It’s just another mutherf*ckin’ day for Dre, so I begin like this
No medallions, dreadlocks, or black fists
Just that gangsta glare with the gangsta raps
—Dr. Dre, Let Me Ride
At Opsware I used to teach a management expectations course because I deeply believed in training. In it, I made it clear that I expected every manager to meet with her people on a regular basis. I even gave instructions on how to conduct a 1:1 meeting so there could be no excuses.
Then one day while I happily went about my job, it came to my attention that one of my managers hadn’t had a 1:1 with any of his employees in over six months. While I knew to “expect what I inspect,” I did not expect this. No 1:1 in over six months? How was it possible for me to invest so much time thinking about management, preparing materials and personally training my managers and then get no 1:1s for six months? Wow, so much for CEO authority. If that’s how the managers listen to me, then why do I even bother coming to work?
I thought that leading by example would be the sure way to get the company to do what I wanted. Lord knows the company picked up all of my bad habits, so why didn’t they pick up my good habits? Had I lost the team? I recalled a conversation I’d had with my father many years ago regarding Tommy Heinsohn, the Boston Celtics basketball coach at the time. Heinsohn had been one of the most successful coaches in the world, including being named “coach of the year” and winning two NBA championships. However, he had gone downhill fast and now had the worst record in the league. I asked my father what happened. He said: “The players stopped paying attention to his temper tantrums. Heinsohn used to yell at the team and they’d respond. Now they just ignore him.” Was the team now ignoring me? Had I yelled at them one time too many?
The more that I thought about it, the more I realized that while I had told the team “what” to do, I had not been clear about “why” I wanted them to do it. Clearly, my authority alone was not enough to get them to do what I wanted. Given the large number of things that we were trying to accomplish, managers couldn’t get to everything and came up with their own priorities. Apparently, this manager didn’t think that meeting with his people was all that important and I hadn’t explained to him why it was so important.
So why did I force every manager through management training? Why did I demand that managers have 1:1s with employees? After much deliberation with myself, I settled on an articulation of the core reason and I called up the offending manager’s boss—I’ll call him Steve—and I told him that I needed to see him right away.
When Steve came into my office I asked him a question: “Steve, do you know why I came to work today?”
Steve: “What do you mean, Ben?”
Me: “Why did I bother waking up? Why did I bother coming in? If it was about the money, couldn’t I sell the company tomorrow and have more money than I ever wanted? I don’t want to be famous, in fact just the opposite. ”
Steve: “I guess.”
Me: “Well, then why did I come to work.”
Steve: “I don’t know.”
Me: “Well, let me explain. I came to work, because it’s personally very important to me that Opsware be a good company. It’s important to me that the people who spend 12 to 16 hours/day here, which is most of their waking life, have a good life. It’s why I come to work.”
Steve: “OK.”
Me: “Do you know the difference between a good place to work and a bad place to work?”
Steve: “Umm, I think so.”
Me: “What is the difference?”
Steve: “Umm, well…”
Me: “Let me break it down for you. In good organizations, people can focus on their work and have confidence that if they get their work done, good things will happen for both the company and them personally. It is a true pleasure to work in an organization such as this. Every person can wake up knowing that the work they do will be efficient, effective and make a difference both for the organization and themselves. These things make their jobs both motivating and fulfilling.
“In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not. In the miracle case that they work ridiculous hours and get the job done, they have no idea what it means for the company or their careers. To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem.”
Steve: “OK.”
Me: “Are you aware that your manager Tim has not met with any of his employees in the past six months?”
Steve: “No.”
Me: “Now that you are aware, do you realize that there is no possible way for him to even be informed as to whether or not his organization is good or bad?”
Steve: “Yes.”
Me: “In summary, you and Tim are preventing me from achieving my one and only goal. You have become a barrier blocking me from achieving my most important goal. As a result, if Tim doesn’t meet with each one of his employees in the next 24 hours, I will have no choice but to fire him and to fire you. Are we clear?”
Steve: “Crystal.”
Was that really necessary?
You might argue that no matter how well managed a company is, it will fail without product/market fit. You might argue further that horribly managed companies that achieve massive product/market fit succeed just fine. And you would be right on both accounts. So was it really necessary for me to make such a dramatic speech and threaten one of my executives?
I think it was for the following three reasons:
1. Being a good company doesn’t matter when things go well, but it can be the difference between life and death when things go wrong.
2. Things always go wrong.
3. Being a good company is itself an end.
The difference between life and death
When things go well, the reasons to stay at company are many:
Your career path is wide open because as the company grows lots of interesting jobs naturally open up.
Your friends and family think you are a genius for choosing to work at the “it” company before anyone else knew it was “it”.
Your resume gets stronger by working at a blue chip company in its heyday.
Oh, and, you are getting rich.
When things go poorly, all those reasons become reasons to leave. In fact, the only thing that keeps an employee at a company when things go horribly wrong—other than needing a job, which isn’t so applicable in the current macro environment—is that she likes her job.
Things always go wrong
There has never been a company in the history of the world that had a monotonically increasing stock price. In bad companies, when the economics disappear, so do the employees. In technology companies, when the employees disappear, the spiral begins: the company declines in value, the best employees leave, the company declines in value, the best employees leave. Spirals are extremely difficult to reverse.
Being a good company is an end itself
When I first met my friend Bill Campbell, he was chairman of Intuit, on the board of Apple and a mentor to many of the top CEOs in the industry, including Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos. However, those things did not impress me nearly as much as his time running a company called GO Corporation. GO essentially attempted to build an iPhone in 1992. The company raised more money than almost any other venture capital back startup in history and lost nearly all of it before selling itself for nearly nothing to AT&T in 1994.
Now that probably doesn’t sound impressive. In fact, it probably sounds like a horrible failure. But I’d met tens of GO employees in my career, including great people like Mike Homer, Danny Shader, Frank Chen and Stratton Sclavos, and the amazing thing was that every GO employee that I’d ever met counted GO as one of the greatest work experiences of their lives. The best work experience ever despite the fact that their careers stood still, they made no money and they were front-page failures. GO was a good place to work.
This made me realize what an amazingly effective CEO Bill was. Apparently, John Doerr thought that too, because when Scott Cook needed a CEO for Intuit, John recommended Bill even though Bill lost a ton of John’s money at GO. And for years, everyone who ever came into contact with GO employees knew what Bill was about. He was about building good companies.
If you do nothing else, be like Bill and build a good company.
