I'm listening to the new Portlandia rewatch podcast because modern life says that when you rewatch a show, you check whether there's a podcast for it. In this case there's a new one. So, cool.

Then Carrie Brownstein, explaining how Thunder Ant (the original name for the show, with a funny backstory of its own) started before it was a fully formed TV show idea, throws out a line so poetically perfect I immediately record it in my notes for later review:

As I'm reading it back, all I can think is Jim Collins. I didn't come in here intending to overlap business books with bands (again), but this is his "get the right people on the bus" idea, said by someone who formed a band instead of a company.

Of course it sent me digging back through my own notes, first the Personal Archive (lots of Jim Collins notes there) and then the even older notes, because I know I've been thinking about this for a long time. I found a 2017-ish re-read of Good to Great, and as the notes show, I was trying to figure out how to get the right people onto my career bus at the time.

What I see clearly now is that I was on the wrong bus.

Wrong people, wrong bus, and I was trying to fix things the people in charge were never going to fix. I already knew I didn't like some of them, but isn’t that just reality in a corporate gig? Now, I had plenty of fellow passengers I'd take bullets for, but the people in control were not people I wanted to be around any more than I was being paid to be there. I didn’t respect or admire any detail of them outside of their position on the job, and good lord there was no inspiration, unless you consider negative inspiration a thing. But I thought that was just the way work, you know - worked.

I was naïve and I couldn’t see it. Something had happened in my brain when I got off the artist bus and onto the corporate ladder bus. I assumed good faith in the bus drivers. I assumed they had some knowledge bestowed upon them that put them in the driver’s seat, and in charge of admitting passengers.

Have you tried to fail your way forward without learning anything? I have. It doesn’t work. I don’t recommend it.

The lessons are there but you have to be self-aware enough to pick up on them. There’s no good to come from assuming that whoever is present knows what they’re doing out of some sick form of situational faith. So when Collins said it in the books, on the first read (or two) I figured you worked with what you had to work with.

Eventually I noticed, and I credit his flywheel concept for this, that nothing was turning the way a flywheel ought to turn on the job. A flywheel is something that, once you get it moving, keeps moving. Ideally you push and everybody benefits. Don't mistake it for a mill with a hand crank, where it only turns by brute force, you're the labor, and somebody else is the beneficiary, even if they call it a flywheel.

And a flywheel won't turn without the right people. Not for you, anyway.

Collins covers who gets on your bus. He doesn't cover the moment when the bus itself is the problem: somebody else picked the people with their own objectives in mind, and even though the passengers are mostly decent, you're collectively powerless to change where it's headed. Once you realize it's a top-down issue, all you can do is get off and, if possible, take some of the good people with you. You need a new bus. It's as simple as that.

Carrie and Fred intuited this. They did it with their hands, and then with a show. The quote nails it, and it explains why their flywheel turned. It explains why the show is so good that we're rewatching it, again, and I'm checking just in case there's a podcast. Of course there is, with the two of them talking about how great all the people were that they worked with.

Creative people don't need business books. But sometimes a professional-sounding word helps remind us we're pros at what we do.