Brian Balfour: preference

Transcript context

…Awesome. Okay. And we'll link to that in the show notes. Okay. Lesson one: inspect the work, not the person. What is lesson two? Lesson two: tell me what it takes to win, then tell me the costs. And I couldn't remember quite where I picked this up, the language for this up. It might be from Bezos, so some listener can probably credit for me. But a problem that I've experienced, especially as my team at HubSpot grew or the team at Reforge has grown, is that as the team grows, a lot more of the initiatives and ideas obviously come bottoms up from the organization. But oftentimes, by the time it would get to me, the person would've taken an approach or all of these filters would've gotten put in place. They would be thinking, "Well, I don't want to propose something that's going to get denied", or, "This might sound a little bit too wild and I don't want to be interpreted that way", or, "Somebody else in the organization told me that this is going to be a lot of hard work." Right? And so by the time it gets to the person that is either green lighting the project or funding the project or making that decision, it loses the ultimate thing that you need to achieve, which is, in startups, you basically just have to do whatever it takes to win. And so the saying is, "Well, just tell me that first, and then even if the costs seem really high, now we can collaborate on, 'Well, what might be a way to approach this where the costs aren't so low?'" But I don't want my team spending time on watered down things that aren't going to ultimately help us win. That's just a waste of time and a waste of resources. I would rather be having the conversation on, "Well, here's what I think it's going to take to win at this particular item. Now we can be having the conversation of, 'Well, how do we actually go do that? '" That's the conversation I want to be having. But if I've got to be pushing the team of like, "Hey, this is too conservative," or, "This isn't going to be enough," or, "I don't know if it's going to be worth the resources," I don't want to be pushing the team. I want the team pushing me, and then we can start to pare it back to figure out how to actually achieve this thing. This touches on a lesson that comes up a lot on this podcast is this idea of working backwards from the ideal instead of working forwards and incrementally getting to something, and then it's just like, "Here's the perfect world. What would it take to get there?" Maybe we'll never get there, but it's a nice forcing function.…

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