#092 Let go to grow with Rob Bier

This transcript is automated. There may be errors.

Hi everyone. Welcome to How to Live, a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host, Sharad Lal. This is episode 92. We often hear how to start a startup, find that product market fit, build the MVP, but what happens next? How do you scale a, how do you scale a startup of one 50 people to four 50 people without losing your soul or your team?

This question got me thinking. Scaling isn't just a business problem, it's a personal one too. How do we scale as individuals, as leaders, as human beings, and evolve into our next chapter? To explore this, we have someone who's been in the trenches, Rob Beer.  Rob has helped over 40 startups scale, including six that have gone on to become unicorns.

His book Smooth Scaling is packed with sharp, practical insights. But before we dive in, a quick thank you with your support. Our podcast is in the top 3% globally and listened to in one 40 countries. Thank you. Now, without further ado, here's Rob Beer. 

Hi Rob. Welcome to the How to Lip Podcast. Thanks, od, happy to be here. How are you doing this afternoon? Quite well stuffy nose. I hope it doesn't bother us too much, but otherwise great. I'm sure it won't.  Rob, thank you very much for making time and you've written this amazing book on helping companies scale, and I know you've done a lot of work with startups  in helping them organize themselves better  and get ready for the next stage of growth.

So the big question is why scaling? Why not the initial part of the idea? Why not maybe exit? Why scaling? Why is that interested you so much?  I fell into it, to be honest. I was working often with founders at a not early stage, but relatively early, let's say 50 employees. And they were doing all the things that founders do, running around, getting things done, and setting up their management teams.

And that all went pretty well. And I was helping them in building high performing teams. And one day, one of my clients who is already quite big, said to me what you do at the top team is great, but we are a much larger organization. We have teams all over the world. Can you help us more broadly? In short, can you scale what you do?

And I thought. I don't think I know how to do that. But what I noticed as I started to get into doing that kind of work first with that client and then with many others, is that the problems that early stage founders have are well known and well written about. You know, there's a million books and blogs about  how to find product market fit and how to raise seed capital and all those kinds of things.

How to hire your first people and how to find a co-founder. And then I noticed that all of my clients, as they grew, were hitting a similar set of issues for which there was no help and no guidance available, and I was helping them one at a time. But over time I saw the patterns and I felt that it, they just, the world needed some playbook to help founders through this, I guess I'd call it the middle stage.

Mm-hmm. Very interesting and middle stage would be like they've hit a certain revenue number or they've hit a certain number of people, organization and. Then they're plateauing and looking at the next,  how would you define that? From my lens, it's a people issue. So it's not necessarily revenue. It's typically around 150 employees.

Some might recognize that as Dunbar's number. Yes, the famous number of, the maximum number of sort of individual relationships that one can have. It can be more or less, of course, depending on many factors, but around that number. I noticed that the organizational friction started to shoot up and performance started to go down.

Hmm. So I have a kind of simple equation in my head. Performance equals potential. Potential is, do you have great people and are they working well as a team? Minus friction. And friction is all those things that take place in organizations that get in the way. Bureaucracy and bottlenecks and bickering and misaligned work streams and misunderstandings and delays and all of those kinds of things.

And  these are things that. We typically, I think, historically thought of as big company problems. Yeah. Right. Kind of the classic silos and all of that. And what I noticed is that these growth companies developed these problems much earlier than you would expect around 150 people. And by the time they were 250, the problems were acute and you could really sense that they were impacting the organization as well as the morale of individuals because it's no fun to work in that environment.

And the joy and sort of passion of the early stage had gone. It was more of a grind. And again, they didn't really have the skills or the guidance to know how to deal with it. So for me, it's the 150 to 400 employees is kind of that mid stage I. Maybe we can talk about the big challenges they face, and I think you talked about a few of them, which sounded surprising to me.

Red tape and bureaucracy, I would think that it would be like centralized decision making founders making all the decisions. So decisions don't get made, but there's silos and different people, so maybe it's good to understand. What are the biggest challenges, folks,  these companies face between one 50 to four 50?

Oh, well, the centralized decision making, the over-reliance on the CEO is absolutely high on the list. It's very common for the CEO to make more or less all the key decisions up to, let's say a hundred people. And that's not, per se, a, a bad thing because the founder has the clearest sense of the vision and where they're going and is often the most effective decision maker.

And it just totally breaks down by the time you're 250 because A, they don't have enough context. And B, there's too long a queue of decisions waiting to get to them, and so they are bottlenecks. So that is indeed one of them. The second one is in effect the silos problem, which is that when you are 50 people, everyone knows each other, they know what each other does, they know what the purpose of those departments are.

There's a kind of implicit trust that we're all working together and there's a congruence and alignment towards what we're trying to achieve. By the time you have three countries and two product lines, and you're fighting over resources.  That's not necessarily the case. You may not perceive other functions and departments as being aligned with your goals.

Often that is an explicit problem of the way that KPIs or OKRs are set up,  but also it's just at a human level. You don't know those people. You haven't worked with them before. They're new to the organization. Maybe they came through a new country or an acquisition,  and so the normal grinding of the gears of how do we work well together  hasn't been.

focus because it all just worked naturally and suddenly it comes into focus, but they don't have the skills or the rituals to deal with it. And sometimes I notice that when that happens, some founders think, let's systemize, let's create these SOPs and systems and stuff, which then end up being discarded because they come in the way of being nimble and agile.

So I don't know, how does that work? How do you still remain agile but at the same time have some sort of systemization. You know, I'm not an expert on the system and process side. What I would say is, of course you need some, the less, the better, but you need some. But here's the thing, I'd like to run a little thought experiment.

Imagine I invite you to come be CEO of a company and I give you two versions of that company. One has brilliant systems and processes for everything. But the quality of dialogue is very poor. People fight. People disagree. Some people don't talk to each other at all because there's been some sort of breakdown in communications, right?

The other version of the company has very rudimentary systems. They haven't really done much yet, but great culture, great dialogue, great trust, great teamwork. Which company do you think is going to do better? It's obvious. It's a no brainer. And why? Because the second company, the first thing they're gonna do is they're gonna say.

Oh, we need systems, and they'll build good systems. They'll build them in a fit for purpose way, and they'll adapt them as they go because dialogue beats systems every time.  More important to have the good human interactions than to have the good systems. And so if I understand right, having these dialogues or maybe a culture of dialogues and open communication and connections is the biggest intervention that you do.

Which then can help companies scale properly. That's exactly right. And again, if you go back to that baby startup of 10 people or 50 people,  we took good dialogue for granted. Yeah. We had it every day. We didn't give it a name. We didn't think about it. We didn't need training, we didn't need workshops. It was a byproduct of.

Trust, familiarity, alignment, clarity, all hearing the same thing from the founder. So very, very strong alignment. And then one day there's 300 people. They don't know the founder. They've never met the founder. They hear messages through all kind of other channels. They don't know each other. And suddenly those conditions that made dialogue so easy have evaporated.

But we haven't built that explicit muscle of how do we build trust? How do we learn to communicate, how do we resolve differences?  And so we fall back on often caveman type propensities, and that's not good. Very interesting, and that's why the Dunbar number is probably relevant because it goes beyond the size that you can actually have proper connections.

A hundred percent. It's also true that these companies in Southeast Asia have more problems than they would in a larger market like India or the US because in the US you don't even think about going internationally until you're enormous. And so typically you have everybody working in one office, speaking one language.

 Broadly one culture.  If you start in Singapore or in in the Philippines, very quickly you're expanding to five countries before you have stable processes, before the strategy is a hundred percent clear.  So now you have groups in five countries with five cultures, five languages, different customer types, different levels of infrastructure.

 So you're dealing with a much more complex problem. Before the company is truly ready. And I understand that's an economic necessity in this part of the world, but it makes the problem of making that organization work much harder. So that Dunbar's number might be 400 in the US and a hundred in Asia.

Absolutely. Very unique. Southeast Asia. It happens early in Southeast Asia. Let's put it that big, given the markets. So once you go in. And you want to get the dialogues flowing better. How do you do that? Well, that's a $64,000 question, I guess. Many different ways, obviously. My basic view is that nothing succeeds like success, so I have to.

Take them. Whatever skills or rituals I introduce,  they have to experience it as making their work better and making their lives their lived experience better.  Rituals are a stepping stone. What do I mean by that? Everybody can teach you skills, right? You can go to a training course and learn a skill. Typically, people don't apply those skills in the heat of battle when they need them the most, right? So they learn to skill.

They can do it when things are calm and relaxed. But then when there's a crunch and there's a fight and there's an issue at hand, they fall back on old patterns. And so I used the idea of rituals as a way of saying, if you practice this a little while, pretty soon it will become a habit or an ingrained skill.

And at that point you'll use it even in those high stakes situations and that will make business a lot better. And I'm very much involved in a client right now that has many of these issues. So for me, this is not theoretical. I see the inefficiency and the frustrations that are brought by poor quality dialogue every day, and how much difference it can make when you can.

Change that. Yeah. Rob, at the heart of that is the founder or the two, three co-founders together. And one of the things that you mentioned is the big shift they have to make is a mindset shift from operator to builder. And that is a really difficult shift. So if you can talk a little bit about that.

A hundred percent. So I think that all founders start out. With a mindset that I would describe as Get Shit Done. Yeah. That is also the strategy. That is also the culture, that is the organization, everything, operating model, everything is based on get Shit Done as it should be. Yeah. Right. Until you reach a certain point.

And that point is typically where you have a management team, right? You run sales, he runs marketing, she runs finance, somebody else runs technology operations.  Now we need a little bit more order and cadence to how we do things. The founder has to delegate.  Most founders make that transition quite okay.

Maybe a little help on the delegation part. And the reason they make it, they, they find it easy is because they are still in touch with the work itself. They still see the product revisions and the spreadsheets coming out of finance and the customers and the, all that stuff. So at that stage, they tend to think of their job as making sure shit gets done right.

And that's okay. That's also fit for purpose, let's say from 50 to 150   the thing about making sure shit gets done is I feel very comfortable when I go to work that I'm touching everything and checking in and following up and going to product reviews and going to business reviews.  My hands are on the work, so I feel good at some point that clearly breaks down and like just as a jokey thought experiment.

If I ask you, what does Tim Cook do at Apple? I think we can safely say he's not making sure shit gets done right. Way too much going on in Apple for him to be the guy chasing you saying, did you do task 37 on our, activity list? And so what is he doing? What is Tim doing? And I would argue that what this, what I call stage three CEOs do is they build the organization.

That gets shit done. That is about the right people, the right structure, the right culture, the right process, and that is a radical transformation for A CEO to make. And many find it very difficult because their hands are not on the work, right? Their hands are on the organization that does the work. And so If I'm running a 400 person organization and somebody brings me a business problem, right? We messed up on this the way we deliver to this customer, and now they're unhappy, and what should we do about it? I have two choices. As a CEO, I can try to solve the problem, right? Grab the work product and deal with it directly.

This is very tempting. We'll come back to that. Or I can say. What is the organizational dysfunction that led to this? Because the root cause of that business problem is something that wasn't working either. It should never have happened bef at all, or it should have been solved at a lower level and never reached me.

And the fact that that didn't happen suggests an organizational dysfunction. That's a very different mindset to say, nevermind. We'll park that. Let's look at the root cause. Right? So why do. Founders love to grab the problem and solve the problem. Obviously, they think it's the fastest and most expedient way, but also it's crack cocaine for founders, a hundred percent because they feel good.

They go home that day and they think. I am still adding value. I've still got what it takes. Yeah. If they, if people bring them three problems and they solve three problems, that's a great day for them, even though it's probably the worst thing they could have done for the organization. So interesting. And here's the thing, those people.

Collude with them. They like it too because the founder is good. They didn't have to make the tough decision. So it's not just that. Founders love it. Execs like it too, too ecosystem loves it. And so everybody colludes to keep the CEO in that problem solving mode as long as possible when in practice that's not actually good for the growth of the organization.

And how have you seen, maybe through an example, a founder realize at some stage, intellectually, maybe everyone realizes it, but something clicks in them that they're able to let go of the fear work through a process that they're actually  creating an organization that gets shit done. That, transition.

how does that happen? So this has a tremendous amount to do with the quality and maturity of the people who report to the founder. Mm. Because when I first say this, they often look at me and say, yeah, but if I say take a big step back and I leave it to these people, honestly, they're just gonna drop the ball To which the correct question is, well then why are they still there?

Still there? Because if you're trying to scale the company, maybe you should have looked at that. Often the penny drops, not because I tell them or they read my book, the penny drops when they hired their first, what I would call true C-Suite executive. And what is a true C-Suite executive as opposed to  a department head who's been given a C-Suite title.

A true C-Suite executive is somebody who looks at the CEO founder and says, I've got this boss, and says it in a way that makes the founder feel comfortable, and they go. Ooh, this feels good. I can go home and sleep at night knowing that Sherrod, who's been there before, who's still got his sleeves rolled up, but has the experience and has the maturity, has looked me in the eye and said, leave it with me.

I'll deal with it. I've got this. I'll deliver what you need.  And then they think, oh, this is what it feels like. Mm-hmm. Then they start thinking, I want more shirad around. Right? How do I get more people like that in the organization? Now, very often that's a bit late, right? And they could have gotten there a little earlier, but really, most people experience it when they sort of bump into a situation like that.

I love that. So this C-Suite executive, and we call Shirad out here, what's the typical profile? Is it, is it a corporate guy? Because the sense that I get it's, it's someone who's almost like an entrepreneur, him or herself. Yeah. Okay. Again, we have a different answer in Southeast Asia than in the us. If you are building a SaaS company in the US and it's 400 people and it's a vertical SaaS, and you need a true, a new C-suite person, right?

You call the local headhunter  and they give you 20 names of people who have done that in high growth entrepreneurial situations, but have experience in track record. By definition in Southeast Asia, we don't have that. Right. So you're forced to choose between the 50-year-old corporate person mm-hmm.

Who you really worry about speed and sleeves rolled up, and can they operate without all the infrastructure and the brand  and the bright 30-year-old who's got talent but not the experience. Right. That's been the choice in Southeast Asia and there's no magic answer. The real answer is that your best bet is to have developed them internally, to take in your those heads of department three years ago  and worked intensively with them to get them to grow, to be C-Suite level, knowing that your company was going to get there one day and that you would need that because those are the people who have the institutional knowledge get the culture, and not all of them will make it maybe half if you do that intensive exercise.

That half will prove invaluable. And that's a much lower risk and better way of solving the problem than trying to recruit either the 50-year-old or the 30-year-old. Very interesting. So the few people that you hire, even the first one 50, some of them need to be strategic hires who will run through, not just solve the problem at that stage.

That's right. And they need to be constantly assessed, not based on how they're doing today. Of course, that right? You mess this up, all the normal. Day-to-day assessment,  but against this future bar, what do I need you to be doing in two years time, in three years time? And they need to get very honest feedback about that gap.

And of course, there's a gap and help and coaching and belief and a kick in the butt when they're not growing fast enough so that by the time as a company you need that C-suite. One of two things is there. What is true, either that person is pretty much there or they are not there and they know they're not there, and therefore they don't resent the fact that you go out to hire somebody above them.

Because one of the problems is when you go out to hire those people, you fear you're gonna lose. Yeah. The ones who have, who are being layered, who have historically reported to you and have given blood to get the company to where it is, and now you're saying you're not good enough. So that's a difficult position to be in.

 Rob, maybe we take this and see how these principles can be applied to an individual, so many people who listen to this podcast.  Our folks in their thirties and forties who may not be entrepreneurs, they may be doing well in the corporate world, and they hit a plateau after a period of time.

They've done really well, and they're looking at the next stage of growth. So I think some of these learnings operate to a builder. Could be relevant to those. Maybe let's just brainstorm, what lessons can we take to those people for individual growth to evolve to the next stage of their development?

That's a great question. I mean, I think two of the smartest words to come into the English language in the last 30 years is growth mindset. Yes. Right? Like, I'm not sure I'm a expert on what it means, but we all kind of get it. Mm-hmm. And you sort of know it when you meet it. Right. And so you know it when you meet it.

That's good. Right. And so people who are hungry to learn. Open to feedback, curious, looking around reading, trying. Who are not holding on rigidly to what they have been. So this is that concept of what got you here won't get you there. Yes. From Marshall Goldsmith and some people, naturally they, they're just not, they don't care about how they got here.

It's like, what's next for me and how do I learn and how do I grow?  Others can be helped and coached to get into that frame of mind. And then of course, there are people who. Really struggle. So I would say that the mindset, the openness, beginner's mind, some people would call it is the single most important thing.

Hmm. I love that on the beginner's mind. And what I also liked, there's a little bit of risk management out here where if you know somebody's taking care of stuff, the risk of it going bad is taken care of. And then you can look at your next stage of growth. So I think for an individual, it's finding that way.

Like if they're doing a certain role, which they're doing really well, it's knowing that, all right, if I'm the smartest in the room, maybe it's already established, now I can go and try and do something else. I'm not gonna lose that smartness, I'm going to. Open it up to something else, and it's a new learning, I guess.

But this has a lot to do with the organizational culture because if you live in a punishment oriented culture, right, where mistakes are punished, success is deemed as achieving your KPIs. There's not a lot of emphasis on doing better or coming up with creative new things. Just like hit your numbers, hit your targets, and if you don't, you will be punished and any mistakes will be punished.

Then obviously that does not encourage people to experiment. And vice versa, right? So organizational culture has a lot to do with it. If you're gonna leave behind what got you here and try something new, you're gonna make some mistakes. It's not all gonna be happy in flowers and unicorns. And if you have a CEO or a direct manager who encourages that, then that's gonna be very helpful.

now for a person, a founder, especially, even though they might see someone who's capable and, and that's a big step, getting someone who they know is capable. There's always fear, always, because you're more paranoid, something's gonna go wrong,  which prevents you from delegating, which also then gets you to micromanage a little more.

How have you seen fear manifest in founders and how have they worked through it?  I'm gonna answer a slightly different question first, which is, how do I see fear in managers generally? Right?

'cause I think founders is a special case. There's a tool I use sometimes called leadership Circle. You may be familiar with this. Yes. And they identify three core fears. I think this actually comes out of Carl Jung originally. Hmm. The most primal one is we all come from a tribe on the African Savannah, and if we are expelled from the tribe, we die.

And so the fear of being expelled, the the need to fit in to be acceptable within a community. And so a little bit of that is very healthy. That's. Easy to get on with nice shows up at the company. Parties,  too much of that in you're compliant. You don't push back, you don't speak the truth to power. Right.

You are too submissive. So that's a fear that can affect a lot of people. Mm-hmm. Another fear, I won't go through all of them, but another fear is the fear that if I am not in charge, the entire tribe is going to hit the rocks. And so that drives controlling behaviors, perfectionism, lack of delegation. You see this a lot in management at all ranks, right?

People who sort of feel instinctively that if they don't have that hands gripping on the, the project then it's going to end badly. So I think founders are somewhat more prone in that yes to that fear, not all. But I think that would be the more common fear for founders. And then honestly, I think there's a lot of fears that even to this day, I don't fully understand.

There are. A lot of founders, I think, have a certain degree of what I call being angry at the world. Mm. They want to show the world. Mm. And you know, maybe, so for example, there's a, there was a piece of research that showed that kids with dyslexia have a much higher propensity to become founders.

Much higher dramatically because they didn't fit. They knew they were smart, they knew they had talent, but in school  they were always pushed back. They didn't do well on their exams. They didn't get the job at Morgan Stanley coming out of school.  So they wanted to go their own way, and they wanted to prove to the world that they had worth right.

What's their fear? Their fear is that they turn end up not having worth, that it doesn't work and that the world was right and that they were wrong. So you have other deeper rooted fears sometimes that drive founders that might be one of them. And like, that's so interesting. There's certain fears that'll actually help you and work for you.

So that is like a motivation for many people up to, I mean, to large extent that drives you, but there are others that come in your way. And how have you seen, like, say, fear around micromanagement? One of the things you mentioned is when you see someone who can take over that gives you confidence. What are other ways that you've seen founders  work through those fears so they're able to step back a bit?

Well, look, the number one fear other than the stepping back is the fear of conflict. Hmm, right. And in Asia, of course we have a PhD in that, but trust me, it's very prevalent in Western cultures as well. Maybe it shows up a little differently and we can do literally a whole hour on how that shows up.  But I absolutely think that in order to become a really well-rounded CEO.

You have to become more comfortable with what I would call healthy or constructive conflict.  It's almost like after a period of time, founders are also looking at the inner world and maybe coaches are helping them through the inner world, their inner fears coming into play, emotions coming into play, drives sometimes going negative and and positive.

So there's an inner world while they're helping scale up the company as well as move the business. So there's all these demands on a founder, which get magnified once you hit the scaling stage. A hundred percent only. Not all founders do the inner work. Of course, we know that, and I don't know what the numbers are, but many are solely focused on the outer work, the strategy, the growth, the sales, the channel, the product launch, the capital raising, the hitting break, even the, all the external metrics.

And they're very reluctant or resistant. They don't maybe have that growth mindset or that openness to doing the inner work. And that I think absolutely will limit them. Now, they may have been blessed with many great qualities as leaders, so they may still be able to go quite a long way and be very successful, but ultimately I think that's a real limiting factor for many of them.

Sure. I think one of the other things you talked about, which we may have covered a bit, but if there's something additional on this where you talk about letting go to grow. To evolve, you have to let go of certain things, which is of course, either bringing, like we said, smart people in, but also other things.

I was wondering, is there any part of this that we haven't discussed, which could be interesting to talk about? I think so. I'll give you a very simple framework. This is extraordinarily simplified, right? If I hire you tomorrow to do a job for me, whether you're senior or junior, if you are new to my organization, I'm going to tell you what to do.

Yeah, I'm going to tell you how to do it. I'm going to review your work quality, control your work, oversee your work. Right? And that's the way we're gonna operate. And obviously that is kind of a functional definition of micromanagement. So each step along the way has fear. If I don't tell him how to do the work, will he do it the way I want?

Probably not. Oh. Maybe it doesn't matter if he does it the way I want, maybe it just matters if he gets the result I want. And so that's a kind of personal learning, right? My way is not the only way to achieve a given set of objectives. And many people learn this empirically. They see, oh, I hired that fellow.

He did something completely different. It didn't work perfectly. It did get the result. Fair enough, I'm gonna stop telling him how to do it. The second fear is now I have to stop telling, overlooking and quality, controlling and checking in. Right? And again, that's a process, a journey. Because surely if I don't check in and oversee and follow up, then it won't be good.

Right? And then eventually I hire somebody who's a little more mature, has higher ownership, is better at upward management. And I'm like, oh, I can just go to bed at night easy knowing that if there's any problem, I'll be the first to hear about it, and if I don't hear about it, it means they're gonna deliver.

Right? And so on and so forth. Here's the most interesting bit. Ultimately, I also need to let go of not just quality controlling and telling you how to do it. I need to let go of telling you what to do. Hmm. I need to develop people who know what needs to be done. I can't be the only person in the organization who knows what needs to be done next because in a 400 person organization, there's gonna be innovation and new processes and new tools that we need and new customers that new ways of dealing with customers that have to come up all throughout the organization.

And that's another fear. I'm the person who knows what needs to be happen next. I have the vision, I have the strategy in my head. Oh, it turns out actually other people have pretty good ideas. So these fears kind of come in waves, let's say, or levels. And ultimately, back to my idea of an organizational builder.

An organization builder hires somebody who they trust. Knows what needs to be done once they're sufficiently aligned with the strategy and the vision and can get it done without detailed oversight or being told how to do it. I love that. And that's when you scale. Yeah. So as a founder is doing these things.

Yes. And then I guess he or she needs to confront the fact that what do I focus on? And is it more like. You never have an ideal setup because there'll always be gaps in some places. So do you see founders then go to see that? What's the gap? And I'll put myself there or, or how, how does that work with founders in this stage?

Oh, sure. I mean, in a entrepreneurial company, founders are of course wearing many, many hats. So they are still solving business problems, even as they are trying to become an organization builder. They're stepping in for gaps of all type and the. The more, let's say, agile and flexible a founder is to be able to do that, the better.

And you know, you can even think of resets where, take Apple, when Steve Jobs left and whatever his name was, the, the Pepsi guy took over. Mm-hmm. Right. They over corporatized the company. So you had a kind of CEO who was too mature for the stage of the business and eventually he left and Jobs comes back and what does he do?

He puts his hands on the work product again, right? He gets right. Back into the weeds and starts making every decision that was appropriate at that time. Right? But then of course, he had to start letting go and bringing in people and, and, and stepping back. So there is a dynamic there, and the best CEOs will know how to play and where to play.

I would say the one thing that is a challenge is the addiction, the crack cocaine. Right? That's the thing that, that, that when they do do a deep dive and they grab the steering wheel and they say, no, the product shouldn't be like this. It should be like that. They know to say, and now I'm pulling out back to you all responsibility with you.

Call me if you need me, rather than showing up at the next 20 product meeting. Thanks. And I've been hearing this because of maybe people like Elon Musk and, Steve Job where the perception is they go into the weeds and that is why they get such a good product. And especially Elon, so many stories of him going, and that's, I've been hearing this from a lot of entrepreneurs with, with like thousand, 1500 people team that no delegate.

They talk about not delegating, but the real entrepreneur has to get into it. So I don't know if that's been a clash with some of the role models that we've seen now. A hundred percent. And there was this whole meme around founder mode, right? Yes. There was a interview with Brian Chesky from Airbnb.

Yes. Airbnb. He talked about founder mode, and then the Y Combinator founder, I forget his name, published a piece on it and it went a bit crazy.  I would say two things. Founder mode is two words, and I don't think it tells us a lot about how they're actually operating.

And Airbnb is a pretty big company, and so I don't think he's sitting on top of every work stream. I think what they really mean, my interpretation of the Elon and the Brian Chesky founder mode is this. They're trying to cut through bureaucracy and organizational complexity, which is exactly what I'm trying to avoid.

So I think philosophically we're on exactly the same page. What they want is what Jeff Bezos would say. It's always day one, right? They want the spirit of an organization that is still a very entrepreneurial. Thing and they see creeping bureaucracy, which is a natural function and tendency,  and they cut through it by de Delayering or walking on the factory floor as Elon and saying that's not the way to solve it.

But that does not mean that they are. Making every decision and micromanaging because how could, I mean, clearly Elon is not doing that. He has seven companies, runs half the government, like, so these apocryphal stories of him walking down onto the factory floor of Tesla with three engineers and whatever, and solving a problem, I'm sure are completely true, but that is clearly not how most problems on the factory floor Tesla are being solved.

Right? Yes. It's, it's like even in, I worked in p and g. Time and again, the CEO would come and walk the street. Yes. And, and just showcase an example that I know the ground reality and I think it's, it's a little bit of a visual to people. So you cannot bullshit me when you talk to me and I know the ground reality and I'm like, I can roll up my sleeve.

So I. I think  as a vision and an optic thing, that's very strong as well. A hundred percent. another really interesting example is Jensen Wong, who is the CEO of founder and CEO of Nvidia. You know, by the way, just a side thing, we lionize Elon, we lionized Steve Jobs in the old days Bill Gates, but the most successful entrepreneur in history.

Is Jensen Wong? It's not Elon. He built one company whose market cap is bigger than all of Elon's companies put together. He's the longest serving public company, CEO in the United States ever. Wow. He's founded the company in 1993. He took it public in 1999. He's still the CEO. It's worthwhile, depending on the day.

$3 trillion. Right. And it's all him. So he's a really interesting model to study. And he's different than, you know, he has his own way. Sorry, this is a bit of a digression, an interest. No, let's go for it. So he. Has a thing that he talks about where he says, I don't do one-to-ones. I communicate with all 50 of my top executives together so that they all hear exactly the same thing.

He's talking about alignment and clarity, and going back to that 10 person organization where we all heard the same thing, saw the vision, knew exactly what we were supposed to do, knew exactly what each other was doing. I. I'm sure he does do one-to-ones. I'm sure it's a slight overstatement, but he's dealing with organizational complexity, but he's not a micromanager.

He has 27,000 employees. He's not sitting on top of every work stream. So there's a confusion between being a micromanager and being very. Entrepreneurial. Yeah. And I think founder mode is just about not letting bureaucracy, taking over. Yeah. Keeping that entrepreneurial spirit of being really focused, really aligned, moving quickly, being really agile, but you still need to empower huge numbers of people to build any of those companies.

Thanks for clarifying that and, and, and I, many people know Nvidia was an old company, but 1993 was when it was founded. That is like phenomenal as as a success story. That's pretty amazing. Yeah. One of the things that you talk about in your book is High Performance without Burnout, and I think that's applicable a lot to founders for sure, but even to people across the corporate world.

So if you can talk a little bit about that. So a friend of mine who you may know, Proja Gata, the founder of Onlo told me something once. He said burnout is not when you work too hard. Burnout is when you work too hard and you're not making progress. Mm-hmm. Right. It's a frustration more than just a physical exhaustion.

And I thought, yeah, that, that's right. Yeah. So a high productivity organization, right, is getting a lot done. A high performing organization is getting a lot done. It's moving quickly, it's achieving great things. That's great. And. I would argue it's doing it in a way that is sustainable because the lived experience for the individuals is also positive or mostly positive, right?

There's something meaningful growth oriented for everyone, and if you think about those kind of classic burnout companies and let's say the rocket internet style of leadership, right? You had very high growth companies, you had cultures that produced very unpleasant results for certain people at certain times.

That led to a lot of turnover. And again, that's somewhat sustainable as long as you have money coming in the door and you don't mind. But that leads to burnout because people are not having a good time. They're experiencing high levels of frustration or de-motivation while they're working hard. But if you go to.

A job in which you love the interactions you have with your colleagues and your boss treats you with respect and you have pretty good relationships with your stakeholders in other departments, and meetings are generally pleasant and fun, and they get a lot done. You're not going to burn out. I mean, you may work too hard, but that's different.

Great point. Some of the work that we were talking about that I do is around purpose and the same thing comes up across teams when they talk about. They remember a time when they worked with a team where they all felt united. They all felt they were doing something common and big together. And that time, late nights didn't matter.

There was no such thing as work-life balance. They would in fact work till late at night or early morning so they could have breakfast together and they remember those times fondly because exactly what you said. When work is fun, when you find some meaning through it, in whichever way I. Then burnout is less of a consideration.

A hundred percent. I mean, one of the ways I got into this work, maybe the way, is that I had a company of my own where I was a founder and we had a really high performing team and we loved it. And I never heard the word burnout or trauma or any of these things. And then like during Covid, when every founder was talk tweeting about their mental health and all that stuff, like I get it, but I didn't recognize it from my own experience because.

We were all having the time of our lives. Yeah. And I do think that being a member of a high performing team is one of life's truly, truly great experiences. And I think it's one of the most memorable experiences. And you know, I will say to executives, like you talk to them about that. I say, 10 years from now, you will not remember whether you hit your numbers this year.

Like you just won't, you won't even remember what the numbers were, but you will remember what it felt like to be a part of this team. A hundred percent. What wise words,  but sometimes when you're in it there may be some exceeding pressure, the realities of life where you have a high performing team and there's all these pressures coming in. 

How can the founder or the team manage it in such a way that you manage the burnout? You still create some level of fun or some level of meaning. So that burnout does not happen. I. Okay, so I wouldn't necessarily use the word fun. Hmm. I'm not sure that that's a necessary precondition to avoid burnout.

What I would say is to release the tensions and resolve the conflict that cause people to go home, feeling bad, feeling beaten down, feeling that there's something in the system that they can't change. And so we're back at this topic of, let's say, psychological safety. It's not my favorite term. It tends to get used to mean a lot of different things.

But the notion that if I see something which is really frustrating, I have a voice, my voice will be heard. I work in an organization that will not tell me shut up and get back to work. I work in an organization that says, oh gosh, I hadn't realized that was such a big issue. Let's see what we could do about it.

You could just feel the pressure coming off of your shoulders. Even as I say that, it's like, okay, if I live in a world where we can name the problems openly without fear of punishment and where senior leadership is open to looking at those and saying, how can we do better, then whatever those problems are, and they may be just, there's too much work or it may be something else.

Then I think people will generally have a positive psychological experience, which will prevent that sort of what we would call burnout. Makes sense, makes sense. I know you've also worked with bigger corporations and, and you do a lot of work with teams and bigger corporations as well as fast growing companies.

What's the difference that you've seen? Oh, that's a really interesting question. I mean, there are many differences, of course. Maybe one way to think about it is this startups because they have a get shit done culture. Yeah. Hire people who are good at that, right? They're fast movers. It's kind of the move fast and break things, right?

They're very good at getting things done. They're very action oriented. They're often not particularly good at managing organizational complexity. If you say the word stakeholder management, they shiver and think, what a waste of time we need to be getting shit done, right? They're not good at the lubrication of a complex organization, writing the memos and going to the meetings and playing nicely with others.

Large companies. That's you were Tip Proctor Gamble. That's the skill. What gets you into senior management is precisely that. You're good at working with others, at building processes that are collaborative, where everybody can see what's going on at being likable, frankly, to a large number of people where they say, oh yeah, yeah, that guy's good to work with.

He's fine. Because if you have a lot of people saying you're difficult or challenging, you're not gonna get promoted. So they have essentially the inverse problem. They know how to manage organizational complexity and friction and get along with each other. They don't know how to get stuff done in a hurry.

And so I'm running a project at the moment for a large bank, which I just called the, you know, bureaucracy busting. But it's like, yeah, you're good at, great at going to meetings and having nice conversations. You're not great at. Doing the Elon thing and cutting through all that stuff and saying, how do we accelerate this project?

How do we break down barriers, which the entrepreneurs are naturally very good at, so they tend to have inverse skills. That's so cool. So you're bringing some of the founder mindset, the entrepreneurial mindset into the corporate world, which serves them better. And I think things like agility, innovation, that kind of helps in that, that land a hundred percent.

And agility, every company in the world will say, we want agility, we want innovation. The question is like, what does that actually mean? What do I do differently tomorrow? Right? And that thing that I do differently turns out to be a big culture change, right? Mm-hmm. And very often it's again about fear of conflict.

I have to go into your office and say. This is simply not working. We have to do something different as opposed to write a mamo and schedule a meeting for three months time and Right. And so there's a lot of learned behavior and culturally ingrained behavior that needs to shift before you can do that agility and innovation stuff.

Yeah. You've talked about conflict a bit, and you've talked about that's a big barrier to go through where you can get. More comfortable with conflict. How have you seen people do that? Especially like you talked in Asia, it's a little difficult to do that. How have you seen people break that barrier to the next level of growth?

 Has to do with how we were wired, maybe through our education system or our culture, to believe that when we approach a problem that we know something about or we're a stakeholder, we have the right answer and if we have the right answer, by definition, people who see it differently have a wrong answer.

And by definition in that. Intersection. Somebody is going to be proven right and somebody is going to be proven wrong. This is very uncomfortable. I don't want to be the person who is wrong. I also don't want to make the other person feel wrong because that will be embarrassing and awkward and uncomfortable, and then they'll say, I'm not nice.

And so we kind of paper over the whole thing with, with, with, you know, glossy words to avoid this basic sense that one of us is wrong, right? And one is wrong, but the whole construct is wrong. Mm. Here's the right construct. I know something about this problem, and I know I'm partly right. I know I have a point of view, which deserves to be heard.

And it's probably not perfect, and I should provide my evidence and my thinking so that others can see where it's right and where it's wrong, and I should be open to that because I'm wired to know that I'm not always right. Oh, but I should also recognize that I don't see all aspects of this issue. The compliance person and the HR person and the finance person and the local person will all see it differently.

And in order for us to get the best answer, we need to hear all of those ideas and voices. So when somebody disagrees with me, they're not making me wrong. They're enriching a shared perspective of what is the best approach and therefore. The fear of conflict simply disappears. It simply melts away. 

I love that. There's so much of the things that you talked about which come into this particular aspect of growth mindset, where you are open to seeing and learning from others. Little bit of connection and collaboration as you talked about, and joint, it's not joint consensus. You're jointly discussing and understanding and arriving at once.

You see all the vantage points at what it should be, and then it is less. Idea of ego, who's there's one right, one wrong. And I guess that's the way things can emerge. A hundred percent. So in my book I talk about company values and how not all values are created equal, and that there's some, what I call atomic level values, like base level values, that without which you're never gonna build a great organization.

One of them is intellectual humility. That's what we've been talking about. I have a perspective, I know my stuff. But I'm humble enough to know that it's not the whole answer and that I also could be wrong. Another core value is empathy. That when somebody comes in frustrated, it's like I can't just bludgeon them over the head with how right I am.

Even if I feel that way, I have to listen. What is it that's frustrating them? How are they seeing it? That's a empathy as well as a intellectual thing. So. These kind of, and psychological safety is a third, so that we can all speak openly when we see that something isn't right. So these kind of values are absolutely central to the functioning of a healthy organization.

But yeah, if I had one magic pill, I'd spend it on intellectual humility. Yeah. Very powerful. We've spoken on many things. Is there any area that we haven't touched upon that we should talk about? Gosh, I'm pretty happy with where we've gotten to so far. I will connect a couple of dots. Would love that.

We talked at the beginning about dialogue. What is dialogue like? Is this, what is, what do you mean by that? This fancy word, right, so dialogue it's a Greek word means a a flow of information. So it's back to this magic pill. If you come in thinking I have part of a solution, but I'm also interested to know what Rob sees that I don't see, and I have the same perspective.

That's dialogue. Right. Dialogue is not just talking and listening. It's thinking together. It's saying, oh, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Let's look at this in a new light. In light of what you've shared with us. So that process of what I call harnessing the collective intelligence of a organization or of a team is done through dialogue and it's greatly facilitated by having that mindset.

I contrast that with debate. Debate is, I'm right, you're wrong. That's also a conversation. So they're both conversations, but there's no flow of meaning in a debate. It's just me conquering you, right? Beating you over the head with how smart and how right I am, or how much power I have in the organization.

So these are very, very deep differences which are often invisible to people. Hmm. I love that dialogue versus debate. Now as we wrap up, is there any bottom line advice for the listener? We we're talking about a 40-year-old woman or a guy who's doing pretty well maybe in the corporate world, or as a founder looking to get to the next stage of growth.

Is there any bottom line advice you would lead them with?  Oh gosh. Manage your own nervous system. First and foremost, if you are highly anxious, if you are highly stressed, it's going to be very difficult for you to hear where you're not doing well or where you, where you can grow. But you'll hear it as, oh, I'm not enough.

I'm not doing well. It's gonna be very difficult. So it's a lot easier to get into that growth mindset if your body and your nervous system are well-regulated. So whether that's meditation or long runs or breathing exercises or just hitting the gym or whatever is your thing, I think they all work different wins for different people.

Start there. Get to a point where you can walk into most meetings in a state of complete calm and openness. And then the second thing would be just ask more questions. They don't have to be deep questions like, how can I grow? Right? Just questions like, so we've had a good conversation. What have we missed today?

I shared with you my strategy. What? What didn't I address? Right? They're just general questions about what am I not seeing? What could I have done better? How could we do better? And you will hear hopefully helpful things that you can use to grow. It comes back to humility. Humility and asking great questions.

Asking great questions.  📍 Thank you very much, Rob, for spending time with us. I wish you all the very best. Thank you. Thank you so much. Rad.