to go you’re not going anywhere. And if you’re not going anywhere you’re not getting anywhere.
So you just stay where you are.
And if you stay where you you’re going backwards.
Makes more sense now?
Ok, great!
But caring is only part of the formula. The first piece.
It only gets you started. Only gets you from zero to uneasy.
And I’m a wimp. I can’t stand uneasy. That’s why I don’t do uneasy.
Sometimes I run. That never works. Not for long.
Sometimes I make a fist and throw a punch.
Sometimes it hits.
Courage
After I started working in our family business I spent years entrenched in a procrastinating corporate molasses. An organisation that identified itself with its glorified past and was at odds with an inevitable future.
I didn’t have a formal business education and simply assumed that business worked the way everyone said. The way everyone was pretending it would: let’s call it the this-is-how-it’s-done principle.
I had always believed that business was a sequence of logical decisions, based on established principles, measured and supported by key metrics and guided by the firm intent of moving forward in order to improve something. And as a result it makes money.
I didn’t really know anything about how it’s done. I was a freshman and I had to learn. So I bought a suit and watched.
I watched for nearly 10 years.
During those years our family-owned, engineering and manufacturing business with almost 100 people went from stale to nearly broke and back to stale.
Personally, I went from being overwhelmed by my own (perceived) inexperience to being shell-shocked from getting racked and ruined due to (seemingly) external causes, to settling into some sort of default business anxiety.
Exciting times.
The whole thing always looked fine from the outside. Orderly. Reputable. Successful.
On the inside it felt like the organisation was going through the stages of a zombie transformation. Slowly rotting from the inside out.
It wasn’t always like that.
Like many other companies, ours had once started out with a promising product. Hungry and eager to change the world, I would assume.
But once we got to a mature stage things settled in. Somewhere during the 30 or so years before I joined the company, the mindset shifted from “advancement” to “maintenance.” And we had our extensive lineup of incremental mis-improved products to show for it.
This is not to say that we weren’t somehow considered successful. To this day the company is a well regarded engineering – and manufacturing – partner for many corporates around the world. Still market leader in their tiny shrinking niche that no one else really cares about.
Great stuff for the “About” page on a website.
So, what’s the problem?
The problem is ignorance towards increasing entropy.
At some point, early in the life of the company, my father had made a dent in the fabric of reality. He created a product that was ahead of the curve. He planted the seed for future growth and prosperity.
He literally combined energy and materials into a lower state of entropy, and inverted the process of deterioration. He had initiated a sequence of reactions that created a source of positive energy and gave his company momentum.
But, remember, according to the rule of increasing entropy, any organisation will sooner or later decline without consistently applying counteractive measures.
30-some years later, my father had long passed, the company had gotten itself stuck in a phase I’d call “innovation pretension.” We acted innovative. And tricked ourselves into believing we were, too arrogant to see we were not.
The mindset of many seemed to be somewhere between self-delusion of former glory and reluctant acceptance of externally induced change.
Something that seems to be true for many companies: they go from moving forward, to moving sideways, to moving in circles. Circles that gradually turn into a downward spiral.
When a company enters a phase of circling, when it has a hard time satisfying customers and hardly turns a profit, there is increasing entropy at work.
This is like the corporate version of depression. It’s true, an organisation can be insecure, anxious and depressive. A sad company.
Then, running a business often becomes little more than the mere execution of different sequences of operational procedures — recurring mechanical routines applied on a daily basis — in order to keep things going.
In those cases, the goal of doing business deteriorates to making an immediate sale rather than collecting and monetising steppingstones en route to making a dream a reality.
When you ask them why, they say “this is how it’s done.”
Looking back at the first 10 years I spent in our family business I can truly say the organisation had been caught in a depression spiral.
There was no common understanding of a place that we were headed towards. No desired future state we were trying to reach. No dream we could have used to pull ourselves out of our corporate cognitive misery.
For the vast majority of businesses a vision, the intent on how to make an impact on the world, becomes an afterthought. At best.
And hardly anyone recognises the fact that a vision is a dream put to work to propel a business towards its desired future state.
I didn’t understand this truth until I felt I had no other option.
I had no choice other than declare and vehemently implement my vision of “The Company Of The Future,” an entirely new form of organisation.
A real-time business laboratory built to push the boundaries of what it meant to be a company in an ever-changing society. A company that wasn’t just a monolithic thing. But rather an ever-changing, decentralised, intelligent organism.
An organism with an open mind and open arms. One that would embrace new technologies and methodologies. Experiment and expand into new markets. Build on the old and learn from the new.
In a nutshell.
It took naiveté.
And it took courage.
I didn’t decide to have the courage to turn a decades-old company inside out and upside down with knowing little more about business than how to tie a tie.
I felt like I didn’t have an alternative.
And my only option was courage.
The courage to do something new. Because the old was more frightening.
Courage was key.
Courage. That’s piece number two.
Where was I?
Right: if you care you have somewhere to go. If you have somewhere to go and courage, you’re going there. And if you’re going there you’re getting there.
Off you go.
Not the End.
This is where this story should end.
But it doesn’t. Because it didn’t.
Look, I’m telling you this so you can understand. They didn’t. But they didn’t care. Maybe you care. That’s why I’m telling you this.
You have to understand how much I put into this damn company. Of myself I mean. It was a lot. Too much. Way too much. It was everything. My whole thing.
And that wasn’t smart. But it’s what I did.
I knew what I was doing. I knew this was dangerous. My face had become the face of the company. It had become the face of change. The face of a new movement towards a new future. It wasn’t the only face of that movement. But one of them. One of just a select few in Europe.
But what if something happened? What if something went wrong?
What I built was built by us. But if it failed the failure was mine. My face. Not theirs.
And my face was always pointed towards the future. Forward.
What I didn’t see coming snuck up from the past. From behind.
These old despicable creatures. The lowest of lows. Takers. Not makers.
I gave everything. They took everything.
That’s what I tell myself. They will tell you something else. But this is my story. Not theirs.
And they will have to eat every single word of it. I’ll shove it down their throats. Their cowardly, dishonest, manipulative, opportunistic throats. Word for word. Letter. By. Letter.
I’ll make them suffer.
They made me suffer.
Suffering.
It makes you care more. Care. More!
It’s the superpower you didn’t ask for.
Suffering. That’s piece number three.
Where was I?
Right: if you care you have somewhere to go. If you have somewhere to go and courage, you’re going there. And if you’re going there you’re getting there.
Pardon my french.
You’re fucking getting there! You hear?
If you suffered the pain no one can fucking stop you!
Try me.
Purpose
A piece about finding purpose. This is mine.
Three pieces. For you.
Caring is piece number one.
Courage is piece number two.
Suffering is piece number three.
Caring + Courage + Suffering = Purpose
Maybe you care.
That’s why I told you this.
Christoph Haase is Founder of Otherstate: to Launch, Pivot and Rebrand Early-Stage Startups.
