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Public escalation is a valid option and should be encouraged, because if you don’t it will just happen anyway, only with a lot more rancor.
Meetings should have a single decision-maker/owner.
A meeting between two groups of equals often doesn’t result in a good outcome, because you end up compromising rather than making the best tough decisions.
The decision-maker should be hands on. He or she should call the meeting, ensure that the content is good, set the objectives, determine the participants, and share the agenda (if possible) at least twenty-four hours in advance. After the meeting, the decision-maker (and no one else) should summarize decisions taken and action items by email to at least every participant—as well as any others who need to know—within forty-eight hours. Even if a meeting is not a decision-making meeting—for example it’s designed to share information or brainstorm solutions—it should have a clear owner.
Meetings are not like government agencies—they should be easy to kill.
Is the meeting still useful? Is it too frequent / not frequent enough? Do people get the information they need? Meetings should be manageable in size.
Attendance at meetings is not a badge of importance.
Timekeeping matters.
If you attend a meeting, attend the meeting.
How often have you emailed, chatted, or texted someone who was sitting only a few feet away?
It can be hard for people who don’t know the organization to start that conversation. As a leader, you need to help them.
At Google, our themes include putting users first, thinking big, and not being afraid to fail.
By the way, if you repeat something twenty times and people don’t get it, then the problem is with the theme, not the communications.
One simple tactic to break the staff meeting monotony is the humble trip report.
“What I Did on My Summer Vacation”–style report on what they did and what they learned.
No matter what a person’s job is, they should be encouraged to have opinions about the business, industry, customers and partners, and different cultures.
Make sure you would work for yourself. If you are so bad as a manager that you as a worker would hate working for you, then you have some work to do.
At least once per year, write a review of your own performance, then read it and see if you would work for you. And then, share it with the people who do in fact work for you.
“I should have empowered the team earlier and forced more decisions down into the organization.”
“I should have been more forceful to force closure on certain decisions and be impatient. I have tended to value the development of consensus more than I should in some situations.”
Respond quickly.
When writing an email, every word matters, and useless prose doesn’t. Be crisp in your delivery.
Clean out your inbox constantly.
Handle email in LIFO order
Remember, you’re a router.
When you use the bcc (blind copy) feature, ask yourself why.
Don’t yell.
Make it easy to follow up on requests.
Help your future self search for stuff.
1:1s—match the lists Bill Campbell once suggested to us an interesting approach to organizing 1:1s (aka one-on-ones, the periodic meetings between manager and employee). The manager should write down the top five things she wants to cover in the meeting, and the employee should do the same. When the separate lists are revealed, chances are that at least some of the items overlap. The mutual objective of any 1:1 meeting should be to solve problems, and if a manager and employee can’t independently identify the same top problems that they should solve together, there are even bigger problems
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Bill also suggests a nice format for 1:1s, which we have adopted with good results: 1. Performance on job requirements a. Could be sales figures b. Could be product delivery or product milestones c. Could be customer feedback or product quality d. Could be budget numbers 2. Relationship with peer groups (critical for company integration and cohesiveness) a. Product and Engineering b. Marketing and Product c. Sales and Engineering 3. Management/Leadership a. Are you guiding/coaching your people? b. Are you weeding out the bad ones? c. Are you working hard at hiring? d. Are you able to get your
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(Champion racecar driver Mario Andretti: “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast
He embodied a combination of technical depth, artistic and creative talent, and business savvy
how much personal style can influence company culture and about how that culture is directly tied to success.
Both companies tend to eschew traditional market research and rely on our own abilities to figure out what consumers will want.
for something to be innovative it needs to offer new functionality, but it also has to be surprising. If your customers are asking for it, you aren’t being innovative when you give them what they want; you are just being responsive. That’s a good thing, but it’s not innovative. Finally, “useful” is a rather underwhelming adjective to describe that innovation hottie, so let’s add an adverb and make it radically useful. Voilà: For something to be innovative, it needs to be new, surprising, and radically useful.
But Google also releases over five hundred improvements to its search engine every year. Is that innovative? Or incremental?
definition—innovation isn’t just about the really new, really big things—matters
First, the idea has to be something that addresses a big challenge or opportunity, something that affects hundreds of millions or billions of people. Second, they have to have an idea for a solution that is radically different from anything currently in the market.
third, the breakthrough technologies that could bring that radical solution to life have to be at least feasible, and achievable in the not-too-distant future.
This is usually found in markets that are growing quickly and full of competition (lots of companies are working on automated cars; most of them are actually car companies!). Don’t look for empty space and then be lonely; it is much better to use an innovative approach to become a player in a space that is or will be large. This may seem counterintuitive, since many entrepreneurs dream of entering “greenfield” markets that are brand new and have no competition. But usually there’s a reason the market is empty: It’s not big enough to sustain a growing venture.
Another element to consider is technology: How do you think the technology in the space will evolve? What is different now, and what further change do you expect? Do you have the talent to create sustainable differentiation within that evolving world?
As business managers, we like to manage things. Want something done? Then put someone in charge of it.
“Innovative people do not need to be told to do it, they need to be allowed to do it.”
Derek
“first follower” principle: When creating a movement, attracting the first follower is the most crucial step. “The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.”
“Optimism is an essential ingredient for innovation. How else can the individual welcome change over security, adventure over staying in a safe
Hire people who are smart enough to come up with new ideas and crazy enough to think they just might work. You need to find and attract those optimistic people, then give them the place to create change and adventure.
“focus on the user and all else will follow.”
Focus on the user… and the money will follow.
