WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.280 Hey, what's going everyone? Welcome back to the game. I'm furthering this spirit of telling you guys 2 00:00:07.280 --> 00:00:13.040 it's actually going on in business and maybe it will help apply to your business. This week I had 3 00:00:13.040 --> 00:00:19.520 a frustrating issue with one of our departments and we have had this recurring issue for three weeks 4 00:00:19.520 --> 00:00:26.720 and it's been driving me bananas. One of the things that happened was last week we had the issue, 5 00:00:26.720 --> 00:00:30.320 the week before we had the issue, the week before that we had the issue and every time I'd arrive at 6 00:00:30.320 --> 00:00:36.720 the call I would expect that the issue had been resolved and it had not been resolved and I heard 7 00:00:36.720 --> 00:00:44.400 this thing for Peter Teal. It was said that he would mercilessly enforce a single focus policy. 8 00:00:44.400 --> 00:00:51.520 The theory or thought behind that is that people often add things to their plates that they know 9 00:00:51.520 --> 00:00:58.640 how to solve and if you were to force rank the impact of the problems that they are solving. 10 00:00:59.200 --> 00:01:05.760 They will typically solve lower impact problems that are easier for them to do because everyone 11 00:01:05.760 --> 00:01:10.960 loves to cross things off the checklist and feel like they were productive. But the unfortunate 12 00:01:10.960 --> 00:01:16.240 thing about business is that most of the big leaps occur by solving more difficult problems, 13 00:01:16.240 --> 00:01:20.160 problems with more nuance, more data, more variables, more details, more parties involved. 14 00:01:20.160 --> 00:01:27.840 What ends up happening if you don't apply that militaristic approach to everyone in the team 15 00:01:27.840 --> 00:01:33.280 and what they are spending their time on, then you get a poor return of the resources allocated 16 00:01:33.280 --> 00:01:37.680 in this instance, the work of the employees, the work of your team and you as the business owner, 17 00:01:37.680 --> 00:01:43.360 the cash that you're paying them, you're getting a worse return. I was thinking about that short 18 00:01:43.360 --> 00:01:47.440 when it came to this and so I think there's a couple of things that I take away and I'll tell you 19 00:01:47.520 --> 00:01:53.520 how we ended up solving the thing. First off, I see strategy, the word is this big or morpheus term, 20 00:01:53.520 --> 00:01:57.520 fun mille's prioritization of resources. You have unlimited options that you could do. There's 21 00:01:57.520 --> 00:02:01.120 a million things you could do in your business to grow it. Unlike who we're like, I don't know what 22 00:02:01.120 --> 00:02:05.200 to grow it, there's exilient things you could do that you grow the business. The question is which 23 00:02:05.200 --> 00:02:09.440 of these things will grow your business the most and so the people who grow the fastest or the ones 24 00:02:09.440 --> 00:02:15.040 who get the best returns on their limited resources, unlimited options, limited resources, 25 00:02:15.040 --> 00:02:20.960 what bridges the gap is strategy and so that is a big fancy word but my word that I prefer to use 26 00:02:20.960 --> 00:02:25.520 is prioritization and so if you've ever heard strategy, I immediately translated my mind as 27 00:02:25.520 --> 00:02:29.440 parties and so they're like, he is a great strategist. It just really means that he's good at 28 00:02:29.440 --> 00:02:35.680 prioritizing things. Now, level two strategist is they have items that you can't see that they see 29 00:02:35.680 --> 00:02:40.320 as a higher priority than your entire list and that is where people are like, wow, his strategy is 30 00:02:40.320 --> 00:02:45.200 brilliant. It's just that there's another thing that would give you an even higher return on your 31 00:02:45.200 --> 00:02:49.520 resources that would make you the most money, right? And so fundamentally the better entrepreneurs 32 00:02:49.520 --> 00:02:52.720 that are out there see those other plays and then say, this is where we're going to allocate 33 00:02:52.720 --> 00:02:56.720 our attention. Chunk down a level and this is if you're a manager or your team's call it, 34 00:02:56.720 --> 00:03:02.320 you know, the team of direct reports that are underneath of you. I see a good manager slash leader 35 00:03:02.400 --> 00:03:10.160 as somebody who's actively, regularly and ruthlessly pulling up there to do list and saying, 36 00:03:10.160 --> 00:03:14.960 this is an important, this is an important, this is important, this is the most important thing. 37 00:03:14.960 --> 00:03:19.680 And to echo the Peter Teal and if those you don't know, Peter Teal is zero to one. He's a great book. 38 00:03:19.680 --> 00:03:24.480 His class that he taught at Stanford Business School on entrepreneurship is basically the notes 39 00:03:24.480 --> 00:03:28.160 summarized from that class in two books. It's really valuable, very good. If you don't know who he is, 40 00:03:28.960 --> 00:03:34.720 he was a founder of PayPal, part of the PayPal Mafia, Palantir, and a number of other massive 41 00:03:34.720 --> 00:03:40.800 companies, the multibrilator. If you were the leader, then one is you look at the entire list and 42 00:03:40.800 --> 00:03:45.120 you could say, all of these things, though important, are less important than this big thing. 43 00:03:45.120 --> 00:03:51.200 And I think part of that comes down to giving the person permission, just let little fires burn. 44 00:03:51.200 --> 00:03:54.160 And it's a saying that Layla and I have an hour and a world's like, that's a little fire and 45 00:03:54.160 --> 00:03:58.960 we're just going to let it burn for now. Because there is another thing that could, if accomplished, 46 00:03:58.960 --> 00:04:03.360 could make all of these other issues irrelevant based on the speed of growth that would help us unlock. 47 00:04:03.360 --> 00:04:09.680 One of the things that I have learned from managing many people over my tenure is that if you 48 00:04:09.680 --> 00:04:14.160 want something to go faster, there are two big levers that I use. I'm sure there's other ones, 49 00:04:14.160 --> 00:04:18.480 but there's two that I tend to use. These are my hammers, my hammer and my screwdriver. My hammer 50 00:04:18.560 --> 00:04:25.680 is eliminate everything else, which is I look at all of my subordinates and I say, this is the only 51 00:04:25.680 --> 00:04:30.960 thing that matters. Everything else that you have, like right now, we, I talked you about this 52 00:04:30.960 --> 00:04:35.360 yesterday and today it is not done. Tell me what you did between yesterday and today on this 53 00:04:35.360 --> 00:04:39.440 problem. If they have no answers because they were working on quote other stuff, then I would say, 54 00:04:39.440 --> 00:04:44.560 I want you to understand or I need you to understand that none of those other things are as important 55 00:04:44.640 --> 00:04:50.720 as this, which means you are wasting resources. So one is elimination. The second thing is embedded 56 00:04:50.720 --> 00:04:58.800 within that little example I had, which is we were meeting as a marketing team once per week. 57 00:04:59.440 --> 00:05:05.120 One of the things that happened is I said we need to have a more frequent cadence. Whenever you 58 00:05:05.120 --> 00:05:11.120 have high-party issues or at least whenever I have high-party issues, I eliminate an increased 59 00:05:11.120 --> 00:05:15.280 frequency of communication. So I eliminate everything else and say we will talk every day or we 60 00:05:15.280 --> 00:05:21.200 will talk twice a day until this is done because it communicates a very clear message to the team, 61 00:05:21.200 --> 00:05:27.120 to everyone else that, oh shit, the boss thinks that nothing else matters and he's asking for us to 62 00:05:27.120 --> 00:05:32.160 check in on regular intervals, which means from a behavior perspective, there is going to be a 63 00:05:32.160 --> 00:05:38.240 reinforcing event on a very fast cadence, meaning if I want that reinforcing event to be a positive 64 00:05:38.240 --> 00:05:42.560 reinforcement, I should increase the likelihood of that happening by getting this shit done or 65 00:05:42.560 --> 00:05:47.600 at least making substantial progress on it. If the person then says, and this is why the hammer 66 00:05:47.600 --> 00:05:53.280 and the screwdriver have to go together, they have to go together because if you say, hey, we're 67 00:05:53.280 --> 00:05:57.120 going to now talk all the time about this thing and I'm going to be either really happy or really 68 00:05:57.120 --> 00:06:02.320 pissed, obviously I try to go for neutral, not pissed. But if I'm going to, if we're going to have 69 00:06:02.320 --> 00:06:05.840 some outcome that hopefully I just want to say great job, keep working, let me help you, 70 00:06:06.000 --> 00:06:09.280 let me dev bottleneck this with you, let's let's solve the problem move forward. 71 00:06:10.000 --> 00:06:14.640 If that occurs, then we have to make sure that we've actually eliminated everything else from 72 00:06:14.640 --> 00:06:19.600 their plate because let's say for example, you talk to a customer server shop, just using a simple one. 73 00:06:19.600 --> 00:06:25.280 And that person has to be on call all day, to answer customer's complaints. If you say, hey, 74 00:06:25.280 --> 00:06:31.040 I need you to work on this customer service, new SOP, standard operating procedure. You need to 75 00:06:31.040 --> 00:06:35.360 give it to me by lunch or by the end of the day. That particular person gets to the end of the day 76 00:06:35.360 --> 00:06:41.120 and says, hey, I really wanted to work on it, but I had 16 customer tickets that came in during 77 00:06:41.120 --> 00:06:45.920 that time period from when you told me the morning until now. And that is where, if you didn't say, 78 00:06:45.920 --> 00:06:51.120 oh, by the way, I'm going to take you off the schedule until you solve this, I'm going to eliminate 79 00:06:51.120 --> 00:06:55.600 everything else or just say, we're going to let those 16 tickets that come in today, 80 00:06:55.600 --> 00:06:58.720 you're just going to save them for tomorrow or I'm going to give you overtime or the weekend, 81 00:06:58.720 --> 00:07:04.080 whatever it is, but this is more important. I'm willing to upset 16 customers because this 82 00:07:04.080 --> 00:07:08.800 thing is upsetting 500 customers. And sometimes you just have to spell it out because honestly, 83 00:07:08.800 --> 00:07:12.880 this is my experience, people want to do a good job, people don't want to be in the doghouse, 84 00:07:12.880 --> 00:07:16.960 people want the person who's doling out reinforcement to say you did it, you did great, you're doing 85 00:07:16.960 --> 00:07:21.600 you know, you're doing awesome, whatever. But the thing is is they have conflict when they don't 86 00:07:21.600 --> 00:07:27.280 have prioritization happening for them. And so I would say the big metal lesson that I have that 87 00:07:27.280 --> 00:07:32.080 I was reminded of and that hopefully maybe this podcast will remind you of is that your team, 88 00:07:32.080 --> 00:07:36.160 their to-do list will literally only get longer and they will come up with other things for 89 00:07:36.160 --> 00:07:42.320 themselves to do that typically don't align with the overall strategy of the business. Now, 90 00:07:42.320 --> 00:07:47.120 I don't say that as a as a slight towards them or that they're trying to deliberately sabotage 91 00:07:47.120 --> 00:07:50.560 your company more so that they just don't have the context that you have. One of the things that 92 00:07:50.560 --> 00:07:56.240 Layla and I are doing, this is a side quest note here, but what we're continually reinvesting in is 93 00:07:56.240 --> 00:08:00.640 even further transparency within the business so that there is so a lot of people are like really 94 00:08:00.640 --> 00:08:05.040 weird about financials or like you know proprietary data, at least from the stuff that you've you know 95 00:08:05.040 --> 00:08:09.040 seen from how Layla and I roll like we prefer to just make everything public. There you go, it's all 96 00:08:09.040 --> 00:08:12.720 there. And for those of you who are like really weirded out about that, let me just give you a 97 00:08:12.720 --> 00:08:16.480 hypothetical extreme for like I'm really worried if people like I don't want my team to know my 98 00:08:16.480 --> 00:08:19.440 financials. It's like what do you think the biggest companies in the world have? They have public 99 00:08:19.440 --> 00:08:23.680 financials, they're publicly traded companies. I heard Sam Walton say this in his autobiography, 100 00:08:23.680 --> 00:08:28.240 he said it was one of the biggest mistakes not making stuff transparent earlier and not giving 101 00:08:28.240 --> 00:08:32.480 ownership, but he had all these concerns that ended up being unfounded. And so and people know 102 00:08:32.480 --> 00:08:36.560 having better context to make decisions, they understood where the role contributed to the 103 00:08:36.560 --> 00:08:39.840 overall growth of the business in a much more significant way. And so that's something that Layla 104 00:08:39.840 --> 00:08:45.760 continued to strive to do is just get everybody understanding. Obviously some people don't take 105 00:08:45.760 --> 00:08:49.520 interest in that because that's just like not where the roles are fine. But for those people who 106 00:08:49.520 --> 00:08:53.040 want to, which is usually a more leadership oriented person who wants to move up the company's 107 00:08:53.040 --> 00:08:58.880 more career-minded, that information advantage or rather not giving only a select few people the 108 00:08:58.880 --> 00:09:04.480 information advantage, allowing, call it mid-tier and you know, individual contributors to have 109 00:09:04.480 --> 00:09:08.560 insight is to what is driving the stuff in the business allows them to move up faster because 110 00:09:08.560 --> 00:09:12.080 they can actually make decisions that impact the company if they understand how everything ties 111 00:09:12.080 --> 00:09:18.640 together. I am actively looking to remove things just like you as an entrepreneur like us like we're 112 00:09:18.640 --> 00:09:23.680 always trying to, or at least for me, I'm always trying to cut things because like as soon as you 113 00:09:23.680 --> 00:09:28.000 develop like some level of success, some level of momentum, like there are more opportunities 114 00:09:28.000 --> 00:09:33.280 that come up than than you have bandwidth. It's just natural. There's just there's you have very 115 00:09:33.280 --> 00:09:38.400 limited resources, your attention being the scarist, your time being the scarist of those resources 116 00:09:38.400 --> 00:09:42.400 and the same applies to the team. And we assume for somewhat of a reason, or at least I have 117 00:09:42.400 --> 00:09:47.040 this assumption that my team is perfectly effective, is always productive with all the hours of the 118 00:09:47.760 --> 00:09:52.880 day. I have that to be not true the closer I look at things in our one-on-one. Let's just pull up all 119 00:09:52.880 --> 00:09:56.800 the stuff you got going on. And so you look at all of a sudden you're like, oh my god and sometimes 120 00:09:56.800 --> 00:09:59.920 you're like, oh shoot, I forgot, I told them to do that. And I forgot about it because it's not 121 00:09:59.920 --> 00:10:04.560 even that important. And they've been stressing out and spending, you know, 25% of their time on this 122 00:10:04.560 --> 00:10:09.280 project that I actually forgot about and I don't even need them to keep working on it. And so I think 123 00:10:09.280 --> 00:10:16.000 the continuous cycle of pruning the tree, like if you see each of them as a tree that's being 124 00:10:16.000 --> 00:10:20.480 watered and grown from your leadership, your management, I need to cut as many of these other 125 00:10:20.480 --> 00:10:26.080 things that are having them grow, these offsuits that aren't going to drive the overall height of the 126 00:10:26.080 --> 00:10:30.640 tree. Let's say height is the growth of the business for the analogy. I want to direct all of their 127 00:10:30.640 --> 00:10:36.720 resources towards this one point of leverage that this person or this department has the greatest 128 00:10:36.720 --> 00:10:41.280 influence over. And a lot of times it's like, and it sometimes it feels weird to say, oh yeah, 129 00:10:42.160 --> 00:10:45.680 email follow up. We're just not going to send an email this week or, you know what, we're not 130 00:10:45.680 --> 00:10:49.520 going to make a YouTube video this week or I'm not going to release a podcast. Some people 131 00:10:49.520 --> 00:10:54.400 really pride themselves in like, I made a podcast every single week for five years. That's amazing. 132 00:10:54.400 --> 00:11:01.280 I don't like rules. I like the, what's the spirit behind it? If I miss a week or two, but during 133 00:11:01.280 --> 00:11:06.240 that week, because it was not as high of a priority for the week, obviously you have long term 134 00:11:06.240 --> 00:11:10.320 priorities like, yeah, if we, if we eventually kill the podcast or we eventually kill the YouTube 135 00:11:10.320 --> 00:11:15.520 channel, then that's going to be a problem, right? But for this week, the incremental loss that we 136 00:11:15.520 --> 00:11:21.440 will experience in viewership in whatever is not proportional to the loss that we have by not 137 00:11:21.440 --> 00:11:27.200 getting this big thing done. I think a lot of people have a lot of superstition and at least for 138 00:11:27.200 --> 00:11:35.120 me, it has served me well to at least know that I always have a trump card. I can always say, stop 139 00:11:35.200 --> 00:11:42.720 the trains. This is what matters. Let that fire burn. These aren't priorities. And for me, 140 00:11:42.720 --> 00:11:50.080 as an entrepreneur driving growth, it's been incredibly difficult for me to turn down opportunities. 141 00:11:50.080 --> 00:11:54.880 I've made plenty of stuff about this. But the, the way that I do this is that I always try to 142 00:11:54.880 --> 00:11:59.360 crystallize them. I try to memorialize them, try to save them in some place so that doesn't feel 143 00:11:59.360 --> 00:12:04.480 like I lost them. And what I found oftentimes, and this is what's wild about this, and we also see 144 00:12:04.560 --> 00:12:08.800 this with school with the product iteration cycle. Let's say we've got five things that we think 145 00:12:08.800 --> 00:12:12.720 are priorities are very interesting, right? We still need to say of those five, which is the most 146 00:12:12.720 --> 00:12:16.400 important. And I encourage you, like thinking right now, you probably have like five things that 147 00:12:16.400 --> 00:12:20.240 you're like, off, we do these things, this will be huge. But if you can only have one of those five, 148 00:12:20.240 --> 00:12:25.200 what would it be? And if you just did that one, how much further would you be, right? So then maybe 149 00:12:25.200 --> 00:12:29.040 let's not distract the other resources towards the other four and just focus on this one. Now, 150 00:12:29.040 --> 00:12:31.920 this is where it gets really interesting. And this one, I'm going to pull the school example in. 151 00:12:31.920 --> 00:12:36.480 What we have found, and we've seen this with the product roadmap, if we solve that big thing, 152 00:12:37.680 --> 00:12:44.720 sometimes one of the other four things that were on that list, we remove one or two, 153 00:12:44.720 --> 00:12:49.120 because people stop asking for that particular feature or that particular, that basically that 154 00:12:49.120 --> 00:12:53.840 thing, the problem that that other thing was going to solve has already been solved or at least 155 00:12:53.840 --> 00:12:59.680 solved enough that it's no longer a priority under this new cycle, under this new condition, 156 00:12:59.680 --> 00:13:06.000 where this other variable is now in place. And you'll also find, or at least I have found, 157 00:13:06.000 --> 00:13:13.840 that there are new initiatives and new priorities that when examined in comparison to the remainder 158 00:13:13.840 --> 00:13:18.640 of those four lists actually becomes number one. And then all of a sudden, we say, wow, 159 00:13:19.440 --> 00:13:24.080 we could have in an alternate universe, still been spreading our attention between these five and 160 00:13:24.080 --> 00:13:29.120 not have accomplished any of them, or maybe we're chipping away at it. Or in this new universe, 161 00:13:29.120 --> 00:13:33.440 where we just focus on what things solved it, we actually find out that the next thing that we need 162 00:13:33.440 --> 00:13:40.560 to do isn't even on that list. And so this process of continually pruning the tree and going down 163 00:13:40.560 --> 00:13:44.000 a level of organization, so I'd encourage you to do that if you have multiple tiers of management, 164 00:13:44.000 --> 00:13:49.680 and saying pull up what you have, tell me where your priorities are, let me help you contextualize 165 00:13:49.680 --> 00:13:55.440 these things to say this is the most important, this is where you should be allocating your resources. 166 00:13:55.440 --> 00:13:59.120 And if you do have, for example, something we're like, let's say the customer service exit 167 00:13:59.120 --> 00:14:03.680 light earlier, if the person has to do their job, right, it's like that, you know, we can't have 168 00:14:03.680 --> 00:14:07.440 the whole customer service not answering the phones, because unless there was some major issue, 169 00:14:07.440 --> 00:14:13.360 you probably still won't answer your phones. But can I say, I want you to just do that between 170 00:14:13.360 --> 00:14:19.120 nine and noon for the next week and from noon on, this is where I want you to allocate your time. 171 00:14:19.120 --> 00:14:22.960 And at the end of every day, send me your update. So that way you could have a reinforcement 172 00:14:22.960 --> 00:14:26.880 loop with them to say, oh, awesome job, great work, great progress. Let me let, and then there's, 173 00:14:26.880 --> 00:14:31.120 and then with any questions that are stopping them, right, because sometimes a weekly cadence for 174 00:14:31.120 --> 00:14:35.440 something is just too long. It's like, I'm going to, I'm going to need to help them make a decision 175 00:14:35.440 --> 00:14:38.640 three times. It's like, well, I could probably help them make the decision three times in one day and 176 00:14:38.640 --> 00:14:43.600 get to the end of this thing. And then save 21 days of delay. I made this week the other day, 177 00:14:43.600 --> 00:14:49.440 which I don't think got as many retweets as it should have. I feel as though the job of the entrepreneur 178 00:14:49.440 --> 00:14:55.200 is to make things happen faster while also dealing with the fact that nothing is happening fast enough. 179 00:14:56.400 --> 00:15:01.680 The biggest way that I found to move things faster is to remove everything else that doesn't 180 00:15:01.680 --> 00:15:05.600 accomplish the big thing. And that's from the organizational level to the leaders all the way down 181 00:15:05.600 --> 00:15:11.840 to the individual contributors is saying, this is the priority. And that is how strategy gets translated 182 00:15:11.840 --> 00:15:17.120 from the top all the way down throughout the organization so that you actually have alignment of 183 00:15:17.120 --> 00:15:21.840 all resources to get the highest possible return. And when you get the highest possible return, 184 00:15:21.840 --> 00:15:26.800 it doesn't look like people are working frenetically. They're not working chaoticly. It's not like 185 00:15:26.800 --> 00:15:32.800 they actually make their hands move faster. The thing that they're using their hands for is the thing 186 00:15:32.800 --> 00:15:38.800 that moves the company the furthest. And so I have thought about this in terms of speed and distance. 187 00:15:38.800 --> 00:15:46.960 And I prefer to use distances the analogy is we cover more distance with each stride more than we 188 00:15:46.960 --> 00:15:52.720 stride faster. And I think that thought process really that visualization for how growth really 189 00:15:52.720 --> 00:15:59.920 occurs in a business is how you can unlock huge upside with the existing resources you have. 190 00:15:59.920 --> 00:16:03.680 I hope you find this more documentation style like stuff that's actually going on in our business 191 00:16:03.680 --> 00:16:08.800 today. Helpful. If you do tag share it with a friend. I look at the stats and so that's how I know 192 00:16:08.800 --> 00:16:12.800 if something's good or not. And if it sucks, obviously share it with nobody and never tell a soul 193 00:16:12.800 --> 00:16:16.480 that you hated this. Just get it. Love you all. Keep crushing and I'll see you guys next one. 194 00:16:16.480 --> 00:16:17.360 Bye.