May 18, 2017
Vision
“The fastest way to move cattle is sloooooowww.”
Hearing this quote it hit me that maybe moving fast can actually be harmful.
A friend posted about how amazing it was that Google created a Google Glass prototype within a day of the idea. Hmmm… That’s a good innovation story if it were not such a disaster. There are a lot of people out $1500 for a piece of plastic. How is that a win?
I get that we should encourage failure, but what if the irony is that speed of innovation is actually at the root cause of failure?
I was speaking with a company that’s growing tremendously fast and they are hiring hundreds of people in months. That is incredibly risky for culture. Yes, we want to keep up with growth, but at what cost?
Think about Elon Musk and Tesla. They didn’t rush. In fact they said, you can pay us to be on our wait list, and we’ll get back to you when we’re ready.
They took their time, in the name of excellence and quality.
That said, I’m a huge fan of increasing capacity when it comes to customer service. Customers will be forgiving of a lot of errors if they feel they are being given a lot of attention. At Zappos we built up a bench of people because otherwise it’s impossible to answer a call in under a minute.
If you’re thinking about growth, here is the fundamental question to ask yourself…
What is more important? Momentum or Clarity?
Momentum can drive you 100mph into a brick wall. Clarity means no matter what the speed you’re going in the right direction. That’s slow growth. That’s taking more time with innovation.
May 4, 2017
Great cultures
I sometimes call values the “Health Food” of business – It’s what we all know we should do, but aren’t really doing. Mostly because companies have not taken the time to simply figure out what their real values are.
But seeing stories like this in Fast Company, and noticing how both the strongest brands and the disruptor up-and-comers are focused on values, I think values are about to go vogue.
February 3, 2017
Great cultures
I was a facilitator and closer for the Culturati Summit in Austin, TX. It’s a gathering not only of culture authors, but people in companies, boots on the ground and implementing. Here are the notes I thought would be helpful to share:
1. Getting Real
It used to be about hype and spin and staying positive. Now it’s all about the reality check. It’s about being authentic over looking good.
2. Embracing contradictions
We want to succeed, but we also want to make it safe to fail. We don’t want to get political at work, but we want people to be free to speak their minds. We want stability but there’s a need to disrupt ourselves before someone else does.
3. Values as clarity
There are so many distractions and interruptions that values are the only thing that really keeps us on track. It keeps us deliberate rather than being reactionary.
There was a talk on the new book An Everyone Culture that advocates for organizations that are constantly growing their people. I found this model interesting because it shows the balance of challenging people (edge) supporting people (home), and creating systems and processes (groove).
Anders Ericsson, author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, shared a fascinating way to improve performance across industries. The best way is not more and more practice. It’s this formula to generate the feedback loop of success:
Rinse and repeat.
I’ve seen how incredibly this works for me as a speaker. I’m excited to see if others apply it to their industries.
Note, studies have shown that people are really on for peak performance for 4-5 hours a day. Makes me wonder – What if a company had people work from 9am to 3pm – with just highly focused work? I wonder if they’d be more productive and they’d have time to do the other things that make them happy (or do things like pick their kids up after school).
