Take a Bid

What we can learn from successful marriages

My best friend Jamie founded a coworking company called Industrious that has been wildly successful. As WeWork rose to stratospheric heights and then flamed out due to its founders’ shall we say “excesses,” Jamie kept steadily growing Industrious into the industry leader. The company was recently acquired by the real estate giant CBRE, where Jamie now has a senior role. He still oversees Industrious and is looking for a replacement.

I am not sharing any of that to encourage you to apply, but because the opener to his job description was a wonderful piece of writing (something I’ve never said about a job description) and an inspiring example of the concept of “taking a bid.” As I read his job description this morning, I realized I haven’t done a great job at this. Jamie, for example, became a Buffalo Bills fan for me. I, on the other hand, have not reciprocated his love of trivia or karaoke (which, I know, are the most annoying hobbies someone could have, but the point of taking a bid is not to ask questions).

I think this is partially a result of my all-in approach to hobbies. It’s hard for me to dabble because it violates my principles for effective learning. But sometimes it’s okay to do something because the people around you love it.

Read on to see what I mean.

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(From Jamie Hodari)

I'm hiring a CEO for Industrious. The job posting below will describe the role the way these things usually go, and you should definitely read it, but the truest description of this job isn't a list of responsibilities, it's a list of people. I thought you should meet a few of them before you apply.

Jazzman

You will be responsible for a gentleman in our East Austin location who is genuinely upset that we played the 1998 CD remaster of Coltrane's Giant Steps instead of the 1960 Atlantic mono pressing, and who is right, and who will know whether you fixed it.

Veterans of the thermostat war

You will be responsible for the woman on the fourth floor in Chicago's West Loop who has been running a years-long campaign about the thermostat, and for the man two desks over who leads the counterinsurgency, and you should know going in that they both renew every year, that we love them, and that the thermostat is, as far as anyone can determine, fine.

The book (wine?) lovers

You will be responsible for a book club that has met fourteen times, talks constantly about book club, and I'm pretty sure made t-shirts. They recently celebrated finishing their second book.

The finance drama hounds

You will also be responsible for a small number of disappointed financial analysts. Industrious pioneered the management-agreement model, meaning we partner with landlords and share the economics rather than signing fifteen-year leases and hoping for the best. Every so often an analyst calls looking for drama, some white-knuckle lease exposure he can put in a short report, and hangs up bored. Part of your job is keeping him bored.

Your teammates

You will be responsible for around a thousand employees, many of whom came to us from hotels and restaurants, and who will tell you, if you ask, that they got into hospitality because they love taking care of people and very nearly got out of it because of everything that came with it: the schedules posted Thursday night for a week that starts Friday, the closing shift followed by the opening shift, the guests who never learned where their hands belonged. They never stopped loving the work. But they did stop loving the conditions, and they came to Industrious because we promised them the first without the second, and that promise transfers to you with the title.

Your teammates' friends, who are likely also your teammates

You will be responsible for at least one employee whose entire bridal party works here, which sounds like something in a recruiting brochure, but all I can say is the dress fittings are reportedly going well. There is a version of this company where that stops happening, and the most important thing on your desk every morning is making sure it never does.

The striver

You will be responsible for the founder who toured three times before signing a two-person office, the first physical proof that her company existed. The day her team outgrows it and takes the suite down the hall will feel, to both of you, like a small graduation.

The name for all this

There's a name for what everyone on this list is doing, by the way. A psychologist named John Gottman spent decades studying thousands of married couples and found that the happy ones share one habit above all the others: they take each other's bids (those small requests for connection). For example, your spouse mentions birdwatching and you don't say "okay." You ask why, or you offer to come along. The Giant Steps remaster is a bid. The thermostat is a bid. The book club, the bridal party that started out as a job, all of it, bids, and Industrious is, underneath everything, in the business of taking them.

Because sometimes someone will make a bid that doesn't look like one. You'll walk into one of our locations early and find a woman who spent the night in her office for the third time in a row, and you'll have every right to wake her and ask her to leave, and maybe you should. But maybe she's going through a divorce and there's nowhere else right now. It doesn't have to become policy for you to help her find a place - or to understand that you may have caught her at the exact moment being seen mattered most. You'll never know in advance which bid is that one. So you take them all.

There are nearly a hundred thousand of these people at the moment, with more arriving every Monday, and as you probably already suspect, everything in the job post below is in service of them.

With love,

Jamie

(Read the full job description here)