💃 Software is Easy. Hardware is Hard. People are Impossible🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! Software is easy. Hardware is hard. People are impossible.

That old engineering proverb is the entire job description of every executive who has to weld the three into something that makes money.

You're a general manager building a roster. You draft the code, you build the facility, then you have to get a locker room full of humans to actually run the plays.

Two of those problems have answers. The third has opinions.

IT’S JUST CODE

Software is Easy 🙂

Software is easy because it's honest 😇.

Code does exactly what you tell it, every time, with no mood and no agenda 🫡.

A flow that fires today fires identically at 2am on a holiday weekend. When software "misbehaves," it's flawlessly executing an instruction a human wrote down. The bug is a mirror.

That makes software the most controllable line item you own.

You can test it, version it, roll it back, and clone it a thousand times for the price of one. Best of all, it scales without a salary! Spin up a thousand identical copies overnight and not one of them asks for a raise, a title, or Friday off. Try that with your best sales engineer.

On the GM's whiteboard, software is the chalk- infinitely editable, perfectly obedient, and worth absolutely nothing until a human decides to run the play 🙋.

PHYSICS CREATES, PHYSICS TAKETH AWAY

Hardware is Hard

Hardware is harder, because hardware answers to physics, and physics has never once moved a deadline.

🧱 Servers throw heat.

🧱 Signals can't outrun the speed of light, so your data center in Virginia will always feel a little far from your customer in Singapore.

🧱 Chips have lead times measured in quarters. Drives fail, batteries swell, and entropy sends an invoice every month.

Here's the gift buried in all that difficulty - hard and unpredictable are different animals.

A server rated for a load carries that load until it can't, and it usually warns you on the way down ⚠️.

You can model it, budget for it, buy redundancy, and sign an SLA that puts somebody else on the hook.

Hardware is the stadium 🏟️- wildly expensive, boxed in by the real world, but it shows up the same way every Sunday. It never decides it's just not feeling the game today 🤲.

MANAGING TECHNOLOGY IS 🙂 , MANAGING PEOPLE IS 😐

People Are Impossible

Then there's people, who break every rule the first two layers just taught you, and who decide whether the business wins or loses.

When CRM projects die, the software is rarely the killer 💯. People problems drive the majority of failures, while technical defects account for only about 6 to 10 percent.

Here are a few reasons people earn the label 👇

🫠 Emotion, Not Logic

A server never gets defensive in a status meeting. Your Senior Consultant does.

People carry ego, fear, and last night's argument into every decision, none of which appears in the requirements doc. A project endures time and budget issues, but also is impacted by a person who didn’t get the raise they wanted, or their parent is sick, or they won the lottery 🏖️.

💁 Incentive

Show people a comp plan and they'll show you the future 🔮.

A rep paid on bookings will torture your pipeline stages to look brilliant on the 30th. It's gravity - people run the play that pays them, even when it's the wrong play for the team. Your roster does what you reward, never what you announce.

A company needs to align worker’s incentives to business goals, otherwise they’re pointing people at the wrong targets 🎯.

🙅 Resistance to Change

Code accepts a new version in milliseconds 🤖.

People file an emotional change order 🙆.

The most expensive resistance in your company is the people and their quiet hallway or water cooler campaign, the "we've always done it this way," or the veteran who nods in the rollout meeting and never logs in again.

💃 People have Lives, Limits, and Breaking Points 🕺

Hardware prints its duty cycle on the spec sheet.

People hide theirs 🫣.

They burn out, coast, get poached, or quietly endure a terrible quarter, and no SLA covers a human at the end of their rope. Your best admin is also a person with a sick kid and a competitor in their LinkedIn DMs 📥.

So why bother, when people are the one variable you can't debug?

Because they're the only one that compounds 🧑‍🏫.

The right people make mediocre software sing and tired hardware last another year, which is why winning leaders draft people first and tooling last, an order that makes an org 86% more likely to beat its goals.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Executives are paid to answer these questions-

❓ Are you investing more in the system itself than in getting your people to adopt it?

❓ What behavior are your incentives really rewarding, regardless of the memo you sent? Is that reward reaching your people’s paychecks?

❓ Who on your team is overloaded or being recruited away while your attention is on the technology?

Can you answer them? 🤔

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes