Archive for the ‘Self-knowledge’ Category

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A-players hire A-players, B-players hire C-players

April 28, 2009

This is one of those sayings in the startup world that is so accepted that it’s crossed the border of familiarity and become a full-time resident of the land of trite.  

Guess who coined it?  Steve Jobs.  That’s right, Steve Jobs, when he was getting the Macintosh off the ground.  It’s a phrase we used at RealNetworks a lot, and one that my partners and I use as a result. 

But that it’s trite doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant or true.  It is.  Absolutely. 

And it’s a subtle but important concept to really understand.  What do A-players do for you?  Everything.  Most important, it’s the tone they set in the organization and their influence on the behavior and performance of others. The hiring is critical too, but that’s a byproduct of everything else.

  • A-players are at the top of their game.  This means they know the difference between good and great.  In the work they do, and in the standards they set for those around them and those in their organizations.
  • A-players aren’t threatened by someone better than they are.   Rather, they’re relieved.  That stuff they were struggling with?  They’re happy to get that into the hands of someone who can run with it, faster and more nimbly.  How liberating.
  • A-players know what they don’t know.  A corollary to the point above is that A-players know when they don’t know something, and ask questions.  They have the security to not need to know the answer to every question, and know how valuable intellectual curiosity is.
  • A-players can’t tolerate C-players.  So they make sure the C-players are replaced.  And guess what? The rest of the organization is relieved and inspired.  They know who the C-players are, and have felt the drag on performance.  It may sound harsh, but it’s true.

To me the most essential capability A-players bring to an organization is the tone they set for it.  Their definition of “good” is so much greater than a B or a C player’s, it’s as if they’re speaking a different language.  In fact they are, and it’s critical the organization you’re in all speak the same language. 

This is why starting up companies is so liberating for A-players.  I remember when I was at LSI Logic in the early days, fresh out of college with my head spinning in this startup.  The CEO, Wilf Corrigan, made a comment to me once about why he loved being CEO of LSI Logic so much more than being CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor (which he had been before founding LSI).  He said “because I created a company with only people I wanted to have there, not ones I inherited.”  At the time the answer sounded sensible, but now I realize what he meant was he could hire A-players from the start. 

But don’t get me wrong.  A-players are not a homogenous bunch.  There’s a huge, huge spectrum of abilities and characteristics among them.  Some can be incredibly thoughtful and compassionate, others can be intellectual bullies and seemingly heartless.  But the connective tissue that binds them all together?  They know where to set the bar/standard and how to hold themselves and everyone around them to it.

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Posted in chicken killer, Empathy, fear of not succeeding, Intellectual curiosity, Self-knowledge, Values | 2 Comments »

Man On Wire – Best Startup Movie Ever?

April 1, 2009

I saw Man On Wire for the first time in February; I’d read a snippet somewhere about this being the story of the man who tight-rope walked between the two World Trade Center towers in 1974.  And at a certain level, that’s exactly what this movie is about.  It’s exquisite.  The tight-rope walker, Philippe Petit is almost a caricature, his vision and ambition equal parts boundless and focused.  I’ve seen the movie three times now, and each time it’s more revealing.

What viscerally strikes me is how it tells the story of starting up a company.  This is all about having an idea so audacious it’s almost not believable to someone who hasn’t drunk your kool-aid, yet.  It’s about staying focused on the one reason why you will succeed and not the 10,000 reasons why you will fail.

Man On Wire reveals four super-compelling principles that underscore what it’s like to be in a startup, and if you haven’t been in one, it’s a wonderful way to get a sense for what it feels like to be there:

  • A meticulously constructed plan, discarded.  Philippe Petit spent six years planning this act, including building scale models of the towers’s roofs, constructing a tight-rope the same length as the towers in a field, and on and on.  And guess what?  The day of the “coup” huge elements of the plan had to be thrown out, the real world just didn’t cooperate.  This is “why the numbers in your operation plan are wrong” writ larger than life.
  • Repeated visualizations of the outcome.  This is one of the critical mechanisms to ensuring you’re focused on why you will succeed.  Philippe from the moment he learned of the Towers construction, visualized walking between them.  For years and years visualized walking that wire, how he would do it and succeed. This is critical when you only get one shot at an opportunity, like he had. 
  • Significant emotional toll.  Getting something done that’s ambitious, with a visionary leader means you will do things that are difficult and way outside your comfort zone.  You will find out who the chicken killers are, who can be relied on and who can’t, and most importantly what you can rely upon yourself for.  It’s messy and painful, and you will be different as a result of this experience.
  • The fear of not succeeding.  Philippe’s obsession was on success.  Startups are all about being laser focused on why you will succeed, and your only fear is success NOT happening.  I just can’t say this enough.  People who are afraid of failure may very well get great things done, but just not at startups.

For me the most piercing and fiercely honest confession of the entire movie is when Philippe describes the moment when he committed himself to walking that wire.  A simple shifting of weight from the foot resting on the tower to the foot resting on the wire.  Silent and internally deliberate. 

Compare/contrast this with the article in this April’s Outside Magazine about why people participate in risky sports, and profiles BASE-jumper Ted Davenport.  Neuroscientist Russell Poldrack asserts that there are three ingredients to risk taking: desire for adventure, relative disregard for harm, and acting on your desires without fully thinking them through.  That last factor strays way, way too far into the landscape of recklessness and separates Philippe from Ted.  There was nothing reckless about Philippe Petit.  Deliberate, honest, ambitious, meticulous.

So see this movie for the reasons I outline above.  Also, let yourself ask the other questions.  Like “how can someone afford to spend six years planning this”?  How “real world” is that?  We’re not getting the full story here, but it sure is enjoyable. 

Before your Netflix delivery arrives watch Philippe break Stephen Colbert out of character on the Colbert Report, and you’ll hear Philippe describe that moment when he shifted his weight onto the wire.  Mesmerizing.

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Posted in Business planning, chicken killer, Failure, fear of not succeeding, Intellectual curiosity, meaningful failure, Self-knowledge, Success, Values | Leave a Comment »

Slide decks and spreadsheets

March 26, 2009

This morning I came across an article in mocoNews.net about how Charmin is using a wiki to create a community cataloging the locations of public toilets in ten countries.  As the article points out, it’s not so much the magnitude of the initiative, but the direction it points for how a large CPG organization thinks about its customers and how best to engage them in a conversation about one of its brands.  It’s easy to see when they “get” this transformation and when they don’t.

There’s been a lot written about how brands should be thinking about social media, and our portfolio companies like Wetpaint, Smilebox, and Icebreaker are all deeply engaged in developing products or services enabling a richer interaction between consumers and brands.  I spend a lot of time digging deeply into the trends and subtleties driving and enabling this broader opportunity space, and understanding how important the “understanding of the audience” is to this space.

So a while ago I was asked to guest lecture at a “Top 25” university MBA program on the subject of venture capital and entrepreneurship.  It was at a time when I was travelling a lot, and was really, really busy (which is a cop-out, when are any of us not busy?).  I prepared my talk from a very “inside-out” perspective:  my observations, my points of view, my experiences.  What I didn’t do was spend time examining the course syllabus – admittedly, a brain-dead and inexcusable lapse in not just effectiveness and basic marketing but also common courtesy.

About half way through my talk I made an observation that my job was basically one of digesting information, and that it came in two formats:  slide decks (PowerPoint presentations) and spreadsheets.  I mentioned that between these two documents, you really get the essential information you need from the company, before you dig into the really useful information to help make a funding decision – your own research, your own contacts, your own scar tissue.  

A hand was raised.  The question?  What about business plans? 

I told these students that not only do I rarely come across these, when I do, it’s usually a sign that the entrepreneurs are first-time entrepreneurs, are “old school” in a not good way.  That extracting the salient information from within all that prose takes more time, and in my world, time is a  hard commodity to come by.  I thought this was a useful and helpful piece of “real world” insight.

Except that the class I was speaking to was a few weeks into learning how to write business plans. 

How was it that I was standing in front of 75 MBA students delivering a message that wasn’t “wrong” but clearly was not effective given the context.  Well, with the same arrogance and ignorance large brands who just “don’t get” social media have.

I had completely failed to understand my market and audience.  I hadn’t thought through my objectives for the talk from a perspective any other than my own. I wasn’t thinking “conversation” I was thinking “talking.”

I’m headed back to the same class to lecture again in two weeks.  I know how I will approach the development of my message: a clear set of objectives and a set of messages informed from my point of view and the context of the students and the syllabus.

But back to slide decks and spreadsheets.  As true as it may be that this business is all about digesting information, getting to the point quickly, and that business plans are no longer the mechanism to do this, communication is about by listening, not talking – whether you’re a brand engaging consumers or just someone talking to a group of students. 

I wish Charmin well; that’s not an obvious tactic they’ve chosen, and I hope it’s one based on listening, a lot.  I think it’s brilliant, and reveals an understanding of the audience, the medium, and thier brand.  I plan to be listening, a lot, when I’m in front of those students in two weeks.

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Posted in Business planning, Empathy, Failure, Intellectual curiosity, Self-knowledge, Venture capital | 2 Comments »

Effective networking – as easy as public speaking

March 19, 2009

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a series of conversations with people about what makes an effective networker, and following up my post about the Seattle 2.0 Awards event, “networking” seems like a timely/relevant topic.

To me networking is the ability to develop a real and sincere personal relationship with someone around a topic that the two of us find interesting, relevant, and important.  It’s bidirectional, about giving and getting.

No surprise it has nothing to do with LinkedIn or Facebook.  Just look at the About LinkedIn page: “We believe that in a global connected economy, your success as a professional and your competitiveness as a company depends upon faster access to insight and resources you can trust.”  This is under the heading Relationships Matter.

Wait a second, this is about stuff for you, it’s not about relationships. 

Networking is about taking “what goes around comes around” to heart, and focusing on what you give to someone, beginning with an understanding of that other person.  It’s creating some durable residual value through a conversation, and the goal is to produce a lasting memory of you and your talent/intellect.  Along the way they’ll learn about you, but that’s secondary; it’s the byproduct.

OK, but this can be scary to do.  You are going to reach out to someone you don’t know or know well and ask for something.  In some aspects, this puts you in a situation similar to public speaking (and we all know how comfortable that can be for people).  You need to “perform” and expose some vulnerabilities.  It gets a lot less scary for me when I don’t view this as networking, and instead view this as a way to form and nurture a personal relationship.

Perhaps in this first conversation you do have a favor to ask, or maybe you just want to establish the relationship, or have this person keep an eye out for a role or opportunity relevant to you.  It’s this slice of memory that will provoke them to make the introduction you just asked for, remember your name and repeat it to a relevant contact, or to take your call and grant you a favor someday later when you ask it.

I do this all the time for people, and I don’t mind it one bit.  As a matter of fact, I love it.  I just did it while writing this post.  Someone I know has taken on an ambitious consulting project, and a former colleague of mine who has since become a rock-star marketing exec could help her out.  I loved connecting them, a good fit of two thoughtful, talented people -  who I have real and sincere personal relationships with.

This is taking your values as a person and applying them in a professional context (something I touched on in an earlier post) and doing this in an interpersonally “deliberate” manner. 

And then I thought, well there is networking I hate and am not comfortable with.  It’s the “forced” networking of work-related events – when you’re in a crowd and making the small talk that on occasion produces an interesting and memorable discussion.  This is perverse because in my role as a VC a big part of my job is to get out into the market, to attend events, and to “network.”  I am horrible at small talk, and I admire people who can establish ease and comfort quickly with someone new, and find some common ground.  I am still learning here.

But I approach this in the same way I had to learn to speak in public.  It doesn’t mean I’m always comfortable, it just means I’ve trained myself to do it.  And there are a lot of conversations along the way that just seem to fill space and time, but there are also those moments when I meet someone where we can establish an actual, meaningful conversation.  And then I’m right back in my comfort zone.

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Posted in chicken killer, Empathy, fear of not succeeding, Intellectual curiosity, Self-knowledge, Values | 2 Comments »

Failing in Style – Guest post by Jenny Hall, former CEO of Trendi.com

March 16, 2009

Jenny Hall has graciously agreed to a guest post.   Jenny was the CEO of Trendi.com, a social networking destination focused on young women’s fashion that was shut down in October of 2008, and discusses what she learned as a first-time CEO through the startup and eventual failure of Trendi.

This blog focuses on this juncture of success, failure, and finding the meaning from each.  I think you’ll enjoy what Jenny tells us through her first-hand experiences at Trendi.  Thank you, Jenny, for being OpenAmbition’s first guest writer.

——————-

I really don’t like failure, but I know it’s one of the best sources of learning. I learned a lot the past few years working at a startup, and I learned even more as a result of it failing.

I joined Trendi.com in March of 2007 as the head of marketing and I ended at Trendi in October of 2008 as the last employee and CEO. We had investors, a smart team, a fabulous domain name, a popular blog and so much more going for us- so many reasons to succeed- yet we failed. 

When people ask me “what happened?” I usually say we ran out of money. That’s the cop-out answer- running out of money is a symptom of the underlying issues. I think our underlying issues were communication related (unclear communication with each other, of expectations, and with our customers) and experience related (being young, excited, wanting to do it all and getting nothing done.)

I learned lessons from the mistakes we made as a company and my personal mistakes. Of the many lessons learned, these are the ones that stand out the most to me.

Your target audience should be so excited about your product that they’re pushing you to launch, even if it’s crappy when it launches.

I joined Trendi after the founder received funding for his idea. (I know- that never happens! We were lucky.) I talked to my target market occasionally, but didn’t seek their regular input for 2 reasons- 1) I trusted the investors and founder were right in their beliefs that the idea was a winner and 2) I was afraid of the reaction if I discovered we were wrong and proposed changing the concept.

I should have let my market share what they value, even if it differed from what we wanted to create. Sometimes we get caught up in what we’re building, fall in love with it, and fail to realize other people don’t see it the same way. It’s like parents with ugly babies (hey, there ARE ugly babies) that filter out all negative comments because they’re so in love with what they created. Trendi was, in some ways, my ugly baby.

Launching a product your market is begging to use, even with a few rough edges, will have more success than a fully developed site that doesn’t add any value. Plus, you’ll tie your market emotionally to the product. They feel invested and valued and voila- you have your first product evangelists. Furthermore, their input is the ammunition needed when confronting a team, investors, or a board about why a major change needs to take place.

Keep the focus simple and narrow.

Once you know what your audience values, keep your focus only on the features you need. Trendi started out (on paper) as a simple 8-page design. We quickly escalated the site to include a robust back end, picture management system, full social network, etc.

Extra features added time to our launch, increased the burn rate and made the user experience…fragmented. We assumed the users would like what we built only to find out they didn’t like or use all the features and it was difficult for them to figure out the ‘point’ of the site when they arrived.

We over-built Trendi for one main reason: We didn’t have a plan.

Sure, we had some general milestones, but we didn’t have an actionable, communicated business plan. When there is no plan, startup employees turn into hormonal 13 year olds with severe ADD. Anything catches their attention and can change the intended course of action. What are the competitors doing? Why don’t we have this cool feature? Let’s make it pink! No grey! We need a YouTube video STAT! (Get the idea?)

People often ask where our board was during this process and I’m embarrassed to say we didn’t have a formal board. We had our investors who would give us time when they could and we had some friends we would call on informally…but no board to help us keep focus.

Don’t do it just because all the cool kids are doing it.

There were an onslaught of “social shopping” sites in 2006 and early 2007. We jumped onto that trend and while it’s important to know the trends and competitors, it’s more important to figure out what your substantive differentiation is, how that difference adds value and how to make money because of it.

This is a mistake businesses and people make all the time- doing something because everyone else is doing it. Why do we feel more comfortable when we’re doing what everyone else is doing?

I now know questioning the trends and value proposition needs to be done regularly- at least monthly- to ensure the choices made are in the best interest of the company.

Hire only when it’s absolutely needed.

Everyone should be fully utilized before anyone else is hired and increasing the number of employees doesn’t always speed up the launch. For a company like Trendi, we probably only needed a CEO, two developers, and a designer. Ideally the CEO would have been someone who deeply understood the target market, could raise money, inspire the team, and was a stellar marketer, writer or able to contribute another key skill.

Instead, we were almost a year into the project and 15 employees deep before our Angel (who owned the majority of Trendi at that point) stepped in and made a drastic change that involved laying off most of the employees.

Yowza. Hard lesson learned. The team stayed lean and more productive after that.

If it won’t matter in 3 months, don’t spend too much time on it.

We could spend a whole day talking about how our rating system would look or a week bantering back and forth about a press release. I should have asked myself – will this matter in 3 months? If it won’t matter then, why spend too much time on it now? Time is a precious commodity in a startup and should be spent on what matters the most- quickly building a product your customers love.

——-

Funny how our resumes show our successes and we take full credit, yet we leave off the failures and if they come up, we blame others. I wish I could blame Trendi’s failure on other people and circumstances, but I can’t. No startup has it perfect- we all deal with difficult employees, investors and economic strains. I have to accept that as a company we made mistakes, but I also have to look back and accept my personal contribution to those mistakes.

Accepting the personal mistakes hurt my ego. I screwed up and it made me question my ability to lead others, my knowledge as a marketer and my future ability to start another business. But somewhere in facing my failure and accepting these mistakes, I was able to learn how I can be a better leader, new things I can try as a marketer, and that I do have the strength to try again.

I always hope for success and aim high, but I now face failure with a humility and thankfulness I didn’t have before. Ignoring failure only hurts you later- you can stuff it away and try to pretend it didn’t happen, but it’ll bite you in the butt at some point. I know that if I face failure as a teacher (a harsh one, but still a teacher) I’ll become stronger and smarter.

I like tea, Thai food and good happy hours. If you want to join me in Seattle for any of these, email me at jennymhall@gmail.com.

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Posted in Business planning, chicken killer, Failure, fear of not succeeding, fundraising, meaningful failure, Self-knowledge, Success | 4 Comments »

Guest post coming Monday

March 13, 2009

I wanted to let you know that OpenAmbition will be showcasing its first guest post, from Jenny Hall, former CEO of Trendi.com, which was a social networking destination focused on young women’s fashion that was shut down in October of 2008.  Jenny will be sharing what she learned as a first-time CEO through the success and eventual failure of Trendi.

I met Jenny the first time a little over a year ago, when she was trying to raise a Series A financing for Trendi, and for  reasons I explained to her, my partners and I were not able to fund her company.  Jenny touches on a few of the reasons in her post on Monday, but in many respects, what she describes are what many entrepreneurs wrestle with in an emerging but crowded market, where so much is learned in real-time. 

Like with many of the entrepreneurs I am fortunate enough to encounter, she and I have kept in touch, and when she stopped by my office a few weeks ago to tell me about her next startup idea, the subject of Trendi of course came up.  Jenny talked me through some of what she had learned, and how valuable the failure of Trendi had been for her personally (but not painless for her, for her employees, or for her investors). 

When we moved on to discussing her next startup idea, it was inspiring to see how much was informed by what she had learned through Trendi’s failure, how she had embraced what many would have tried to forget or move on from.  And so it seemed like she had a story to tell that the followers of this blog could relate to, find interesting, and hopefully find some meaning in too.

I hope you all enjoy it, look for her on Monday.

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Posted in Business planning, chicken killer, Failure, fear of not succeeding, fundraising, meaningful failure, Self-knowledge, Success, Values, Venture capital | Leave a Comment »

Peripateia and the value of getting it wrong

March 9, 2009

One of my kids favorite TV shows is “Dirty Jobs”, and I have to say that what I’ve seen of it, I have liked, because the host Mike Rowe comes across as genuine and inquisitive.  He’s there to understand, not to judge.  That alone is a wonderful set of values for children to see and explore, regardless of medium.

So, when a friend forwarded a link to Mike Rowe’s TED talk  (embedded below) on the merits of hard work, my intellectual curiosity was high.  His job is to question assumptions and to get all of us to understand the real, human aspects of jobs that other people are unaware of or assume just get done. 

He talks about how he’s “gotten it wrong” a lot, but that getting it wrong informs the essence of what he does and how he does it.  He shares the meaningful failure he encounters as an apprentice on a sheep ranch where it’s his job to castrate the lambs. 

He does his research ahead of time and determines the “humane” way to perform said castrations (with a rubber band).  Then he gets to the ranch, and finds the castration performed there is quite different (with a knife, and more); on the surface a more grisly method than he or we could have imagined.  Let’s just say that this would make killing an actual chicken seem simple and an easy choice.

But in the process of telling the story he introduces the concept of peripateia - the sudden or unexpected reversal of circumstances or situation (remembering it from his days studying Greek classics).  What a wonderful way of describing meaningful failure. 

Mike’s castration dilemma is so clearly framed, his assumptions apparent (“the ‘humane’ way is the right way”) and then, through first-hand experience, not only questions that assumption, he casts it aside when he realizes the definition of “humane” needs to be questioned. 

He describes in twenty minutes what some entrepreneurs I know have taken years to internalize, and he draws on some key themes I’ve explored:

  • Getting it wrong is something you need to embrace, it’s what enables you to both perform better and to comprehend your purpose and goals more insightfully.  It’s meaningful failure from another point of view.
  • You need to know when to stop what you’re doing, and question your core assumptions.  This is hard, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts.  When he stops what he’s doing, he demonstrates incredible integrity and purposefulness.
  • Facing up to the unfamiliar, the unpleasant, is precisely what presents you with the opportunity for discovery and learning, and improving the quality of your results.  This is a benefit of chicken-killing I hadn’t thought about.

But the impact of Mike Rowe’s honesty doesn’t stop there. 

He has a transparent methodology (no takes, no scripts, it’s all real) that underpins the credibility of his “product”.  What I loved about this anecdote is that he even had to question that foundational element of his show; he had to stop the filming because his core assumptions about the subject matter were so precarious.   That takes experience and a confidence in your process and values.  He didn’t rationalize, he didn’t talk about the cost of stopping production, he just did it because he knew he needed to.

Back to peripateia.  That doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but what an elegant term to describe how you bring meaning to failure, from getting it wrong. and finding meaning from the doing.  I want Mike Rowe on the board of the next company I fund too.

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Posted in Business planning, chicken killer, Failure, fear of not succeeding, Intellectual curiosity, meaningful failure, Self-knowledge, Values | 3 Comments »

Ask, Tell, Help

February 18, 2009

How often do you encounter a a situation at work where your personal values inform how to solve a difficult/ambiguous situation?

In 1998 I had just joined RealNetworks, and was running the RealSystem G2 launch; it was quite an adjustment professionally.  Real had just acquired Vivo Software where I had been the VP of Marketing, and I now had a much bigger job, with much bigger company ambitions.  G2 was Real’s next generation internet media platform, and was intended to become essentially a multimedia operating system for the web.  We never spoke those ambitions publicly, but they were very, very much the ambitions.

We had the upper hand on the internet a/v market.  Microsoft’s Windows Media Technology (WMT) platform was embryonic and poorly integrated across their vast product/platform landscape.  We routinely pushed the Windows Media guys around like how the New England Patriots pushed their opponents around.

But these were the conditions that provoke a response from Microsoft, and I remember the day we learned that Will Poole had been moved to Windows Media from Internet Explorer 4 – the understanding being the “A” team was now on WMT, the same team that had just crushed Netscape. (The Patriots analogy is eerily relevant here – I’ll save that for another post).

Two years earlier we had licensed RealSystem4.0 to Microsoft, and their players could play back our content up to version 4.0, but not our newest G2 content.  This was intentional and was common practice back then – a way to “provoke” upgrades.  We’d get our broadcast customers to produce audio and video in our newest version, and everyone would need to get the new RealPlayer to access the new content – our players were explicit and helpful about how to do this.

Microsoft saw an opportunity.  They made the Windows Media Player automatically become the default player on someone’s computer for our 4.0 content without telling them, and when it got to our G2 content it stopped and produced an error message.  Microsoft made sure the error message was cryptic (a core competency, apparently), implying there was something wrong with Real’s product, and that was it.  End of the road.

This caused a furor for us and our customers.  Competitive technology geopolitics at Cuban Missile Crisis levels.

So, I got called into a meeting with all the senior execs at Real to sort out what to do.  Our president (at the time) has an incredibly insightful mind, and summarized the problem as if he were explaining it to a child.  “Look, during installation you should ask the user if you can play other media types, then you should tell the user if you encounters one you can’t play, then you should help the user locate a player that can.  Pretty simple stuff.

But he wasn’t talking about a solution to this geopolitical skirmish, he was talking about his values, and applied them to a situation at work.  It was so simple; you ask for something before taking it, you tell people if you have a problem, and you help people.

So, I got tasked with spearheading the Ask, Tell, Help initiative, and spent the next six months rounding up industry support for this, eventually causing Microsoft to sign on.  The legacy is visible today to anyone installing iTunes, Rhapsody, or Windows Media – the application asks you for what media types you would like it to be the default.

I think about Ask, Tell, Help pretty frequently.  It reminds me that my values are my values regardless of whether at work or home, regardless of how charged or ambiguous the situation is.  And keeping clarity about those, and a tight grip on them, enables successful navigation of difficult circumstances.

Don’t you think, or rather don’t you desperately hope, that the folks who had a hand in the mortgage/banking crisis would have made different decisions if they’d have applied their personal values to the ambiguous and charged landscape of credit default swaps?

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Posted in Business planning, Empathy, Intellectual curiosity, Self-knowledge, Success, Values | 3 Comments »

Bad news should travel faster than good news

February 11, 2009

I love this phrase. It was a core principle of Rob Glaser’s at RealNetworks, and I think I must say it to myself or repeat it to someone nearly every day. It’s simple, true, and universal. It applies to work, life, relationships, everywhere.  It’s a core principle that cements the relationship with my partners.

I also love noticing how other people have internalized this principle. The CEO of one of my companies is an incredibly experienced and pragmatic executive who articulates the essence of this phrase another way: that bad news and good news are just different types of data, and just data.  You can’t make good, sound decisions with only half the data. In fact, you will consistently make poor decisions with half the data.

She creates a culture on her teams of “no cost to sharing bad news, and the more rapidly the better”. There’s a second-order benefit too. By treating bad news as data, you build trust within the team, and you shift the focus off the news, and onto what can be done, and how should the team or person respond.  This is easy to say, and really, really hard to put into action.

It also helps you appreciate good news more lucidly. When an executive only tells me what’s working well, the great forecast, the customer wins, part of my mind spins up, wondering “what’s he/she not telling me, because nothing ever goes well all the time.” It gradually deafens my ability to listen to the good news.

Conversely, when someone walks me through what’s gone wrong or what he/she is struggling with, when we get to the good news, I listen so much more closely, because it’s so much more credible. It also tells me a lot about the executive. I know I’m having a real conversation, that I’m not being sold to. 

But this isn’t just about work, it’s about life.  For example, putting into action with your children follows a similar trajectory.  Once my children entered school, and report cards started coming home, we applied the same approach the CEO at my company has with her team.  My children have been told that “this is just a collection of data that will help you and us understand where you need to apply your attention in the next grading period” and “Let’s not focus on the grade itself, but on whether you and we feel you’re working to your potential”. 

My two oldest are in 10th and 8th grade now, where grades matter a lot, and not surprisingly these two children respond quite differently to reviewing “the data”.  The oldest has found it easier to respond matter-of-factly while her younger brother has been less comfortable engaging in a discussion.  There are some likely “birth order” effects going on here, but those aside, he’s struggled to not be defensive…and it’s not about raw intelligence; both of them are at or near the tops of their classes.

So, last month when reviewing the interim grade reports, my son’s math grade had really taken a tumble, it was clear that he was struggling.  But he so didn’t want to examine why.  He wanted to focus on the courses where he was doing well, and pushed back in ways only a 14 year-old can do about applying some objective scrutiny on the basis of his math grade.  But, I guess he listened more than I realized.

A few days later, he walks up to me and says “I’ve got a big math test coming up, and I think I need help with some of this, I just don’t get it.”  We spent the next two nights working together going through the finer points of the standard, point-slope, and slope-intercept formulas with him. 

It was a lot of work, but the transformation was palpable.  He seemed to have turned this corner and saw/felt the benefit of not judging the data, but using it.  By the time we were done, he was confident and relaxed for his test, and he did just fine, better than he expected.

Then again, of course he did, he got to look at all the data.

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Posted in Failure, Intellectual curiosity, meaningful failure, Self-knowledge | 3 Comments »

Shaping your sense of giving

December 18, 2008

Where does our sense of giving come from? How is the act of giving shaped and sized?

One of my family’s holiday traditions is an open house we put on in the second or third week of December. It’s an opportunity to bring our family’s “community” together; all walks of life, people who normally might not run into each other. This followed us from Boston to Seattle, and when we moved to the small town in the Midwest we live in, it found a home here too.

With a backdrop of a worldwide financial crisis and looming hardship in the New Year we asked ourselves “what would be appropriate this year?”. So, my wife rolled up the expenses for last year’s holiday activities and we called a family meeting to talk this through. As we walked through the numbers we saw our party accounted for 20% of the holiday budget last year.

It was gratifying to see our children balance what they knew was happening in the economy with their own fondness for the party. Our fourteen year old son was the first to verbalize what they all seemed to be thinking: “Let’s not have the party and donate the money to the food pantry”. There was a lot of back and forth, but that’s essentially where everyone ended up.

So, instead of sending out an invitation, my wife created an “Un-Invite” in the same invitation format as in years past. It told people we wouldn’t be holding our holiday party this year due to the hardship many are or would be facing and we’d be donating to the food pantry instead. We put instructions on the back letting folks know that they could drop off their own donations with us and we’d deliver these to the food pantry as well.

We got interesting responses. The people at the upper end of the income brackets seemed to hear “You can’t afford to put the party on this year” – and told us so either outright or indirectly. The people on the lower end of the income bracket seemed to hear “You’re focusing on the needs of others” and mailed us checks or dropped off food. Those who gave generally have little to begin with – but found a way to mail $10 or $20.

This range of responses shocked us.

I did some digging and it looks like this is more the norm than not. A paper on charitable giving in America written for Google’s philanthropic foundation makes some interesting observations:

  • “Average” income folks (<$100K) are generally the greatest dollar givers or the most active givers as a percentage of the population, representing 36% of total giving.
  • “Above Average” income folks ($100K – $200K) are the least giving and least active givers than any other income group, representing 8% of total giving.
  • “Average” income folks contribute 49% of the giving to meet basic needs of the poor, while “Above Average” folks contribute 13% of the total. “Wealthy” folks ($200K – $1 million) contributed 28% of the total given.

How does one’s giving “call to action” get shaped and sized? Do some people see a need and respond with an action shaped by the nature of the need? Or do some people see a need and shape their response by their own circumstances (budget, social status,…)?

Why is it that folks closest to feeling the needs of the poor found it easiest to hear the rationale for canceling our party? Is it as simple as realizing they could be there too if circumstances changed? Are folks on the next rung up on the ladder more cognizant of the distance they’ve created? Is that why the focus shifted to “affording a party or not” – which is really a social status issue that has little to do with the needs of the poor.

If it was gratifying to see how our children realized we should cancel our party this year. It’s been equally gratifying to see them ask these questions with us – none of us know the answer.

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Posted in Empathy, Intellectual curiosity, Self-knowledge, Success | 1 Comment »

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