Ruth — of systems & designAug 25, 2024

Eric Schmidt:

‘learned that there were people who I call “glue people”. The glue people are incredibly nice people who sit at interstitial boundaries between groups, and they assist in activity. And they are very, very loyal, and people love them, and you don’t need them at all.

[..] I kept trying to get rid of these glue people, because they were getting in the way, because they slowed everything down.’

quoted in Contempt for the Glue People by @norootcause

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2021/08/28/contempt-for-the-glue-people/

Contempt for the glue people

The clip below is from a lecture from 2015 that then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave to a Stanford class. Here’s a transcript, emphasis mine. When I was at Novell, I had learned that there were …

Surfing Complexity
Show threadRuth — of systems & designAug 25, 2024

Contempt serves to self-elevate by denigrating. It is a classic power-over kind of move, for it takes personal power from.

Still. The importance of “glue people” might be better understood if we used a word that connotes cohesion rather than adhesion??

Show threadKevin RiggleJul 2, 2025
@RuthMalan a lot of people I know liken us to enzymes
Show threadKevin Riggle
@RuthMalan sure, we slow things down, in the sense that it’s slower to convert sucrose to ATP than just breaking it apart into glucose and fructose. But good luck getting anything done with just glucose and fructose and no ATP
Jul 2, 2025 at 5:04amWeb