Anneka Gupta: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's such a cool simple way of thinking about this. Is there an example from your work that might illustrate some of this from a project you worked on or a product you built? I can take some recent examples. We've been doing a lot of strategic planning for where do we want to be as a company over the next three years, and Rubrik operates in the cybersecurity space. It's a very fast moving landscape. There's a lot of places that we could go as a business, and one of the ways that I've exhibited this, and this is what I recommend to other people too, is sometimes it's really hard to come up with the compelling and simple why behind something and sometimes it's also really hard to come up with a really big idea out of thin air. So these things can be very challenging. The first step that I found as very useful, and I use this tactic every single day in meetings, is just summarization. So, bringing people together, lots of different voices into a room and hearing what they have to say and at various times in the conversation summarizing what people are saying and summarizing what that means in terms of the direction that we could go in. And then that's a checkpoint of saying, "Okay, this is how I've synthesized what is happening. Is this correct or do we actually need to do another turn because we don't all agree with where we're landing here?" That summarization, even though I may not be adding a new idea into that, I found people actually view that as strategy. They view the effective summarization as strategy. So I think that's one element. Then what I've also found is that when I summarize what other people are saying and especially multiple different stakeholders, then I can think about offline and not in the context of right in the meeting, sometimes in the meeting too I guess, is how do I make this idea one click better? It's not about how do you do something radically, radically different, but taking ideas and then making it slightly better, slightly better. When you think about that, especially from an outside-in perspective of what are the customer problems we're trying to solve and how are we going to take this to market, and don't worry about how difficult the technical implementation is going to be, then you start to get to these big ideas that can really be the change agent ideas. So, I've started doing this more and more and I think especially in the past three to six months, and I'm seeing a material difference in terms of the number of big ideas that we're going and pursuing overall as a company and also the quality of the strategic thinking that I can bring to the table, and it's been really exciting and rewarding. There's so much you're sharing that resonates with other podcast episodes. For example, this idea of just going one click better. I had Roger Martin on the podcast where this book, Playing to Win, which is one of the more popular strategy books, and he has this concept of betterment as a way to work on strategy. A lot of people go huge with a big strategy and vision, and his advice is just find the thing that is the biggest constraint and bottleneck to your business right now and just make it better and that's your next step. And then just keep doing that and you'll end up in a much better place over time, even though it feels like you're just doing one little thing. And so I love this idea of just picking one thing and making it one click better. There's going to be an episode that comes out right before this with Alex Komoroske, and he has this concept of the adjacent possible and it's just find the next thing that's possible and focus on that versus some big lofty thing. So I'm just sharing a bunch of stuff, that's not a question.…

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