Disrupted

by Dan Lyons

  What does any of this nutty horseshit actually mean? I have no idea. I’m just amazed that hundreds of people can gobble up this malarkey and repeat it, with straight faces. I’m equally amazed by the high regard in which HubSpot people hold themselves. They use the word awesome incessantly, usually to describe themselves or each other. That’s awesome! You’re awesome! No, you’re awesome for saying that I’m awesome!

  They pepper their communication with exclamation points, often in clusters, like this!!! They are constantly sending around emails praising someone who is totally crushing it and doing something awesome and being a total team player!!! These emails are cc’d to everyone in the department. The protocol seems to be for every recipient to issue his or her own reply-to-all email joining in on the cheer, writing things like “You go, girl!!” and “Go, HubSpot, go!!!!” and “Ashley for president!!!”

  Every day my inbox fills up with these little orgasmic spasms of praise. At first I ignore them, but then I feel like a grump and decide I should join in the fun. I start writing things like, “Jan is the best!!! Her can-do attitude and big smile cheer me up every morning!!!!!!!” (Jan is the grumpy woman who runs the blog; she scowls a lot.) Sometimes I just write something with lots of exclamation points, like, “Woo-hoo!!!!!!! Congratulations!!!!!!! You totally rock!!!!!!!!!!!!”

  Eventually someone suspects that I am taking the piss, and I am told to cut that shit out.

  The cheerleading and delusions of grandeur are staggering. At one point HubSpot posts a job listing on LinkedIn, searching for a new PR flack. But because this is HubSpot, the advertisement says we are looking for a “Media Relations Superstar.” The implication is that the person conducting the job search, our head of public relations, is herself a superstar and thus needs someone who can keep up with her. What she is actually looking for is an entry-level person, probably someone right out of college or with a couple years of experience, who will work for low pay, believing that time spent at HubSpot will look good on a resume.

  The advertisement challenges potential candidates: “Think you can get HubSpot on the cover of Time magazine or featured on 60 Minutes?” Take it from someone who worked at Time’s primary competitor—the only way a company like HubSpot will ever merit that kind of coverage is if an employee brings in a bag of guns and shoots the place up. The question is nuts, and any experienced PR person—any actual “media relations superstar”—would know that. The only person who could answer yes to that question and then apply for the job is by definition someone with very little experience. Like the person who posted the advertisement.

  This is the peppy, effervescent, relentlessly positive, incredibly hubristic and overconfident attitude that everyone in the HubSpot marketing department exudes from Cranium on down. These people are super cheery cheerleaders. The whole world of online sales and marketing is filled with people who listen to Tony Robbins audiobooks on their way to work and dream of unleashing the power within themselves, people who love schmaltzy, smarmy motivational-speaker guff about being passionate, following your dreams, and conquering fear.

  Conquering fear! I have no idea what all of these people are afraid of, but to marketers, the world is filled with fears that must be conquered. Maybe they like this rhetoric because it makes online sales and marketing seem like some kind of epic adventure rather than the drab, soul-destroying job that it actually is. Marketing conferences are filled with wannabe gurus and thought leaders work themselves up into a revival-show lather about connecting with customers and engaging in holistic, heart-based marketing, which sounds like something I made up but is actually a real thing that really exists and is taken seriously by actual adult human beings, which makes me want to cry.

  Except I’m also fascinated by this world. Part of me fantasizes about becoming one of these phony gurus. Some of these people make a lot of money, and all they do is fly around the world giving speeches. Part of me figures that if Brandon the pool installer can become Brandon the multimillionaire author and motivational marketing speaker, why can’t I?

  To become a marketing wizard, I will first have to survive here for a few years, and that means finding a way to fit in, which won’t be easy, not only because I’m fifty-two years old, which is exactly twice the age of the average HubSpot employee, but also because the atmosphere is so different from that of a newsroom. I had expected the transition might be rough, but even so, I’m taken aback by how much I’m struggling. The weird language and the relentlessly chipper attitudes are both the polar opposite of the world I know. Reporters are trained to hate corporate jargon and to eliminate it, not to engage in it. We’re expected to be cynical and skeptical, not to be cheerleaders.

  Another challenge is that HubSpot has so many meetings. Like most journalists—and, I would argue, most sane people—I detest meetings. At HubSpot they have meetings all the time, even for little things. Instead of just pulling up a chair and talking for five minutes, at HubSpot people will scan your calendar—everyone keeps their calendars online—and send you an invitation for a meeting in a block of time that you’ve left open. Anyone can call a meeting for pretty much any reason. I don’t want to look like a grumpy old man, so I just click yes on every invitation. Some mornings I come to work and find my calendar packed with back-to-back meetings for random things that have nothing to do with my job: brainstorm with the funnel team; learn what the e-book team has planned for next quarter; listen in on a conference call with our “social media scientist,” a competitive weightlifter who lives in Las Vegas and basically does nothing; talk to a salesperson who thinks she can sell our software to a newspaper in Orange County, California. I attend everything. I’m here to learn. I want to be a team player.

  At HubSpot people use Gmail calendar invites for everything, even for making lunch plans. One Monday morning, Zack, who sits facing me, asks me if I’ve been to the burrito place on First Street. I tell him I haven’t. He says maybe we can go there tomorrow, on Tuesday. Sure, I say.

  “Great, I’ll send you a calendar invite,” he says.

  “No need,” I say. “We can just go. I’ll be free.”

  “But this will remind you.”

  “I won’t forget. It’s tomorrow. I can just put in my calendar myself. See? I just did it. It’s now on my calendar.”

  “I’ll send you one anyway.”

  He does, and a few seconds later the email arrives, and I click yes, and now the appointment is on my calendar twice.

  This is fine. I don’t make a fuss about stuff like this. The one thing I don’t want to be is the curmudgeon who goes around saying, “Back in my day, we did things this way.” I’ve been warned that at a place like HubSpot the worst thing you can say is that anything that was done at your last company is something we should think about doing here. Even if your last company was Google or Apple, nobody at HubSpot wants to be told, especially by some newcomer—some outsider—that there might be a better way. HubSpot is HubSpot. It’s unique. It’s different. HubSpot has its own way of doing things. We’re rethinking everything. We’re challenging all the assumptions. We’re not just making software, we’re reinventing the way companies do business.

  Maybe that sounds arrogant, but who knows? Maybe the people at HubSpot have figured something out. Maybe the best way to do something really innovative is to hire a bunch of young people who have no experience and therefore no preconceived notions about how to run a company. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were twenty-five years old when they founded Google. Mark Zuckerberg was twenty when he founded Facebook, and once famously said, “Young people are just smarter.”

  Maybe Zuckerberg was right. Sure, experience is valuable, but I’m willing to accept the idea that experience can also be an impediment. Forbes and Newsweek were filled with old-timers who scoffed at the Internet, didn’t understand it, and didn’t want to understand it. They pined for the good old days. I couldn’t stand them. I was on the side of change. Those people had lots of experience, but their experience kept them fr
om being able to adapt.

  I’m not here at HubSpot to fight these guys; I’m here to learn from them. If they think it’s better to book lunch by using Gmail calendar invitations, then that’s what we’ll do.

  But then, about two months into the job, there comes an experience where the cultural gap between me and the people I’m working with opens up like a yawning chasm, and I begin to doubt whether I will be able to make my way across.

  This happens during our personality assessments. A lot of tech companies do these now. The idea is to figure out what kind of person you are, and what kind of people your co-workers are. Somehow by knowing these things about each other we will be able to work together more effectively.

  Companies use various tests and methodologies. One popular test is called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. HubSpot uses a methodology called DISC, which stands for four basic personality types: dominant, influential, steady, and conscientious. You can be a mix of more than one trait—a D with a little bit of C mixed in, for example.

  The basic idea on all of these things is that you answer a zillion random questions, and a piece of software analyzes your answers to determine what kind of person you are. You do the test online. In the DISC assessment, you’re presented with statements to which you must answer yes or no. I am a neat and orderly person. I like peace and quiet. I am very persuasive. I am a very modest type.

  A week or so after filling out my questionnaire I am sent to a meeting where I will find out my results. It’s a group encounter, with about twenty people. I’m the only person from my department. The others seem to be mostly from sales. I don’t know any of them.

  DISC is based on concepts created in 1928 by a psychologist named William Marston, who also created the comic book character Wonder Woman. That tells you pretty much all you need to know about DISC. Other people picked up Marston’s concepts in the 1950s and 1970s, and used them to create personality assessment tests.

  The ideas are pretty much hogwash, and to make things worse, they are put into practice by people with no psychological training or expertise. At HubSpot, the assessment program is overseen by Dave, the energetic goateed heavy-metal guitarist who runs the company training program. Dave is assisted by a middle-aged woman named Deb, who sports dramatic eyewear.

  The day begins with Dave and Deb explaining the four traits to us. No trait is better than any of the others. There are no bad traits and no good traits. They are all just different. We do an exercise where we all have to guess which type we think we are. Then we open our packets and find out the truth. It turns out I’m a D, which means the kind of person who hates sitting through personality assessment encounter groups and team-building exercises. I guessed right.

  I’m hoping that the meeting is over, but in fact we’re booked to be in this room for half a day, and, sure enough, now that we’ve all opened our packets, it’s time for the dreaded role-playing games.

  The big theory behind DISC is that if you know what kind of person you’re dealing with, you can understand how to interact with them. Someone like me, with a D personality, is probably going to have trouble working with a C personality, because my personality type tends to be impatient, overbearing, and judgmental, and C personalities tend to be lazy nitwits.

  Managers, people like Zack, get the same training that I’m getting, but then they go to an extra class where they learn how to use DISC when they are managing people. Try to imagine the calamity of that: Zack, age twenty-eight, with no management experience, gets training from Dave, a weekend rock guitarist, on how to apply a set of fundamentally unsound psychological principles as a way to manipulate the people who report to him.

  If you put a room full of journalists into this situation they would immediately begin ripping on each other, taking the piss out of the instructors, asking intentionally stupid questions. If the boss wants us to waste half a day on Romper Room bullshit, we could at least have some fun. My HubSpot colleagues, however, seem to take the DISC personality assessment seriously. The scene feels like something out of Office Space, the Mike Judge movie about life as a corporate drone at a company called Initech. Dave and Deb keep asking for volunteers to engage in role-playing games. I keep my head down and avoid making eye contact. Luckily, I’m spared.

  We watch an unintentionally funny training video that seems like a parody of a training video. A smarmy host introduces four actors who represent the four basic personality traits. The actors are the kind of actors who get hired to appear in corporate training videos, reading scripts written by the kind of people who write scripts for corporate training videos. After the video, Deb asks us to think about which person we liked the most and which one we liked the least. Then she starts calling on us.

  “Who here is a D?” she says.

  I raise my hand, but limply. I’m at the far end of the table, hoping she won’t see me. She does.

  “Dan,” she says, “which of those people did you like the best?”

  I choose the young African-American woman who was playing the role of the S personality. Deb says that’s interesting, because D people and S people often don’t get along.

  “What did you like about her?” she says.

  The truth is, I’m not sure.

  “She seems pleasant,” I say. “I think we’d get along.”

  “Fair enough,” Deb says. “And which person would you least want to work with?”

  That one is easy. There’s a guy who plays the role of a corporate robot. He does exactly what he’s asked to do, but nothing more. Basically this is a version of Milton, the character in Office Space who loves his red Swingline stapler. When his boss asks the guy in the video why he hasn’t sent over a certain report, the robot guy says it’s because the boss didn’t tell him to send the report, simply to print out the report. Robot Man says he always finishes his work on time, and he will never be late, but he will never finish early. He does exactly what he is told, no more and no less.

  “I couldn’t stand that guy,” I explained to Deb. “I think it was just something about his face, just the way he looked. He’s got that mustache, you know?”

  Deb looks at me.

  “And why is a guy like that working here, in a start-up? Why is he here? Who hired him? If I had to work with that guy, I’d want to smack him.”

  Nobody laughs. They all just sit there.

  “Well,” Deb says, in a patronizing voice, “I can hear your frustration. I think we all can agree that it can be hard to work with people who are different from us. I think what you’re trying to say is that you might have a hard time interacting with that person.”

  “Definitely,” I say.

  She smiles. “And you would probably have to come up with a strategy for how to deal with him, right?”

  “I suppose. But really I’d just want to strangle the guy.”

  If this were a room full of journalists, people would now be joining in, talking about various ways to kill the guy without getting caught. Could you make it look like an accident? Could you lure him onto the roof by telling him the boss says he has to go there right away, and then push him off? Could you invite him to lunch, and arrange to have him hit by a car while crossing the street?

  In a room full of journalists someone would already be doing an impersonation of the Robot Man. We’d also make fun of the smarmy host, who is a bit like Tom Bergeron, host of Hollywood Squares, America’s Funniest Home Videos, and Dancing with the Stars, only cheesier, which is remarkable because Tom Bergeron is already the gold standard of cheesiness, and yet here is this total amateur, this complete unknown, blowing Bergeron away. Maybe the host of this training video should have his own game show. Maybe you could have a game show based on DISC, and pit the four personality types against each other. Put them into a cage and make it a fight to the death: Four drones go into the box, but only one comes out! Who will survive?

  But these aren’t journalists. An awkward silence has fallen over the conference room. In a gentle voice, the voic
e you might use to persuade a lunatic to put down the gun and step away from the schoolchildren, Deb says, “You know, Dan, some of the people here in our group today belong to that personality type. Surely you’re not going to strangle any of the people in this room, are you?”

  I try to backpedal and explain that I was making a joke, but it’s too late. They’re all staring at me. They don’t look afraid; they look appalled.

  Later, after the meeting breaks up, I pull Dave aside and apologize for my outburst. “No, that was great,” he says, with a tight smile, quickly turning away. “Thank you for being honest.”

  Which I think means, Thanks for ruining my training session, asshole.

  It occurs to me that spending twenty-five years surrounded by journalists has not prepared me for life in the outside world. Civilians is one term journalists use to describe non-journalists. Another is laypeople. Or normals.

  As I’m now finding out, it’s one thing to write about the normal, and quite another to work among them. This business of personal reinvention is going to be more difficult than I thought.

  Six

  Our Cult Leader Has a Really Awesome Teddy Bear

  One morning in early July, about ten weeks after I’ve arrived at HubSpot, everyone in the marketing department receives word from Spinner, our peppy, ponytailed PR person, that Dharmesh has just posted an awesome article on LinkedIn, and it would be awesome if we could all use our Twitter and Facebook accounts to promote the article and drive lots of traffic to it so that it can go viral and blow up the Internet.