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This article is by Dave Girouard,
CEO of personal finance startup
Upstart, and former
President of Google Enterprise Apps. He’s well known for building Google’s
enterprise apps division into a $1B+ global business. Here he shares his tips
for making speed fundamental to your company.
I’ve long believed that
speed is the ultimate weapon in business. All else being equal, the
fastest company in any market will win.
Speed is a defining characteristic — if not the defining characteristic
— of the leader in virtually every industry you look at.
In tech, speed is seen
primarily as an asset in product development. Hence the “move fast and break
things” mentality, the commitment to minimum viable products and agile
development. Many people would agree that speed and agility are how you win when
it comes to product.
What they fail to grasp
is that speed matters to the rest of the business too — not just product.
Google is fast.
General Motors is slow.
Startups are fast. Big companies are slow. It’s pretty clear that fast equals
good, but there’s relatively little written about how to develop the
institutional and employee muscle necessary to make speed a serious competitive
advantage.
I
believe that speed, like exercise and eating healthy, can be habitual.
Through a prolonged,
proactive effort to develop these good habits, we can convert ourselves as
founders, executives and employees to be faster, more efficient company-building
machines. And, when enough members of a team exhibit this set of habits, and are
rewarded with reinforcement, compensation, and promotions, the organization
itself will gain velocity.
This is how category
killers are made.
So let’s break this
down. What are the building blocks of speed? When you think about it, all
business activity really comes down to two simple things: Making
decisions and executing on decisions. Your success depends on your
ability to develop speed as a habit in both. MAKING DECISIONS
A good
plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.
General
George Patton said that, and I definitely subscribe to it. Do you remember
the last time you were in a meeting and someone said, “We’re going to make this
decision before we leave the room”? How great did that feel? Didn’t you just
want to hug that person?
The process of making
and remaking decisions wastes an insane amount of time at companies. The
key takeaway: WHEN a decision is made is much more important than WHAT decision
is made.
If, by way of habit,
you consistently begin every decision-making process by considering how much
time and effort that decision is worth, who needs to have input, and when you’ll
have an answer, you'll have developed the first important muscle for speed.
This isn’t to say all
decisions should be made quickly. Some decisions are more complicated or
critical than others. It might behoove you to wait for more information. Some
decisions can’t be easily reversed or would be too damaging if you choose
poorly. Most importantly, some decisions don’t need to be made immediately to
maintain downstream velocity.
Deciding on when a decision will be made from the start is a profound, powerful
change that will speed everything up.
In my many years at
Google, I saw Eric
Schmidt use this approach to decision-making on a regular basis — probably
without even thinking about it. Because founders
Larry and
Sergey
were (and are) very strong-minded leaders involved in every major decision, Eric
knew he couldn’t make huge unilateral choices. This could have stalled a lot of
things, but Eric made sure that decisions were made on a specific timeframe — a
realistic one — but a firm one. He made this a habit for himself and it made a
world of difference for Google.
Today at Upstart, we’re
a much smaller company, and we’re making decisions that matter several times a
day. We’re deeply driven by the belief that fast decisions are far
better than slow ones and radically better than no decisions. From day
to day, hour to hour, we think about how important each decision is and how much
time it’s worth taking. There are decisions that deserve days of debate
and analysis, but the vast majority aren’t worth more than 10 minutes.
It's
important to internalize how irreversible, fatal or non-fatal a decision may be.
Very few can't be undone.
Note that speed doesn’t
require one leader to make all the calls top-down. The art of good decision
making requires that you gather input and perspective from your team, and then
push toward a final decision in a way that makes it clear that all voices were
heard. As I’ve grown in my career, I’ve moved away from telling people I had the
right answer upfront to shaping and steering the discussion toward a conclusion.
I wouldn’t call it consensus building — you don’t want consensus to hold
you hostage — but input from others will help you get to the right
decision faster, and with buy-in from the team.
This isn’t a vote for
rash decisions. I can be a little too “pedal to the metal” at times, and
sometimes my co-founder Anna will say, “This is a big decision. Even though we
think we know what to do, let’s give it 24 hours.” She’s saved us multiple times
with that wisdom.
There's an art to
knowing when to end debate and make a decision. Many leaders are reluctant to
make the final call when there are good arguments and a lot of emotions on both
sides. We intuitively want the team to come to the right decision on their own.
But I’ve found that people are enormously relieved when they hear that you’re
grabbing the baton and accepting responsibility for a decision. Using the “CEO
prerogative” — to make the final call — isn’t something you ought to need every
day. As long as you do it sparingly, you can actually make your employees more
comfortable, and engender more trust by pulling the trigger, logically
explaining your choice and sticking with it.
In fact, gauging
comfort on your team is a really helpful measure of whether you’re going fast
enough or not.
You
know you're going fast enough if there's a low-level discomfort, people feeling
stretched. But if you're going too fast, you'll see it on their faces, and
that's important to spot too.
While I was at Google,
Larry Page was extremely good at forcing decisions so fast that people were
worried the team was about to drive the car off a cliff. He’d push it as far as
he could go without people crossing that line of discomfort. It was just his
fundamental nature to ask, “Why not? Why can’t we do it faster than this?”
and then wait to see if people started screaming. He really rallied everyone
around this theory that fast decisions, unless they’re fatal, are always better.
EXECUTING DECISIONS
A lot of people spend a
whole lot of time refining their productivity systems and to-do lists. But
within the context of a team and a business, executing a plan as quickly as
possible is an entirely different concept. Here’s how I’ve learned to execute
with momentum.
Challenge the when.
I’m always shocked by
how many plans and action items come out of meetings without being assigned due
dates.
Even when dates are assigned, they’re often based on half-baked intuition about
how long the task should take. Completion dates and times follow a tribal notion
of the sun setting and rising, and too often “tomorrow” is the default answer.
It’s not that
everything needs to be done NOW, but for items on your critical path, it’s
always useful to challenge the due date. All it takes is asking the simplest
question: “Why can't this be done sooner?” Asking it
methodically, reliably and habitually can have a profound impact on the speed of
your organization.
This is definitely a
tactic that starts with individual employees first — ideally those in senior
positions who can influence others’ behavior. As a leader, you want them to make
“things I like to do” become “things we like to do.” This is how ideas get
ingrained. I’ve seen too many people never question when something will be
delivered and assume it will happen immediately. This rarely happens. I’ve also
seen ideas float into the ether because they were never anchored in time.
You don’t have to be
militant about it, just consistently respond that today is better that tomorrow,
that right now is better than six hours from now.
There’s a funny story
about my old pal Sabih Khan, who worked in Operations at Apple
when I was a product manager there. In 2008, he was meeting with Tim
Cook about a production snafu in China. Tim said, “This is bad. Someone
ought to get over there.” Thirty minutes went by and the conversation moved to
other topics. Suddenly Tim looked back at Sabih and asked, 'Why are you still
here?' Sabih left the meeting immediately, drove directly to San Francisco
Airport, got on the next flight to China without even a change of clothes. But
you can bet that problem was resolved fast.
The
candle is always burning. You need leadership to feel and infuse every
discussion with that kind of urgency.
Recognize and remove
dependencies.
Just as important as
assigning a deadline, you need to tease out any dependencies around an action
item. This might be obvious, but mission critical items should be absolutely
gang tackled by your team in order to accelerate all downstream activities.
Things that can wait till later need to wait. Ultimately, you can’t have team
members slow-rolling on non-vital tasks when they could be hacking away at the
due date for something that is make or break.
A big part of this is
making sure people aren’t waiting on one another to take next steps. The
untrained mind has a weird way of defaulting to serial activities — i.e.
I’ll do this after you do that after X, Y, Z happens. You want people working
in parallel instead.
A lot
of people assume dependencies where they don't even exist.
How can you turn serial
dependencies into parallel action? As a CEO, I insert myself at different points
in a process to radically accelerate things. For example, if we’re coming up on
an announcement and time is of the essence, I might jump in and just write the
blog post myself. It’s not that my team couldn’t do it. I just know it would be
faster since I’m the one who’s picky about the content anyway. As a leader, it’s
your job to recognize the dependencies and non-dependencies, and take action
depending on how critical the thing is and when it’s due.
Ten times a day I’ll
find myself sitting in a meeting saying, “We don’t need to wait for that thing,
we can do this now.” That thought is so common. It’s just that people need to
say it out loud more often.
Eliminate cognitive
overhead.
Remember when you used
to download lots of songs on iTunes? It was so painfully slow if you wanted to
buy a whole album at once. You’d have to wait for one to finish downloading so
they could all speed up. Projects are like this. Sometimes a project is so
complicated that it feels like you’re downloading six albums at once so
everything else grinds to a halt too.
I can’t even count the
number of meetings I had at Google related to enterprise app identities versus
normal consumer Google IDs. We launched a project to fix this, but it was so
complicated that the first 30 minutes of every meeting were dedicated to
restating what had happened in the last meeting. The cognitive overhead was mind
boggling.
This is how I learned
that if you can knock out big chunks of a project early, you can reduce the
overhead of the remaining parts by 90%. You should always be on the lookout for
these opportunities.
Often, it will be one
tiny element of a project that’s adding all of the complexity. For example, our
business at Upstart has to comply with a lot of regulations. There’s not a lot
we can do until we know we’ll have legal approval, so we used to spend a lot of
time dancing around whether something was going to be legal or not. Then we
thought, why don’t we just get a brain dump from our lawyers saying, “Do this,
this and this and not this, and you’ll be fine.” Having that type of simple
understanding of the problem drastically reduced the cognitive overhead of every
decision we made.
If you can assess, pull
out and stomp on the complicating pieces of the puzzle, everyone’s life gets
easier. The one I see the most — and this includes at Google too — is that
people hem and haw over what the founder or CEO will think every step of the
way. Just get their input first. Don’t get your work reversed later on.
What a founder might think is classic cognitive overhead.
Use competition the
right way.
Talking about your
competition is a good way to add urgency. But you have to be careful. As a
leader, your role is to determine whether your team is going fast because
they're panicked, or if they don’t seem to be paranoid enough. Based on the
answer, competition is a helpful tool.
At Upstart, we
constantly say that while we’re working hard on this one thing, our competitors
are probably working just as hard on something we don’t even know about. So we
have to be vigilant. A lot of people say you should ignore competition, but by
acknowledging it, you’re incentivizing yourself to set the pace in your market.
You
can either set the pace of the market or be the one to react. Whoever is fastest
out of the gate is the one everyone else has to react to.
When we were launching
Google Apps, we were coming out against Microsoft Office, which had this
dominant, monopolistic ownership of the business. We thought about what we could
do differently and better, and the simplicity of our pricing was part of it. We
offered one price of $50 per employee per year — compared to the wacky 20-page
price list Microsoft would drop on you. We didn’t agonize over whether it should
be $45, $50 or $55 — I think we decided that in a half hour. We just wanted to
be able to tell people, “We may not be free, but we’ll be the simplest decision
you ever made.” That was us re-setting the bar for the market and pushing it
hard so everyone else would have to react to it.
Rally support for
decisions.
Almost nothing in tech
can be done in a vacuum. Basically, once you’ve made a decision, you’ll need to
convince others that you’re right and get them to prioritize what you need from
them over the other things on their plate.
Influencing a decision
starts with recognizing that you’re really just dealing with other people. Even
if it’s a vendor or another company you need to rally, it boils down to one
person first. Given this view, you need to make a point of understanding this
person, what their job is, how their success is measured, what they care about,
what all of their other priorities are, etc. Then ask: “How can you help them
get what they want while helping you get what you want?”
I’ve seen this done by
appealing to people’s pride. Maybe you tell them that you used to work with a
competitor who was quite speedy so that they have incentive to go even faster.
I’ve also seen this done by appealing to human decency and being honest. You
might say something like, "Hey we’re really betting heavily on this, and we
really need you guys to deliver."
Whichever route you
choose, you want to back up your argument with logic. You should gently seek to
understand what’s happening. I tend to ask a lot of questions like: “Can you
help me understand why something would take so long? Is there any way we can
help or make it go faster?” Really try to get to the heart of the actions
they're taking and the time they’ve carved out to do it. And if this works, be
sure to commend them to their boss.
I highly recommend this
over a brute force method of escalating things to the person’s manager or
throwing competition in their face. That doesn’t serve them, and they’ll be much
less likely to serve you as a result.
How
can you make other people look good? How can you make meeting your needs
a win for them inside their company?
All of this comes back
to making things go as fast and smoothly as possible. When you feel things start
to slow down, you have to keep asking questions. Questions are your best
weapon against inertia.
To keep things moving
along at Upstart, I ask a lot of hard questions very quickly, and most of them
are time related. I know that we execute well and are generally working on the
right things at the right time, but I will always challenge why something
takes a certain amount of time. Are we working as smartly as we can?
Too many people believe
that speed is the enemy of quality. To an extent they’re right — you can’t force
innovation and sometimes genius needs time and freedom to bloom. But in my
experience, that’s the rare case. There’s not always a stark tradeoff between
something done fast and done well. Don’t let you or your organization use that
as a false shield or excuse to lose momentum. The moment you do, you lose your
competitive advantage. |