What does 'don't fight stupid, make more awesome' mean?

"Don't fight stupid, make more awesome" is a principle Jesse Robbins uses for changing organizations. Rather than attacking bad practices head-on, build something demonstrably better and let people choose it.

Don't Fight Stupid, Make More Awesome: Jesse Robbins on Culture Change

Don’t fight stupid. Make more awesome.

I have had a history of choosing battles extremely poorly. It is almost weapons grade. One of my favorite things that I tried to do was kill EC2, in its infancy, because I was an Ops guy. Don’t be that guy.

The principle is simple: rather than attacking bad practices head-on, which triggers defensiveness and political resistance, build something demonstrably better and let people choose it. Most of the time when people are saying no, what they are really saying is they do not know how to say yes.

At Amazon, I needed to shift a punitive operational culture toward one based on learning. Fighting the existing culture directly would have been a career-ending move. Instead, I built GameDay. A program that proved, through practice, that learning from controlled failure was more effective than punishing people for real failures. The results spoke for themselves, and the culture followed. Start small. Pick the smallest project with receptive people. Call it an experiment. Do not trigger the organizational immune system.

The same principle applies to open-source community building. Chef won adoption not by arguing that manual infrastructure management was broken, but by giving developers a tool so good they could not imagine going back. Spread the love as far away from you as possible so that as many people feel ownership of the change.

As an investor, I look for founders who build tools so good that people cannot imagine going back, rather than founders who spend their energy explaining why the old way is broken. Focus on where you can make more awesome.

Further reading