I saw a tweet from Chamath of the All-In-Pod that made me fist-pump because I’m, by nature, a doer. I want to see what happens, not just theorize about it.
Instead, what I often see around me at work is a lot of “let’s research the best option for six months, get buy-in, and influence others to support the idea” behavior. Now, I’m good with that approach in specific, high-risk scenarios. But these aren’t high-risk decisions. These are situations being handled by experienced people, where the path forward should be pretty cut and dry.
This is the thing that drives me crazy about corporate culture. Hire people who know what they are doing and let them do it. Then what you don’t know – try it. https://t.co/tuLCxBgpAB
The culture in my workplace is low-risk, with large groups of people protecting their workloads, budgets, and egos. Many have been in the same role for a decade or more. This dynamic creates a need to show up with facts, present all the options, and play the game of building consensus—often involving at least half a dozen stakeholders.
I get it.
The issue arises when those same people express frustration about our lack of speed. So, what’s the answer? I think there’s a real opportunity here. You continue engaging stakeholders and doing due diligence, but at the same time, you spin up a tiger team to push things forward, ensuring we’re ready to move when the stars align. Its your ace in the hole. You already know the answer from the beginning…you’re just doing the hard work of helping others get there and be comfortable with it.
PS. This is one of the differences I’ve found between startup-level executive leadership and enterprise executive leadership.
• Dynamic and strategic technology leader with engineering leadership, product development, and entrepreneurship expertise.
• Empathetic leader with a reputation for transforming lackluster teams into high performing, motivated, and joyful teams; increased team pulse scores from 2s to near 5s (in a 5 point scale)
• Proven ability to inspire distributed high performing teams to build multi-million dollar ($4m-$30m ARR) products, save millions($5m of $25m budget) through efficiencies and cost, and develop significant major new products through robust incubation pipelines.
• Extensive security knowledge, at the appropriate risk level, reaching internal security metrics to over 90% of KPIs
• Special focus on SaaS/PaaS platforms, Location/Mapping Intelligence, Consumer Mobile, and IoT/Robotics systems, known for the ability to build and scale technology portfolios from 0-1 and 1-100.
