👷🏼‍♀️ Making Over Belonging — An Alternate Theme for Culture in the Workplace.
By: Kausambi Manjita
Tags: Startup Lessons, Workplace Culture, Community, Makers, Open Source

Gathering notes from different thoughts on the subject, and especially inspired by @webfxbill’s (William Craig’s) note on maker personality, I found that every “Maker” has certain core values that can easily transfer to a team or a startup — or even a larger company.

👉🏼Learning On The Job

Makers focus on learning practical skills that can be applied to solve an immediate need or problem today and that helps build up the frameworks that can be applied to other problems or needs in future. The emphasis here is on doing rather than ideating. By doing something today, a maker is building a blueprint that can be re-used tomorrow.

👉🏼Focus on The Results

Practical skills lead us to the next core value of a maker → in-the-moment results. Makers focus heavily on gaining knowledge through practical applications. Their plans are a living entity that morphs as each action and result is evaluated. In other words, a maker evaluates new (or existing) skills by applying it to the current situation and calibrating the results…

👉🏼Nothing Is Perfect, Everything Needs Tinkering

….which means, for a true ‘Maker’, nothing is perfect. A maker is at peace with the fact that for most of us, things cannot be perfect at the 1st (or 2nd or even 10th) attempt. There is an element of constant tweaking and iterating. That’s why makers are not afraid to pick up new skills or challenges. Risk taking is second nature to makers, and they believe that pushing the boundaries is the best way to success. As I read somewhere → “You don’t hear about very many wildly successful entrepreneurs who played it safe, but you see all the time how some of the world’s most successful companies can become stagnant if they stop taking risks.”

👉🏼Openness Is Not An Afterthought

I’ve heard people confusing transparency with knowing every detail of a colleague’s pay-check or being involved in every meeting or discussion that is happening in the team or startup. Productising processes, focusing on metrics and analytics, not externalising failures as someone else’s mistake — these are stronger markers of openness than a once-a-month applause in a town-hall.

Intrinsic openness also helps create other makers. Knowledge is not hoarded, but shared to encourage a more global equity. Google has always strongly supported the open-source developer community. And now, apparently, Tesla has made all their patents for self driving vehicles open to all.

👉🏼Community Over Corporate

The maker culture is deeply rooted in the traditional artisan philosophy. That’s why, community forms an important chapter in the maker’s value-book. For example, Slack (the product) is built on the thesis of openness and teamwork, bringing a sense of community to work. That’s even made it the go-to choice for professional communities all over the world. Google has been a promoter of several developer & technology communities since more than a decade. All of this essentially means that makers believe that their work impacts the community and community in turn fuels their work.

👉🏼Finally, A Deep Love of the Craft

Well, Makers Make cause they Love the process of Making. The maker movement has a heavy emphasis on deep “love” of the craft. Whether you are a (designation)developer, artist, writer, designer, product owner, business owner — you’re a maker when you love the grit it takes to show up every single day, get your hands dirty, refine refine refine, and make something that has value for someone today. Life’s too short to not create when we have a chance.