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Tag: harvard

Mastering Growth with Pirates

Mastering Growth Certificate

I recently completed the Mastering Growth online course with Harvard. As an avid listener of the Masters of Scale podcast I was aware of the content, but this course really made me take the time to reflect on the themes in the context of my role as CPTO of a startup.

The podcast episode that resonated most with me was featured in one of the lectures – Uber’s How Pirates Become The Navy. The episode is about the band of startup pirates learning the benefits and behaviours of becoming a navy. Coming from Corporate land however, I needed to do the opposite and learn when to be a pirate.

Google teaches you to plan big – if it’s not in the hundreds of millions of users or $ then it’s probably not worth doing. That implies that planning and robust debate is important, and exemplifies an engineering lead culture where scale is thought through.

When shifting to a startup, although you might get hired for scale they will give you credit for speed. The company and founders has lived through a period of survival and built a credit structure around that. If you want to earn enough credits to spend on that big scale investment, you had better show you can jump on a quick dollar today. It doesn’t really matter whether that dollar aligns with the strategy or not, what matters is that you moved quickly and you closed it. You have survival instinct.

The trick is knowing when you need to show this hustle. Anyone from corporate land can tell you that quick wins buy credits, but in corporate land there are very clearly articulated strategies and even words that will help you find wins. One example is a corporate mantra of being a “trusted advisor” – just go and get a customer testimonial that shows how they relied on your advice to make a decision. Pre-meditated decision making.

In startup land, it’s more opportunistic. You need to jump on the opportunity as soon as you see it, and then work out the messaging later. A key customer mentions a tangential opportunity? Launch an MVP and then test if there’s a market for it. Worst case the takeaway message is we moved too fast – there’s no punishment for that. Best case, you made a customer happy and a dollar. Now you can put your scale hat on, market size it, and think about whether it’s something worth planning for.

Is this a good core strategy? No, if you focused on this then your ever increasing team would be in an ever bigger state of fragmentation and disarray. As a rough rule of thumb, 20% of your effort should be launching MVPs and 80% should be landing the proven ones.

Top 10 traits of bad leaders

Harvard Business Publishing summarised the 360-degree feedback data on over 11,000 leaders from a study completed by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman. Here are the 10 most common leadership shortcomings, how many apply to you or your leader?

  1. Lack energy and enthusiasm
  2. Accept their own mediocre performance
  3. Lack clear vision and direction
  4. Have poor judgement
  5. Don’t collaborate
  6. Don’t follow the standards they set for others
  7. Resist new ideas
  8. Don’t learn from mistakes
  9. Lack interpersonal skills
  10. Fail to develop others

It is interesting to note that the most successful and least successful differed most significantly in their energy and enthusiasm. Can a good leader therefore be trained or are they born? I see some similarities to the concept of “culture comes from the top”. If the CEO demonstrates energy and enthusiasm this has a huge impact on their report’s motivation to follow, and this energy in turn cascades down the chain. Finally poor management is one of the top 10 reasons employees quit their job, so the consequences of bad leaders are serious.

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