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?
I attended the NASSCOM Summit in this past week (November 6th & 7th) on Gaming and Animation as part of my trip arranged by the British Council for UK’s Young Interactive Entrepreneur 2009 program. The conference was a good gathering of the who’s who in the gaming and animation sector and also brought about some interesting dialogues through the various forums and panels.
The key note speaker on Day 2 was Ernest Adams who is a well known authority on game design, author, co-founder of the International Game Developers Association, and a regular lecturer at the Game Developers Conference. Ernest has been a lead designer at Bullfrog Productions, and the audio/video producer on the Madden NFL product line.
He has developed games for the IBM 360 mainframe, the Playstation 2, and many other platforms. He is a member of the International Hobo game design and narrative consultancy. Adams’ is the author of “Break Into The Game Industry: How to Get A Job Making Video Games”. He also wrote two books with Andrew Rollings. Their 1st was “Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design”. They followed it with “Fundamentals of Game Design”, part of the “Game Design and Development Series” in 2006.
Summarized below are some of the points from his keynote presentation. While I disclaim that this is an effort to capture all his key points, I hope its a useful summary of his speech (His lectures can be found here)
Ernest started with a very simple but important topic:
How does a game entertain its players?
He went on to list some of elements that help create that entertainment value. These might not all apply to all games, but its easy to see that most successful games have covered several of these bases. ▪ Game Play remains the most important aspect. Content is king. ▪ Story is equally paramount to get the user to be entrenched in the game ▪ Exploration adds the required challenge and curiosity ▪ Progression: Hardness, new avatars ▪ Risk & Reward: Again fundamental to user experience ▪ Novelty ▪ Learning ▪ Creativity ▪ Role Playing ▪ Socializing: This is becoming a bigger factor in recent years with the growth of social gaming platform whether on social networks or otherwise with increased connectivity.
One of the issues that Ernest reasoned is important in the growth of the gaming industry is to be able to start creating long games (those that are beyond 12-15 hours). So it raised the obvious question of how to make games longer? ▪ Themes & Variations ▪ New Challenges & Complexities ▪ Progression: Difficulty should increase steadily, not spikily. Character upgrades – Power Up, New moves ▪ Good Pacing: Periods of high activity, low activity ▪ Change Setting ▪ Player Achievements changes story plot (adaptive games)
One fundamental issue that Ernest highlighted was that the very core DNA of short games is different than long games. You cannot just extend a short game to make it a successful long game. And the rationale is in the purpose with which each of these type of games are made: Short games vs Long Games
▪ Short games are intended to be played repeatedly, but yet should be different at every start (i.e.: shuffle a deck of cards)
▪ Long games are once through and never back. Should be realistic goal – but yet challenging.
So what is so unique about Long Games. What makes them its own special class of games? ▪ Long games are a means of escaping reality – bring a dream to live ▪ Reward the investment of time from the player. Let them live something they cant do in live (e.g.: own a farm, own a team, be a F1 racer) ▪ Take care of your players – User Interface and usability is key ▪ Usual budgets of about 5-10mm (EA, Ubisoft, Namco)
Player-Centric Game Design: Actions and game play arise out of the players choices
Animation is also something that game designers have to be extra cautious, especially in this increasingly competitive environment.
Expect users to try to do weird things. Smooth transitions are your saviour.
e.g.: what happens when a character is jumping, and a user presses Crouch. Be ready for that
In Story Telling, animation is controlled. However in gaming, animation has to be ready to adapt to changing demands of the users.
Animation data is stored on the objects, not on the game. Each object has its own dynamics, behaviour, procedural animations.
This has led to the following features in the development cycle:
▪ Inverse Kinematics – Produces graphics on the go (i.e.: the characters shouldn’t have their feet sink into the floor as they walk up the stairs)
▪ Ragdoll Physics – Falling and Gravity
▪ True Locomotion – Speed of character moving should match the speed at which their legs are moving (i.e.: the Skating effect is unwanted)
(Games now create character animations on the go. However there are often pre-rendered motion graphics).
There are only two film companies that have made it in the game area, Lucas Arts and Disney. And this has been because they understand software engineering and not just creative and animation.
Ernest also talked about major challenge for the Gaming industry is: “How do you go from Outsourcing to IP development?” ▪ Design a brand ▪ Begin with characters – create a character that is a strong symbol of the game (i.e.: Lara Croft) ▪ Requires more dedication as a Game Publisher than a Game Service Provider ▪ Everything matters, anything can make it fail ▪ Skilled game producers – if you don’t have them, get them from somewhere (internationally) ▪ Testing, tuning and polishing – spend 50% of time on this. The difference between a good game and a bad game – is the amount of QA and refinement ▪ If development is N days. Then testing & polishing is 2N day. ▪ Don’t promise what you cant do: Don’t hurt your reputation if you cant do. Honesty wins ▪ Know your audience tastes. Understand local styles of entertainment – what works in India is because India works that way. You cant just bring in western thinking and implement. e.g.: German games don’t have blood. British sense of humour is different than American. ▪ Don’t hire just gamers, hire game developers (its a different thing) ▪ Don’t copy – improve ▪ New features alone are not improvement. Do things better, faster, richly, cleaner. Fix the issues – don’t just add things. ▪ If you cant do a thing well – then don’t do it all. A smaller beautifully built and polished game is better than an average longer game
How do you transition into a Game Publisher in a couple years (i.e.: 5 years rather than 30 years):
▪ Education towards Game Development: Education provides a place where students can make risk free mistakes and grow.
(See Ernest Adams 10 Game Development Commandments)
▪ Professional game development training: There are experts and freelancers to teach large scale asset management, SCRUM management, division of tasks
The core issue right now is that game design industry needs experience – but that will come with training and time. Till then its prudent that they the steps to help foster the culture of game design by looking inwards as well as outwards and attract talent where required.
Game companies are mostly making games based on North American stories (i.e.: Tolkien) and a bit from Japan (medieval & shogun). The rest of the world’s stories never make their way into game.
P.S.: Of the all the questions he got at the end of the speech, probably the most interesting one was about some of his all time favourite games. To which he replied:
Tetris. It’s absolutely perfect. It’s simple. If you make any changes to it – you will make it worse
Aneesh Varma — Founder Craft 