Wabi-Sabi: People are Imperfect. Love Them Anyway.

Wabi-Sabi in leadership means treating the inevitable messiness of people as a feature, not a bug. The author recounts a senior engineer who showed up drunk on a critical deadline, yet still held authority and equity. Instead of firing him, the leader had to work around the chaos and keep the ship on course. The story illustrates that technical leaders often face irrational, unpredictable behavior that can't be solved by policies alone.

A second vignette describes a founder who whispered contradictory directions to engineers after the leader left the building, then denied those suggestions at board meetings. The clash could have stalled the product, but the leader forced the founder out of the office until the deadline was met, proving that decisive action combined with tolerance for human error can deliver results. These anecdotes show that leaders must navigate personal flaws while still meeting business goals.

The practical takeaway is simple: stop trying to make people perfect and start designing processes that survive their imperfections. Accept that team members will be chemical, emotional, and occasionally disruptive. Build redundancy, keep communication clear, and avoid writing people off too quickly. By framing flaws as part of the whole, leaders keep teams intact, maintain morale, and ultimately ship better products.