“This is a great example of Ownership. She did a lot of work to benefit the entire company”
In my last performance review, multiple reviewers cited my raising the bar in the Ownership leadership principle. It won me a Coffee Kudos award. I appreciate the kind reviews, but I’d like to talk about the Dark Side of Ownership.
Nothing you build really belongs to you, but if you take the Ownership leadership principle to heart, that work becomes a part of you. It’s part of you, but it doesn’t belong to you. That rift can cause a lot of pain once you leave.
You can win awards, but you have no means of raising your voice against selling racially biased facial recognition technology to law enforcement1. All that ownership and you still can’t protect your family from the institution you love. Engineers “own it” but have no say in how it’s used.
After learning what I’ve learned, I haven’t been able to bring myself to order anything from Amazon.com. I feel like that would be betraying all the abused workers I left behind. But at the same time, I haven’t been able to sell my remaining shares or cancel my Prime membership either, because I still remember that magical summer internship, eating lunch from Specialty’s by Lake Union, and my excitement about getting the return offer. I still remember the joy of my hackathon victories, and having people excited to talk to me like I was a person (they were so proud of me). There was a time when I loved Amazon, but the truth is, it would never love me back.
Be careful with Ownership.
I say that nothing you build belongs to you, but what if it did? What would that look like? It turns out there are people trying to solve this problem.
- O’Brien, M. (2019, April 3). Face recognition researcher fights Amazon over biased AI. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/24fd8e9bc6bf485c8aff1e46ebde9ec1
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