Words are imperfect containers of meaning. But it’s the best things we have to communicate.
(So use them with care)
Something I wrote down, derived from a conversation I recently had.
In our daily office communication, words are all we really get to use — either written on Slack or emails or perhaps in spoken form.
Worth thinking about whether everyone will interpret specific words the same way as you intended. Think through that. 🤔 Is there a different word that would carry a certain idea better? Alternate ones? Easier ones?
As Founders, communication is one of the most important roles we have (our team, our customers, investors, media, regulators, naysayers… et al).
Originally written: November 2018, updates in 2021, 2023, 2024
(This is the first of a three-part writeup about Board governance, this one focusses on the initial setup and core fundamentals).
You launched a startup, raised a bit of Seed capital, and now it’s starting to get to that that 0-to-1 milestone. The 1 is approaching, and maybe you have been told that you need to step up your board governance before the larger institutional round (“SeriesA”)
Or maybe, all of a sudden you are getting these term sheets with words like Board Seats and Board Observers all over them. What do you do?
As a Founder-CEO, the Board is going to be something you need to become really good at.
This is something you cant just coast by. In a way, it’s your job review.
And if done well, this Board changes from being a 3-4 hour burden on your calendar every few months, to something that is another team that is working to help you towards your goals. Imagine that.. another (powerful) free resource working for you!
Let’s start with the basics:
Corporate Governance:
Why is this group of people needed?
What’s the purpose?
Rule number 1: The Board meeting isn’t a Sales meeting.
Not a time for you to have to defend the VC investors decision to back you. They shouldn’t be there to re-underwrite their investment decisions.
Change the tone.
Alignment of cause.
Your Board and making it useful. Picking your Chairperson and other Board Members
Independent members
Trial period
Can you be naked in front of your chair (CEO Test)
Sector knowledge
Coach or mentor?
Balance on the board — Stick to odd numbers and never more than 9
Do a deep dive topic at every board session
Peacetime & Wartime
1-1s prior to the actual board
Bad news shouldn’t be arriving when they first open the Board pack.
Pre-reading
– I prefer to send written notes (prose) with a few graphs thrown in. Effectively a PDF of a
Notion page as pre-reading.
Expect everyone to have read it before the meeting. Yes. Pre-reading.
Have a chat with someone if they aren’t doing this (or use your Chairperson, to crack that whip).
Bad questions. Manage the time
3 hours for a cause. Not just to show up
Size of the Board.
It’s not a party. Small effective teams.
Remember startups rarely vote at the Board.
Voice matters.
So a Board observer can be very impactful as they don’t need to vote but can still be “loud”
Suggest the idea of Closed-session and Open-session
I have absolutely come to love this, and use it regularly to evaluate business ideas, investments and even help fellow Founders use it. Clayton Christensen and his team have bestowed this wonderful gift to anyone involved in strategic thinking work.
Listed below are all the useful ways in which you can learn about this and start using it, collected from a bunch of sources around the web:
Original article on HBR website (first easy way to get an intro):
When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, the next time we’re confronted with the same job, we tend to hire that product again.
And if it does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look for an alternative.
C.Christensen
(We’re using the word “product” here as shorthand for any solution that companies can sell; of course, the full set of “candidates” we consider hiring can often go well beyond just offerings from companies.)
Many leaders ask me: “I think have all the right people hired, but it seems like the rhythm isn’t really there to execute. What’s wrong?”
We have all been taught in every book and blog, that you have to hire the right people and somehow magic will happen. Yes, at the basic level that absolutely matters. But if you don’t then create the right environment for execution you won’t get them delivering the best of their skills. It’s about how you infuse the ability for a team (at a startup or otherwise) to find its rhythm of execution and become that truly “effective team” that everyone seeks.
I have come to believe there are 3 necessary conditions that a team leader ought to work on to get the team to this magical state where it just seems that the engine is working like a flywheel. Just keeps going with momentum — endless energy to execute, which is why I cheekily call it a “GoFlex Engine” (perhaps someone has a better name or illustration for it).
The 3 necessary conditions of this Golden Flywheel of Execution (“GoFlex Engine”):
Establish the Why for the team
Truly empower them to make decisions (autonomy)
Work for outcomes, not outputs
The Golden Flywheel of Execution (“GoFlex” as I call it)
Let’s look through each of these 3 necessary conditions in detail below.
Condition I: Establish the Why?
This sits at the top. Probably the most important, and also one that will really require the team lead to think clearly and become an effective communicator. So this one matters.
This first step is really about establishing the Purpose of this team (the unit). Why does it exist? Why are these people being brought together?
If the Why is done well, then (and only then) the team can move to the associated downstream questions such as: What’s Problem to solve? What the win look like? What are anti-goals? (And remember, over the course of many months & years, these might evolve as things get done — so be ready to keep updating and communicating out the new Why?). Remember, humans are really the only species that seem to be able to come together and cooperate in large numbers to achieve unimaginable goals. So people in the team (company) need to know why all this matters? This is the storytelling that helps bring everyone together to create this shared reality.
The Why will serve in other ways too — especially during the low periods when things aren’t going well — it will be the morale booster that we as humans need. Don’t lie to the team. (This a muscle the company needs to build. It doesn’t happen overnight, but is important to also be able to withstand hits— like your core — this creates resilience). Most importantly, getting this sorted has a strong correlation with being able to hire the right people who join the team for a cause, not just the activities.
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Condition II: Decision making as a skill for teams
Some leaders operate under this misunderstanding that the way they add value to their teams, is by making decisions for them. This is often also coupled with a desire to create a central command structure where teams should bring them things do decide upon, and then go away and execute. This is wrong.
Yes, a big part of the role of a team leader (all the way up to a CEO) is to make decisions, but it is not to do so by depriving the team of the ability to decide on things themselves. That is the conceptual truth of empowered teams that many don’t really grasp. As a leader, you have to create the environment that these team members can make decisions and keep moving forward, and only when things get ambitious or complex do they escalate matters up to you to make a decision. You as the leader are the backstop for when decisions were not made by the team. It does mean that making decisions is a big part of your role as the team leader, but it does not mean that all decisions for the team are being made by you.
You should work with the team to instil a sense of safety that they are allowed to make decisions, perhaps by initially talking about simpler things (sprint code names, choices of productivity tools et al). This is also is a matter of creating the confidence in the team to make decisions (because many people don’t see the decision making as a skill, and indeed struggle even in their personal life when making decisions). Help them understand what are the principles to follow if there is ambiguity while making decisions. Discuss as a team the impact of emotions and impulsiveness in decision making. This will take a bit of work, but the rewards are immense.
As a CEO I would often joke that the only decisions that I should be making are the extremely tough & thorny ones. If I am starting to have to make decisions on some rather simple topics, that means somewhere there has been a failure as those decisions should have been made at those respective levels and didn’t need to be escalated to me (and therefore it is only the thorny decisions that have been rightly escalated to me – a harsh view of the role of a CEO, but a strong vindication of a team and individuals within it are making decisions).
Similarly, this is not suggesting that as a leader you should encourage the team to create a committee for every decision – that is poor leadership as you are just going to create artificial entropy for decision making. You have to encourage the idea that the person closest to the problem, is empowered to speak up and make decisions – and this can happen if they know Why the team is doing what it is doing (ie: good communications). Said another way, “decisions by committee” doesn’t work in just about any context.
Note: I will do a detailed follow up post about Decision Making within an organization or team separately. This is a wide topic, and often misunderstood by most leaders. There are also some really useful frameworks emerging that help add a bit of structure here such as Type1/2 decisions that Jeff Bezos talks about in his shareholder letters.
More to follow on this.
As you empower the individuals within the teams to take decisions, you might also find they find ways of self-organizing that are most relevant for the stage of the company or indeed the crisis at hand. It’s a magical moment when you start noticing these things happen.
Condition III: Work for outcomes, not outputs
Productivity especially in an early stage company that is working to get to Product/Market Fit is never going to be measured by the amount of work done (“outputs”).
The reality is that at the early stages, it is only outcomes that move the needle. And team-members need to adapt their mindset towards this way of thinking: “In the time that we are given (example: runway), how are we going to get X outcome done?” (and definitely not that we have Y weeks, so that means we can write Z lines of code towards X).
There is this metaphor that I heard about “working like lions” — as opposed to grazing like a deer where large amounts of the day are spent eating food and digesting it to extract small bits of energy (the there is nothing wrong with that grazing mode, but it does not apply in the context of an early stage startup that is working hard to find it’s Product/Market Fit which is the only way it can survive).
Lions on the other hand spend a smaller amount of time to hunt down their prey, eat it, and benefit from the energy boost (and importantly, it is teamwork that helps a pride of lions to bring down the prey — there is no hero mode as a solitary lion is usually malnourished). In this metaphor, the outcome is getting the high-energy food. That is what they are focussed on and therefore also focus their efforts in a burst towards that outcome. Just running about for hours and chasing down deer is without getting it, is not a win. Yes they might have lots of outputs to show (“hours spent”), but they arent progressing in terms of their nutrition (“outcome” they seek to survive).
Note: There is a phrase which often creates the wrong reaction, but has become popular for leaders to say — “Sense of urgency” — this has become a misplaced idea because people again tend to conflate the idea of outputs over outcomes (it’s not about working faster like speeding up your videos to 1.5x, if that is the wrong set of activities to begin with!). It’s really about ensuring the people are self-aware they are working on the relevant problems that will move the needle — the outcomes. Energy and effort spent on the right things, creates the right outcomes (it is definitely not about doing a lot of things faster to create an illusion of progress — that’s once again a focus on output rather than outcomes). Within the environment of knowledge workers (which most of us are now), this is extremely important. And team leaders, especially Founders & CEOs need to create the environment for this.
These 3 necessary conditions, when correctly established in the team will allow this flywheel of execution to start gathering momentum — unstoppable momentum provided you have hired the right people as well.
Go Flex it!!
Build great things by pushing for outcomes, with a team that is empowered to make decisions because it knows why it exists.
Also see my post about Storytelling as a Superpower which has a high correlation to being able to hire the right people as a base condition before you think about how to activate this golden flywheel of execution.
I think this is equally important to all employees at all levels.. especially these days.
As you rise, your work is more strategic (thinking) and less functional (keyboarding)
Leadership tip
Its trying to evaluate how much time you are spending on Keyboard vs Thinking (useful also for your career growth).
1. Create Time to think — not just go meeting to meeting and think that is what work is about. (Pre-think the decisions where relevant). 2. Start with a 2 hour block once a week where you sit without distractions. Ideally no phone/iPad and don’t think of work/daily life. 3. Over time try to make this one 4 hour continuous block (if you can) 4. Reading is a good way to start your “Deep thinking” time (and then remember to set it aside after 10-15 minutes when you have shuffled off the other distracting thoughts)
A crude measure of your growth is that over time your ratio of time spent on Keyboard vs Thinking should change as your grow in a company (ie: you are becoming more strategically involved rather than just operationally & functionally delivering).
ie: Thinking output is increasing in importance vs Keyboard output
Questioning is a skill. Many of us don’t realize the importance it carries, especially in a role where gathering information while simultaneously teaching is important = just like the executive role at a company.
The Socratic method is built around asking a series of focused, open-ended questions that encourage reflection. The attention remains on the direct report and should avoid jargon and reduce confusion. The questioning does not suggest there is a correct or preferred answer (ie: neutral tone).
Some suggestions:
Clarification
What do you mean when you say XYZ? Could you explain that point further? Can you provide an example?
Challenging assumptions
Is there a different point of view? What assumptions are we making here? Are you saying that… ?
Evidence and reasoning
Can you provide an example that supports what you are saying? Can we validate that evidence? Do we have all the information we need?
Alternative viewpoints
Are there alternative viewpoints? How could someone else respond, and why?
Implications and consequences
How would this affect someone (some team)? What are the long-term implications of this?
Challenging the question
What do you think was important about that question? What would have been a better question to ask?
A lot of you have asked for this – so I made it publicly available (credit to Alka Varma who originally wrote this with some updates from me)
Start with Tokyo (Narita Airport Landing. Caution – Narita Airport, though serves Tokyo, is almost 2 hours away despite excellent train lines. Do not take a cab – it’s quite expensive. Trains are very well-organized)
You might also land into Haneda airport (which is closer, and buses operate into the city hotels)
Tokyo is a very fast-moving and crowded city. It has all the modern flavours of a typical western capital. But in midst of all the modernity is eclipsed the real and traditional Japan which most foreigners (“gaijin”) would love to see.
So all tourists begin with a sightseeing tour of Tokyo. As Tokyo has been a cultural, political and economic centre of Japan since 1603, it has some places of interest. Though Tokyo has been destroyed many times by fire, earthquake and bombing , it has risen from its ashes.Must see places in Tokyo are:The Nijubashi Bridge
Meiji Shrine
Shinobazu Pond In Ueno area, the most interesting is the traditional entertainment area Asakusa. This has been the Japanese amusement area in Tokyo for centuries. There is also a temple here.
Apart from seeing the old Japan , Tokyo has one of the its most bustling , colourful and lively area called Shinjuku. It has the worlds busiest pedestrian crossing almost from eight sides (which is often highlighted in broadcast media). Its metro stations are so crowded during peak hours that professional pushers are employed to gently elbow the people in. You see Japanese life in all its shades and forms here.
Day trip from Tokyo: Mount Fuji area (including Hakone) and experience a real Onsen with the volcanic waters. Some prefer to do it with a night halt (2-day trip). Read up on the improvements especially with a single ticket now (as of 2019) that allows you all those sights in the Mount Fuji area — including staying at Hakone.
Phase 2 of the trip to the Kansai area South of Tokyo, about 500 kms, 3-4 hrs by Bullet train – Shinkansen. Major cities are Osaka, Kyoto, Nara and Kobe
It’s important to go to Nara.
For 1000 years, Kyoto was the imperial capital of Japan. As it was not bombed during the second world war, the whole ancient city has been well-preserved.
Higashi Honganji
Kinkakuji
Sanjusan gendo,
Cherry blossoms in April at Heinan Shrine and beautiful maple trees seen all over the city during the fall season (The cherry blossoms might work well with the timing of your trip. Its quite a sight that Japanese people yearn for themselves)
Kyoto: So many traditional Japanese gardens which make the city cheerful and relaxed. The Japanese gardens are basically two types:
Daisen-in
And the very famous rock and sand garden at
Moving on to This is the one place a lot of people miss out. Must go.
Kofukuji
Yakushiji
Toshodai-ji
Kasuga
Some of them have paintings and sculptures which have been declared national treasures. The citys mascot is deer and no wonder you find deers crossing in front of your cars. They come trailing behind you in the Nara Park often looking for some food. They are docile and friendly.
While in Japan one must see the ancient performing arts like
Also while in Kyoto must take part in a tea ceremony called Chanoyu. It is meant for relaxing the mind and to appreciate the natural beauty around while sitting in midst of a garden.
Awaji Bridge is another thing you can add-on if you have time. Its a feat of engineering – but might not interest everyone.
You should be able to fly out of Osaka (Kansai) airport. It’s connected to most of the worlds large airports.
Hope you enjoy your trip. This note is more of a guidance of things to incorporate – you might however find that your Japanese travels open up to new places that you would like to share back with us too. Enjoy
Simply rewriting the tags and straplines on your home page can turn browsing visitors into paying customers
Thanks to these changes and creative marketing, Wallace said, online sales have grown to 50% of total sales, up from 5% when he started the business in 2007. Wallace, 30, runs the website part-time from Glasgow. Sales this year should be about £20,000.
Will Sussman saw bookings rise almost overnight when he revamped the website for Meribel-skichalets.co.uk. “I made silly mistakes on the original website, such as white print on a blue background,” he said. “We changed it to black on white, made it all much clearer, got a new logo and spent money on nice images.”
Studying your site traffic is a good place to begin to identify simple improvements, said Varma. “The most important first step is to evaluate where the customers come from. Are they arriving by word of mouth, via the search engines or from direct links through an ad campaign?”
The changes he and Wallace made show the importance of the virtual shopfront, yet many small firms are unaware of simple and inexpensive ways to boost sales, said Aneesh Varma of FabriQate.
Website analysis tools, such as Google Analytics, can help to do this as well as identify what is deterring potential customers, he said. “It will show you things such as the bounce rate, when people enter your site and then leave right away, and the abandonment rate, when they start filling the shopping cart and then leave. It may show people getting lost on page three, for example, which lets you know that you need to redesign it.”
Simple improvements should not be difficult for anyone with a website built on a content management system, said Varma. “The latest systems don’t require special coding knowledge. You should not need to contact your tech guy to make small changes.”
Simply rewriting the tags and straplines on your home page can turn visitors into paying customers, said Varma. “Perhaps you are driving people away by asking for their date of birth or other information you don’t really need. Making the customer journey easy and obvious is important. Usability is paramount. If users get confused, you have lost them.”
Testing ideas for your site is useful. “Get family members or friends to play with the site. Are there things they can’t cope with?” said Varma.
Creating richer, more in-depth content is another way to improve sales, said Varma. “You can show all of the product label, add images and include all the information that comes on the box.”
Marketing services are getting cheaper and in some cases are free, said Wallace. “Mail Chimp is a good campaign management tool and is free to use for mailings of up to 500 customers.”
Tabitha Potts, the founder of Mimimyne.com, an eco-friendly childrenswear and toy retailer, has grown website traffic to 3,500 hits a month since launching last year.
She recommends listing a business in Google’s Local Business Centre. “It’s a good way to attract local searches. I also use Google Base, which gives you the chance to create links to your site with images and product descriptions. It’s a bit of a bore listing your products and names but it gets you up the Google rankings.”
Potts, who is based in east London, is looking at more proactive marketing: “I’ve seen discount coupons work well for other people and I am planning to introduce my own. You should be tweeting vouchers and passing them to your newsletter subscribers and Facebook group.”
Wallace recommends regular visual updates. “Having different themes — using Christmas banners, for example — shows you are up to date.”
Good salesmanship can work online as well as in the high street, he said. “The customer experience is so important. Using creativity and having fun is not something we do enough. I wrote a Scottish sweetie poem on my blog that I think reminded Scottish expats of what they were missing and gave them a sense of who I was. Over the next four weeks sales rose.”
Aneesh Varma — Founder Craft 