Likes YouTube.

Transcript context

…We've run principles for teams, yeah. That's one of them. Teams would be more effective. We have a lot of, I mean I think I have, at this point, I have 12 things that I'll go into a company and do with a company. Typically, the way I like to do it is I will go in and I'll talk to the leader typically and they'll say, "This is what I want." Then I really want to assess. Typically, if the person who is a big part of creating the problem has a hard time seeing the way through the problem, or it wouldn't have been created generally. This is not demeaning any leader, we all have these issues. Usually, what I like to do is I like to go in and I like to talk to three or four people, see what their perspective, not just the leader's perspective. Then I like to sit in a meeting or two and just see actually what the dynamic is. One of the things I like to say about how to change a company is that the atomic structure of a company is the meetings and the decisions. It's particularly true in Silicon Valley, but it's really true in all businesses that all we are as a company is a group of people's relationships and ideas. Especially, like Amazon, you got a couple of buildings and some servers. There's not a lot of hardware there, and they wouldn't be useful without the people anyways. Anybody, whether you're running a farm or a shoe factory or anybody's successful is going to tell you it's all about the people. The atomic structure is what are our meetings like and how do we make decisions? I'll just really pay attention to a meeting. One of the things we do is we talk about what we call five-star meetings, which is how do you make every meeting enjoyable? Literally, how is it that everybody when they walk out of a meeting, they're like, oh, fuck, that was great? It turns out, we've all been in meetings that are hard as shit, and we've walked out and gone, oh, those are great meetings. We've all been in meetings where nothing happens and we're like, "Oh, God. Fuck, another one to just drive a nail through my head. I don't want to sit there." What's required to make one of your meetings five stars? If you do that, that's one of the things we'll do inside of a company is work with them to figure that out. If you do that, every single problem with your company will come to the surface. Every single one of them. I had ten five -tar meetings, but these two meetings sucked. That tells me exactly where we need to focus as a company. That tells me exactly where to look for the problem that's happening. It's the same thing with decisions. If you really start unpacking how the decisions are made where people are frustrated in the decision-making process, you're going to find exactly the problems in the company. An example of this, I was working with a friend and he's a content person, and we were just talking about how do you make every one of your meetings a five-star meeting? He's like, "Okay, great." He's like, "Yeah, I'm never going to do this." riend and he's a content person, and we were just talking about how do you make every one of your meetings a five-star meeting? He's like, "Okay, great." He's like, "Yeah, I'm never going to do this." I was like, "Really? Tell me why." He's, "My YouTube meetings fucking suck." That's not where he makes most of his money, but these YouTube meetings suck. They're never going to get better. Luckily, there's a couple other people around at the time and everyone's like, "No, wait, I love my YouTube meetings. What do you mean? How could this not work for you?" He noticed, oh, the team didn't, the content, none of it was working for him. None of it was him. He was just like, "Ugh." He changed it. He was like, "Okay, I'm going to commit to that. I'm going to see what it's like for me to just say every one of my YouTube meetings have to be something that's super enjoyable to me." When he did it, his YouTube numbers went off the charts in a very short period of time. It's just that common. Wherever the meeting is that sucks, it means there's something else that's a problem that needs to be worked on. That's typically how. I can just look at, usually sit in any team meeting and see at least three or four of the major problems that are happening in the company. Such a cool way of thinking about where to focus decision-making meetings. I love that the story comes back to something you shared earlier with the more you enjoy something, the more joy there is, the better it's going to go anyway. The more you can find those moments and make things enjoyable, the better.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.