alt Hacker NewsIf you choose to define intensity as the ability/willingness to turn other knobs to 11 (which is what the author does), then its not unexpected to see correlation of "intensity" and "success".
As long as the other knobs show a generally positive relationship between input and output, then obviously turning the knobs up will generally result in higher output.
The questions are:
* What are the downsides of turning up the knob? Both in terms of the specific knobs you're turning, as well as "going to 11" in a more general sense.
* Why do people and organizations find it difficult to turn the knob to 11?
My take is that intensity is painful. This brings two things that have to be overcome:
You must somehow build a pain tolerant organization. You can do this by selecting for pain tolerant people, by inoculating a mission/message that positively improves pain tolerance (make people believe that it's worth it), by creating organizational structures that attenuates the pain feedback loop (ie, somehow insulate decision makers from the pain, while finding ways to mitigate or work around the pain where it is felt... ie, probably just accepting the churn) or other means.
The other thing to overcome is that pain is supposed to be instructive, and provide useful negative feedback. As you build up your pain tolerance, you ideally are still able to extract real information from the pain signals. If you achieve pain tolerance through blocking off or ignoring all pain signals, then you are probably at higher risk of just... doing stupid things.
> * What are the downsides of turning up the knob?
I once worked at a relatively small (<1000) person firm that basically had a near extinction event due to failing to fund a secondary datacenter / sensible data backup / business continuity strategy for years (despite engineering raising the alarm).
A team of 20 engineers worked 16 hour days for 2 weeks through the weekend to rescue them from their own decisions.
At the end of it they had a 10 minute zoom with the team to thank us and tell us they were going to - send us a ($10) bottle of wine, and grant "2 days off in lieu" (we were already on "unlimited vacation" plan) for the extra ~14 days of work.
That was a single-use only knob due to their behaviour.
No one cared enough again to do anything above & beyond, morale went to zero, and senior members of the team had all left within a year. The thank-you was so bad it was probably better that they not have done one at all.