I recently spent my nights learning Rust, a systems programming language famous for its steep learning curve and its promise of "memory safety."
As I wrestled with the compiler, I realized that Rust isn't just a language for managing memory; it's a masterclass in managing organizations.
The Concept of "Ownership"
In Rust, every piece of data has exactly one owner. If you want to use that data elsewhere, you have to explicitly "move" ownership or "borrow" it.
In many dysfunctional companies, ownership is vague. Who owns the customer onboarding process? Sales? Product? Support? When everyone "kind of" owns it, nobody owns it.
Lesson: Define clear ownership for every metric and process. Shared responsibility is no responsibility.
The "Borrow Checker" and Resource Contention
Rust has a component called the "Borrow Checker" that prevents you from modifying data that someone else is currently reading. It prevents "race conditions"—where two processes try to change the same thing at the same time, leading to chaos.
Corporate race conditions happen constantly. Marketing changes the pricing page while Product is A/B testing a checkout flow. Sales promises a feature that Engineering hasn't scoped.
Lesson: We need organizational "Borrow Checkers"—strict rules about who can modify a resource (a product, a policy, a budget) and when.
"Unsafe" Blocks
Rust allows you to bypass its safety checks, but you have to wrap that code in an unsafe { ... } block. You are explicitly telling the compiler: "I know this is risky, but I'm taking responsibility."
In business, we sometimes need to cut corners to ship. We skip a legal review, or we patch a server manually. This is necessary. But we often do it implicitly, hiding the risk.
Lesson: When you break process, doing it explicitly. Declare an "Unsafe Block." "We are skipping QA for this fix to unblock the release." Acknowledge the risk, document it, and contain it.
Building a company, like building software, is about managing complexity. Rust shows us that strict rules, while frustrating at first, prevent the catastrophic crashes that happen when we let chaos reign.