Why Shopify's CEO uses 'god mode' to delete meetings from his employees' calendars and stakes his company culture on what he calls a 'trust battery'

• CEO Tobi Lütke has experimented with chaos engineering at Shopify in some unconventional ways.
• Lütke told Bloomberg he'd sometimes enter "god mode" on staff calendars to wipe recurring meetings.

Everyone hates meetings that could have been emails, and Shopify's CEO, Tobi Lütke, is no exception.

In an interview published on Thursday, Lütke told Bloomberg Businessweek about his practice of occasionally scrapping unnecessary meetings as part of his attempt to test out chaos engineering — the practice of deliberately creating issues in order to build resilience — at Shopify, which sells software that merchants can use to open online stores.

To do this, he'd occasionally enter "god mode" on employees' calendars and wipe recurring meetings.

"Nothing can become truly resilient when everything goes right," he said.

In 2017, well before the pandemic led companies to go remote, Lütke sent Shopify's employees home to work remotely for a month as an experiment. He told Businessweek the trial didn't pan out well, and that "the tools were terrible."

In May 2020, Shopify adopted a policy of letting employees work from home long term, joining companies such as Twitter and Square in embracing indefinite remote work.

Lütke also explained his belief in a "trust battery," a term he coined in a New York Times interview in 2016. In the workplace, a person doesn't simply trust or not trust someone else, he explained. Instead, there's a gradient of trust. When a person is hired, the trust battery is charged to 50%, and subsequent interactions either help build or wear down that trust.