David Kopec: Welcome to the premiere episode of business Books and Company. We're so excited to have you with us. Every month we're going to bring you an in depth analysis of a popular business book. You'll get key takeaways, intelligent discussion, and important insights that you can apply to your career. Don't forget to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, overcast, or your podcast player of choice. Thanks for listening, and we hope you enjoy the show. All right, welcome to the book club. I'm David Kopeck. I'm your moderator. I'm an assistant professor of computer science. I'm here with Molson, Hart and David Short. David, do you want to introduce yourself?
David Short: Yeah, I'm David Short. I'm a product manager and former consultant.
David Kopec: Molson, what about you?
Molson Hart: I'm an entrepreneur. I started a toy company about ten years ago. It sells toys, mostly on e commerce channels like Amazon.com. you can check it out. It's called Viheart. I started another company called ES and litigation Financing, and last week I started an oil company. So I start a lot of companies, mess a lot of things up and try to make money and learn as much as I can.
David Kopec: So our book this week is high output management by Andy Grove. And tell us a little bit about Andy Grove. Can either of you give us a little background on who Andy is?
David Short: Andy was born Andrus Istvan Grove and emigrated from Hungary to Austria when he was 20, during the hungarian revolution. Prior to that, his family had survived the Holocaust, and he ultimately made it to New York, where he earned a chemical engineering degree at City College, then went to Berkeley and got a PhD, and then worked at Fairchild Semiconductor, where he met the intel co founders, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. And from there, he was one of the first three people to start intel. But he's not actually listed as a co founder, interestingly, and rather was the director of engineering, but ultimately became the CEO, actually, after he'd written this book. So he was president at the time that he wrote high output management.
David Kopec: Now, most people are probably familiar with intel, but does anyone want to give a brief overview of Intel's business and what they do?
Molson Hart: To be honest, I don't really understand how intel works, and I don't have the best understanding of what the memory devices that they were selling and also the processors that they ended up giving up to the Japanese in the eighties.
David Kopec: Well, intel is probably the leading designer of desktop and laptop microprocessors, and any Mac or PC that you buy today usually has an intel processor. A small minority have an AMD processor. Intel is one of the few remaining microprocessor companies that makes both the designs of their microprocessors and also manufactures them, meaning they own what's called a fab, where they build them as well. They've been at the forefront of the microprocessor industry since the 1970s and really have been one of the main leaders. They're starting to be challenged the last few years by the rise of mobile devices where intel doesn't have a foothold, really. Most smartphones and tablets run on arm microprocessors, which is a different architecture than intel microprocessors. But Andy Grove was the CEO during, let's say, the golden days of intel. He was there when intel was the undisputed champion of high performance microprocessors that are used in personal computers. So very, very successful in his management role at intel. So what got the two of you interested in reading this book? Why did you want to read high output management?
Molson Hart: So for me, the reason why I wanted to read it was that I don't consider myself a strong manager. I think I'm a lot good, like a lot of different things in terms of running a business, but I don't think I'm a strong manager. And this book basically comes highly recommended. It's required reading in Silicon Valley, and then it's not too short. Excuse me, it's not that long. So those three things make it a perfect candidate for a book for me to read.
David Kopec: David, what about you?
David Short: Yeah, I'd actually read this a few years back, but at the time I was more of an individual contributor consultant. And so I thought it was really good, but it wasn't as relevant to my day to day job. But now as a product manager, I both manage multiple people in product roles as well as a team of five engineers. And so coming back to it with a little bit more of a practical, executional approach, I thought would be a good opportunity. And I think I actually heard about it from Ben Horowitz originally. He recommends it, I think, in built. What's his book?
Molson Hart: The hard thing about hard things or something like that?
David Short: Exactly. Yeah, the hard thing about hard things. I think that's where I heard about it first.
Molson Hart: Just going back to Andy Grove's kind of arrival to the United States, there's this really great quote from Ben Horowitz. I don't know if it's a quote, I'm going to paraphrase it very poorly. But Ben Horowitz said something to the effect of, like, if you see a guy like Andy Grove, someone who escapes from a communist country to come to the United States, like, you fund that guy. And to me, that's like kind of one of the defining characteristics of Andy Grove, just the challenges the guy overcame to not only get to the United States, but to become really the CEO of one of America's greatest companies.
David Kopec: Yeah. And we should mention that he's a very successful author. This book did well, but he also wrote only the paranoid survive, which was also a bestseller, I believe. So you mentioned why both of you read the book. Who's the real audience for this book? Before we get into all the details of its contents, who should read this book?
David Short: I would say anyone who manages people or themselves. Frankly, the content that I found most of repeated within the book and also most relevant, is that the output of a manager is the output of his organization. And there's like some caveats on related organizations he may impact. But honestly, as a manager, I had had a little bit of difficulty before that in thinking about how to measure myself when I'm sort of writing a self assessment and things like that. But that makes it a lot easier that everything my organization is working on is the output of the work that I'm putting in.
Molson Hart: Yeah, I agree with David, everyone, regardless of whether you're at a large corporation, managing departments, teams, or you're just managing a few people, or like David said, or David Short said to David's on this podcast, even if you're just managing yourself, there's wisdom in this book for all types of people.
David Kopec: Okay, let's get into the nitty gritty. So what are the most important themes throughout the book?
David Short: So I already mentioned it. The output of a manager is the output of his organization. He goes through a lot of detail on meetings and the different ways and focuses that you should have for different types of meetings, one on ones, regular check ins with a group. And then I forget what he calls it, but I think it's like task oriented or mission oriented meetings. Outside of that, he has a lot of tangible advice on ways to measure the impact of your organization, ways to set expectations for the future, and then look back on how effective you and your employees were at meeting those expectations. There's a lot of stories about the way that he's done things at intel, and then very practical advice and even diagrams and things like that to show how you might implement that yourself.
Molson Hart: Did you guys agree with everything he was saying about the frequency of meetings and how they should be regularly scheduled? He himself even says during the book that he kind of disagrees with Peter Drucker, who's kind of the other guy who wrote the de facto definitive guide to meetings and how to manage people.
David Short: I did push back on a little bit of some of his suggestions. So one was that you shouldn't regularly schedule your one on ones. You should schedule them after the one that just took place. I fundamentally disagree with that. Just have something on the calendar for weekly and if someone is out of town or whatever, then it should be expected that they will move that meeting. But I didn't think it made sense that you should wait until, you know, after you've had it to schedule the next one.
David Kopec: Well, I think regular meetings are critical just to touch base with people, even in academia. I noticed the last year we haven't had regular meetings of our department for various scheduling reasons. And people just start to lose sense of what everyone else is doing if there's not that regular time to touch base. So I think having something on the calendar on a regular basis is really important. And just doing it ad hoc, I don't think, always leads to as consistent results. That's my personal opinion.
Molson Hart: When did you write this book?
David Short: I think it was 82.
David Kopec: Actually, it came out 83. It was revised in 95 with a new introduction. I'm sure that there's been a lot of theory in business management that happened since then, right?
Molson Hart: Well, not only that, sorry to interrupt, but like, I would love to. He's dead, right? I'd love to resurrect the man and then like, not. He obviously became familiar with email, but I would love to know kind of how he'd edit the book in view of constant mobile, everywhere you are, email communication, things like Zencastr or Google Hangouts, video conferences, and also more recently, stuff like project management tools like Trello and Asana and stuff like that. Because I think a lot of those things make meetings less necessary because it's almost like a bulletin board that everyone can see everywhere. So like, do I need to call ten people to a meeting in order to kind of like eight people? In his case, he said never more than eight. I think for big decisions, do I need to call those people together frequently to discuss what they're doing as much when there's, you know, this cool board, in the case of Trello that everyone can look at to kind of follow what's going on?
David Kopec: Well, Molson, you run a remote business in many ways. You have employees all over the world. How do you handle not being able to see them face to face? What are the downsides of never being able to be in a face to face meeting with them.
Molson Hart: I have both. I have employees that I see regularly face to face, and I have employees I don't see regularly face to face. And there are a lot of downsides. I think, like you mentioned in the book, like, a phone call is not a good substitute for a face to face one on one. I'll kind of give you an example. So I recently hired someone in the Philippines, and just prior to them actually starting, they got eye surgery. They had Lasik eye surgery, and we were planning on doing face to face video meetings regularly every week. And in the book, Andy Grove talks a lot about how it's essential that when someone's starting out, if they don't know how to do their job, that you meet with them frequently. And if they're not starting out and they're really experienced with their job, you don't need to get as involved anyhow. So she had just had eye surgery and we were doing like regular meetings. And it was extremely difficult because she had to wear these huge shades, like, around her head. And as a result of that, I couldn't see her eyes when we were doing face to face video communication. And because of that, there was so much emotion that I couldn't read, you know what I'm saying? Like, when I asked her, like, hey, did you enjoy this task? Was it a struggle for you? Sometimes people don't, like, communicate directly and say, yeah, I struggled, but you can get a lot of information just from their eyes. And because I couldn't see them, I wasn't getting that information. Video conferencing helps a lot, but there, and that's something that Andy Grove probably didn't get. He wasn't using in 1982 for sure. But there's something special about face to face in presence communication that I miss out on by running a business that has remote employees.
David Kopec: David, you work in a hyper modern corporation, for lack of a better term. What do you think is the right balance between net based tools and more traditional tools, like in person meetings? And how have you seen that play out, either in a positive or negative way, when it's too heavy on Internet based tools or too heavy on face to face?
David Short: Yeah. So my company has big offices both in Berlin and in Boston, where I live. And so we do use Zoom and Google hangouts and whatever, all kinds of different mechanisms for video chatting. Given that we are distributed to some extent, I find that it really does matter whether or not you get face to face meetings with people so I did go to Berlin for a week, and I found that that dramatically changed the relationships that I had with those people in that office, even though I'm still going to have to meet with them via, you know, video chat or phone calls or send an email, all of those things. Just having that in person experience for some percentage of the time I think is really important. I also try to decrease the number of meetings in my life. To be perfectly honest, I spend way too much of my time in meetings. And so I always try to reflect at the beginning of each day, can I handle this with an email or with a slack conversation? Or can I send a document that I'd already developed to address the question that people are trying to schedule a meeting in order to answer? But that being said, I do think that the meetings that he mostly focused on are quite valuable, which is, yeah, I do have weekly one on ones with both my direct reports and the people that I report to. I do have weekly or bi weekly status update meetings on the projects that I'm leading, which do have sort of larger group audiences and will come with a pre read in advance so that people know whether they are necessary to understand what's going on. As I'm drafting that pre read, I may realize this really is just an email update and we don't need to meet because there's not any decision that needs to be made or controversial thing that's taken place that I want to get direct knowledge that someone is aware of. Not just I sent them an email and so they should be aware of it. But that being said, obviously all these digital communication tools dramatically increase the way with which you can collaborate around the world, but nothing can replace an in person meeting for certain kinds of things you can try, and obviously, when you're dealing with people remotely, you simply have to deal with other methods, but it's definitely not the same.
David Kopec: Okay, let's switch gears a little bit. What does Andy Grove write about dealing with employees who are not performing their best work and how to deal with that situation as a manager?
David Short: So I believe he said something along the lines of people either can't do the work or they are not motivated to do the work. And that that's sort of the first question that you need to understand is, is this a skills gap or is it a motivation gap? I think the skills gap is in a lot of ways easier to address than the motivation gap because if they don't know how to do it, you can sit with them, you can train them, you can watch them do it, then give them an opportunity to execute on it, and everything should work out. If it's a motivation gap, that gets a lot more complicated. So what is the best way to motivate this individual person? Do they care about money? Obviously, we all do, but probably if all they're focused on is money, it's going to be a hard way to truly motivate them. But if they have very tangible, output oriented tasks, maybe you can. Maybe they get paid based off of the execution of those individual things. And it really works. With product management type role, that doesn't tend to be the case. I mean, I can set a longer term objective, which is that you're going to deliver this project, and that's kind of tangible, but day to day, it's going to be difficult to say, like, oh, did you check the box? And so what I found really helpful since I moved into a technology firm is daily stand ups. So that you do get that constant. What are you working on yesterday? What did you work on? What are you planning on working on today? Do you have any blockers? And I found that to be very helpful to understand. Is it a skills gap versus a motivation gap? Because when someone comes back with the same kind of problem and they have no explanation for what are the things that they've done in the interim in order to get around that, you realize, okay, they're not motivated, then maybe you do need to have a separate meeting with them to understand, sort of how can they? What are they excited about? What are the things in the job that they really enjoy and can go after? Can you divert them more towards that? Or ultimately, if they're not going to be motivated in the role, like, probably you do need to get rid of that person.
Molson Hart: Do you want to just briefly explain what a daily standup is? I know what it is because my brother worked at a firm that did it, but a lot of companies don't do that. We don't. I would like to, but we don't.
David Short: Yeah. So I actually hold two now. So I have one daily stand up with my engineers. And the way we run that meeting is that we look at our sprint board, where we can see what the status of the various tasks are that we're trying to work on in the next two weeks. And the things that are closest to being done are the first things that we talk about. So we'll ask the person who's on that thing, that item that's in review, it's almost ready to be deployed, and we'll say, you know, what's the status of that? Do you have any blockers? Is there something we can do to get it over the line? We go through each person in that, each engineer in that way. What have they been working on? What are their blockers? Why is it that, you know, something we thought would be out yesterday is still not out, and as a PM, I actually don't really speak in that meeting except to ask questions and to sort of get a little bit more information. They don't really need to know what it is that I'm doing because it doesn't necessarily impact their work within a given week. And then at the end of the day, I also meet with the product managers that I lead, and so we do the same thing. So what is it that you did today? What are you planning on doing tomorrow? And do you have any blockers? So that's the main point. The real point of the standup is to identify blockers, is to understand, is there something that they need help from me or from someone else in the organization in order to get across the line? Or is it just, this is taking a little bit longer because the SQL analysis required a little bit more time than they thought it would. Those kinds of things where they're clearly making progress and they have a light at the end of the tunnel as opposed to just, I don't know what to do next.
David Kopec: David, have you had to deal with an insubordinate employee ever? And is there anything in Grove's book that helped you with that situation?
David Short: I wouldn't say I've had truly insubordinate employees. What I have had is fresh out of college, people who just don't really know what a job is. And what I've done there is, I mean, again, daily stand up is obviously really helpful on that, that you're checking in with them each day. So you can, it manifests itself very quickly if they are not focused. And frankly, what I had to do is just sit them down and explain, like, look, I know you were in college before. This is your first real job. This is a product management role. And there are a lot of expectations for that beyond what most people would have in their first job out of college. And you should have an ownership mentality. You are earning, you know, equity in this company by working here. So you are an owner. And just because I haven't told you, these are the seven things you need to do today, you should have figured those out based off of the things that I've asked. And if you really don't know, then come to me. It's always an open door. Always happy to give you advice on where you could be valuable next. But don't sit there surfing the Internet because you think you accomplished what you needed to for the day.
David Kopec: Molson, I know you've had some issues in this area.
Molson Hart: Yeah, I've had some insubordinate employees, for sure. It kind of like, again, going back to what Grove said, it depends on, like, their level of competence is the. Is the wrong word, but their level of development. So what I'm trying to say is that I've had insubordinate people whose job was to move things around to warehouse, and then I've also had insubordinate, like, high development office workers. And dealing with those two things are totally different. If you have an insubordinate warehouse worker, you can actually be physically threatened, because they can be, like, a big guy. They may not be super educated. I've dealt with insubordinate felons. One time, we had this temporary worker who had the state of Texas tattooed on his face, just to give you a little picture of what type of person we were dealing with. And I wanted him to move some pallets from one end of the warehouse to the other end of the warehouse using a pallet jack. I don't know. A pallet jack is. It's like a human power device that you can use to move pallets. And he really didn't want to do that. He wanted to use the forklift. And, you know, I didn't trust the guy enough to let him use forklift. I had no idea if he had driven a forklift before. And so you started moving the pallets from one end to the warehouse to the other. And he was just like. He started to swear, and I was like, dude, you just got to move these pallets. Like, I know it's hard, but it's, like, not that hard. And then eventually, he just started swearing at me and throwing things at me, and basically, I just had to kind of walk him off the premises. Definitely a difficult moment. And so sometimes you almost, like, risk physical confrontation. But as a manager, it's something that you kind of need to do. Like, if you're in a situation where you have someone who's insubordinate, like, you need to confront that directly, because if you don't, it sends a strong message to the other people that you manage that you're not willing to confront insubordination directly. I mean, that doesn't mean that you need to be tough on the person or ridiculous or embarrass them or something like that. But you kind of do need to show strength in a position like that. Insubordination with office workers is much less scary in a physical sense, but can be scarier in terms of the kind of damage it can do to your business. If someone's being insubordinate, I would just address it privately. Directly? Directly, but like, thoughtfully and with consideration to why the person might be doing that. It's possible that they disagree with your directive. And if you've got an office worker who's being insubordinate, you have to address that. I think I would address it privately, and I would try to identify the underlying reason as to why they're doing that. They may disagree with your strategic vision, and knowing why that they disagree with your strategic vision is like, hugely important because you can understand who they are, and you can even understand that they might be right. As a manager, you'll make calls because that's your job. It's one of your main jobs. Make calls, make decisions, and a lot of times you won't be right. And, you know, if you can find out from the people that you manage that you're wrong, even if it's via them being insubordinate. I mean, that's a good thing.
David Short: Grove actually has some pretty good points on this directly, which are that it's towards the end of the book, I don't remember the exact details, but essentially that you first need to. Well, they can either agree with your perspective, they can agree with what you've requested that they do, or they can sort of disagree with both of those things. And that he earlier on thought that he really needed to get them to agree with his perspective on things. But he ultimately realized, sure, it's best if they agree both with your perspective and on the action, but as long as they agree to take the action that you want them to, that's all you really need to get to. But to your point, Molson, it's true that you should find out why they're pushing back on you, because just because you're the manager doesn't mean you're right. You should certainly always be open to challenge from, you know, any direction. And in a lot of cases, they do know more about the specific thing you're asking them to do because they do that every day. And you, maybe you used to do it at one point, but you haven't been as engaged in it on a day to day basis. He talks a lot in one chapter on task relevant maturity and how that relates to management style. So the sort of breakdown was with like, low task relevant maturity. Then you need to be very structured. Tell them what to do when and how. Once they get more maturity in the role, when they're in medium, then it can be more individual oriented. You're emphasizing two way communication. I think that's probably where you start to get into the ability for them to push back on things. And then when it's high, the task relevant maturity is high. The involvement of the manager should be minimal, and they should really be just establishing high level objectives and monitoring to make sure those objectives are taking place. But the employee should be independent to figure out how to execute it.
David Kopec: So, David, he gives this analogy of a parent bringing up a child. Can you explain how that analogy applies to what you were just talking about?
David Short: Yeah, absolutely. I thought it really resonated with me and made it clear, but when it is a. Well, when it's a baby, they straight up, you know, you're just changing diapers. He doesn't go to that, but when it's a toddler, you need to tell them, no, don't touch that hot thing. It's going to hurt you. Those kinds of things. You just have to be very prescriptive and directive. As they're getting a little bit older, they'll start to understand things themselves like that. You know, at first you need to tell them, don't cross the street. Later on, they're just going to understand that, you know, there's a danger in this particular area. And I should tread with caution, even if I haven't been explicitly told that thing. That's sort of the medium level. And then ultimately, you know, they're going to go off to college, and at that point, you know, they should have a lot of task relevant maturity. You're going to trust them to decide what their major is to decide those kinds of things. And I maybe if they get a report card back and they're really failing, you might need to get a little bit more prescriptive, even with that college student. But absent some sort of indicator that they're really failing, you can leave them very independent to guide themselves.
David Kopec: That makes a lot of sense. Okay, let's move to something really big picture. So Grove talks about the difference between mission oriented forms of organizations AnD functional form organizations, and he says these are two extreme, different kinds of ways of structuring your organization. He says most organizations are somewhere in between. He calls those mixed organizations. But what is a mission oriented form organization and what is a Functional form Organization.
David Short: Having been a consultant, I have quite a bit of experience with this kind of stuff. But the basic idea is that functional organizations would be things along the lines of there's a finance department, there's HR, there are these kinds of shared roles that are resources across the organization. And then a mission oriented organization would be, you know, you might call it a business unit or something like that, where it's probably, if you have separate products, you might break things down that way. I did work at a bank, and so, like, the different kinds of banks were set up as different business units. So there was like a retail bank, there was a commercial bank. Those were, you know, those had their own CEO's, even internally. And so there's a lot of direct ownership of the output of that specific product that can be led by that mission oriented structure. And of course, at a bank, it is a hybrid, which is what Andy gets to with this, is that with any sort of large scale company, it's going to be some type of hybrid. The reality will probably be somewhere in between a truly functional organization and a mission oriented organization. And the big thing that he points out is that there's obviously the functional organization is clearly more efficient in a lot of ways, right? Having one finance person that's helping all these different people is more efficient than having separate finance people in every single organization. But the thing that you lose by not having that is the agility and the ability to deliver quickly on things that are really important. And so that's why larger corporations tend to split up into these kinds of mission oriented groups, even if they will be supported by some functional organizations. Because when you see some new regulatory requirement that's really going to impact your business. If you have to go to the legal team and get their resources over other things, and you don't have some resources that you can directly deploy, things won't get handled as quickly as they could otherwise. I'm speaking in a very bank focused way right there. But regardless of what it is that you're tackling, clearly it's harder to marshal resources in that functional area because it's shared across a lot of different people. And so those people need to negotiate over what's the highest priority and those kinds of things. And that's the inefficiency that you run into Molson.
David Kopec: How are your company structured?
Molson Hart: For me, I've never really worked at a big company, and I've never managed a big company, so it's a little bit hard for me to say, but I think the answer to that question is that we are mission oriented and not process oriented. So the company that I run that has the most people has, I think, about five people. I may be miscounting that. You have warehouse foreman slash manager. You have temporary labor, temporary laborers. How I got into that insubordination episode with the guy who had Texas tattooed on his face. You have a designer, you have a production manager, and then you have me. And basically, the company is just too small to have, like, an independent HR department and things like that. So kind of the company is too small and too flexible in order for things to be siloed off. So there's a lot of cross departmental work and stuff like that. And really, we're just like one mission oriented department that functions as a company. I think that's how I would answer it. I mean, would you guys disagree? Or, like, how would. The company's too small to really necessarily have these terms applied to it.
David Short: I think now that you have a few different companies, you could see a world where you did decide to have a CFO who did work across those three companies. I think that would probably be your first example where you would start to get a little bit of that. Functional, focused people would be literally just hiring an accountant to cover across the three different companies that you're working with. Given that you've structured them as separate entities, I think they're clearly just mission oriented for now.
Molson Hart: That's a great point. Now that I think about it, my brother does computer science work for a couple of different companies. So, for example, he built some custom software for the toy company to help us manage skus. And then he also built custom software for the litigation financing company. And he is, as I understand it, process oriented department across all of your.
David Short: Engineering department, basically correct.
David Kopec: You know, it's interesting. I was thinking about, what is it for academia? So, at a college, you obviously have some process oriented departments. You have an HR department, you have departments for student support that apply across the entire college. But a lot of the organization is mission oriented because each of the faculty based departments, so whether that's computer science or English or whatever it is, have their own employees, such as an office manager, an Ops manager, a dean, who are specific just to that mission oriented department. So I think it's definitely a hybrid organization. Would you all agree with that?
David Short: Absolutely. We all went to Dartmouth, which we hadn't mentioned previously, but they have this new concept of clusters, which I think is like an even more interesting overlay on kind of hybrid organizations within an academic environment. Wherever they try to pull together faculty resources across a number of different disciplines that all relate to one core thing. So I think there's one around future of energy. I think there's some stuff around healthcare delivery. I don't remember what the, there's some computer science sort of focused things as well. But again, the point being where it's, you want to have someone from like an economics background and someone from like a geological background and someone from a computer science background or whatever, all working together on the same concepts. And so they're almost creating these kind of hybrid organizations even even further within the academic community. But I think Grove actually explicitly talks about a university as a matrix organization in the book. And his example is effectively the security and the maintenance and the administration in terms of the office of the president and things like that. Clearly those are functional areas, process, whatever we're calling it. And then, yeah, there's the separate departments and potentially there are even separate schools and things like that as well.
David Kopec: So let's talk about some specific things that you really liked in the book. David, I know that you liked some of the charts, for example.
David Short: Yeah, I thought Grove did a good job of basically when he put a chart down, I knew I should pay attention to this area and reflect on it a little bit because he cared enough to try and diagram it out. I don't know that they are always adding huge amounts of value, but I did recognize that some of them were quite helpful. And as a consultant, I certainly did a lot of two by two charts in the past of these things go up on this metric, these things go up on this metric. And you want to be in the top right or you want to be in the bottom left or something like that. I'm a visual learner for sure. After reading something, it's nice to have that, that visual representation.
David Kopec: Molson, what were some of your favorite parts of the book?
Molson Hart: So when he was talking about like big meetings and stuff like that, I tuned most of it out because it wasn't as applicable to me as his comments with regards to managing yourself and managing small teams and one on ones. So the few things I took down were there's a great line. I thought delegation without monitoring is abdication. And that's that. To me, that's applicable. Whether or not you're managing a small team or you're managing a big team or you're just managing yourself. Always check delegated work early in the process to catch errors early. Interfering inappropriately is demotivating. Design your work around limiting steps. Batching makes work more efficient. And I took some individual notes down as to how to best conduct one on one meetings, which I agree with Grove on. I mean, I think they're hugely, hugely important.
David Kopec: That quote you read about delegation, it reminds me a lot of Reagan's quote, trust but verify. Would you say that's another way of putting it?
Molson Hart: I'm not sure. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I always interpret. I don't know, maybe I'm a bit cynical, but the way I interpret the Reagan quote is almost like, yeah, give the appearance of trust, but you can't ever fully trust someone to do the right thing. I mean, you really got to monitor them. So I guess it's kind of the same thing. But Grove's quote to me is less about appearances and more about just, you know, functionally being a good manager.
David Short: Yeah, I'd say trust but verify is really just about the monitoring side of things. It doesn't. It's not really talking about delegation necessarily. It is a funny quote, and my mom often used it with me growing up because she did not trust me, really, on what it was that I was doing when I said I was going out. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. Some other things that I really liked within the book were the fact that reports and annual planning are important for the process that allowed them to be complete, but not the documents themselves. So he said that he often literally doesn't read the actual annual report for intel, but instead it was just the act of having put it together is really important. You learn a lot from that process. That's something that I found to be very true, that I'll create a lot of documents internally that I may share with a small group. But frankly, the biggest output of that was me thinking through the problem that I'm trying to tackle. And by trying to write it down and structure it, I just get a better grasp on it myself. And frankly, it's like the conclusion is the only thing that really mattered, and the rest of it is sort of supporting to help you understand how I got there. If you are questioning what the conclusion is, it's there for you to review. But for the most part, the process was more important than the document itself.
David Kopec: Another way of putting that is a favorite quote of Steve Jobs, which is a chinese proverb, which goes, the journey is the reward. Doing the actual journey is what you get all the value out of. It's not what you get to at the end. Would you say that's equivalent?
Molson Hart: I think that there's a better quote for that, actually. And it's cool because we can tie it back to what we were saying before. There's because it's from another american president. So I believe Eisenhower said that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
David Kopec: So what are some things in the book that you're going to be able to apply immediately at work or that you already have applied at work or you see yourself applying in the future?
Molson Hart: For me, what I'd like to do. So previously, when I was doing one on one meetings, which I try to do regularly, and when I definitely do, every time I'm in the same place as one of my employees, I'm going to have them prepare the agenda going into the meeting. Grove made a pretty good point that, like, if you're managing eight people, it's pretty hard to regularly, as a manager, provide each of those eight people with an agenda for your meeting because you just don't have enough time. So you can kind of like outsource that task. And outsource is probably the wrong word. You can give them that task and so they can come to you and be like, this is the agenda for the meeting. And they'll probably think of a bunch of things that you wouldn't have thought of anyway. And then you can look at that and be like, well, they're clearly missing this one thing, and then you can add it to the agenda. So that's something that I'm going to implement immediately.
David Short: I've done that even beforehand, maybe because I read this book a long time ago and it was just in the back of my head. But I've always referred to one on ones as your meeting. When I'm talking to the employee that I'm setting that up with, that this is your opportunity to talk about whatever it is that you want to. Sure, we are going to do, you know, process and task focused updates, but if you're having difficulty with, you know, someone in a different department or you're frankly just interested in learning something completely unrelated to your current role, those kinds of things are certainly things that can come up in it. So yeah, the one on one advice was definitely very helpful. The other thing I really liked and that I probably haven't done before was really reflecting on meetings beforehand. So one thing I'm definitely going to leverage more is being thoughtful about meetings. So I have the quote here, but he said, before calling a meeting, ask yourself, what am I trying to accomplish? Then ask, is a meeting necessary or desirable or justifiable? Don't call a meeting if all the answers aren't yes. And basically the other thing he talks about a lot is that meetings are expensive. Just think about how much each person is getting paid, how much time they're spending here. And it, you know, if you have ten people in a room, it could easily be thousands or tens of thousands of dollars that are being, you know, either very effectively spent or wasted. And then the other quote he had is get it called off early at a low value added stage if a meeting makes no sense and find a less costly way, a one on one meeting, a telephone call, a note to pursue the matter. So those are things that I just find my schedule to be kind of overwhelmed with meetings right now. So I'm definitely going to try and reflect there. And not just on the. I think I'm okay at not scheduling unnecessary meetings, but actually at the beginning of the day, reflecting on my schedule and saying, what value am I going to add to this? And just asking the. Whatever he calls it, chairman of the meeting, whether or not they really need me there, because I don't think I'm going to be a value add.
David Kopec: Okay. Is there anything else in the book that we miss that you really want to highlight for our listeners?
Molson Hart: Let me add another thing that I'm going to do after reading this book. I'm going to set a calendar event to read this book every year because I think there's so much wisdom in this book that it's enormously difficult to implement it all in one shot. I mean, this is the second time I read this book, and the first time I read this book, you know, maybe I probably only took, like, ten to 15% of the wisdom that's in there and applied it. So I don't know. We all agree that this is one of the best books that we've ever read as part of this book club, and there's so much good stuff in there that I really need to meditate on it, implement it, and really just apply it to my own life every year until I really get it down.
David Short: I really like that. I don't know if I'll do it every single year, but I definitely do plan on reflecting on it a lot. I felt like I was actually highlighting the whole thing as I was reading it. So to some extent, having this discussion that I knew we were going to have, I think led me to be a little bit more careful and then following up and putting notes somewhere else and kind of synthesizing down to what I thought was the most valuable. But, yeah, absolutely. It's the best business book I think I've ever read, and I certainly recommend it to others. That being said, there were a few things that I did disagree with. Like he said, you should implement family one on ones. And I don't know that just. I had a really, like, visceral negative reaction to the idea of trying to schedule a one on one with, you know, I mean, I don't. I don't have an immediate family, I guess, directly aside from. From my parents, but, you know, would I want my girlfriend and I to have a weekly touch base? I mean, we certainly meet much more frequently than that. Or at least talk much more frequently than that. I don't know that we need to structure things in that way.
David Kopec: I actually disagree with that a little bit. So I've done that with my wife, and maybe I was actually partially inspired by this book. And it is really helpful because it's a time that, you know, you're allocating to talk through whatever problems you're having right now, not even necessarily between the two of you, just fixing something in the house, trying to schedule something for the next week, for when you both have a conflicting work schedule, something like that, to make sure you have that time where it's not like time that we're just doing something pleasant together, going, you know, to dinner, something like that, but it's actually time to solve problems. I think that is helpful.
Molson Hart: Do you need to schedule it or can it just happen naturally when it comes to the family one on one?
David Kopec: I think it depends how busy you are now. Right now, obviously, it's just the two of us and our dog, but in the future, if we had, like, three kids or something, I could definitely see it being helpful to make sure you have that time every week to sit down and solve problems.
David Short: Yeah. And maybe that is the answer, is it's like, how hectic and how much complexity is there in the life that you're living together. If Nikki and I don't live together right now, so a lot of those sort of tactical things don't necessarily. We don't need each other to resolve. We kind of solve them for ourselves. And as you have a larger family, there probably are more of those things that are less pleasant to handle, that having some scheduled time around might help. So maybe it's just a stage of life issue for me as to whether or not it would actually be relevant right now.
David Kopec: Yeah, I think maybe the lesson is ad hoc meetings don't scale. Once you get to a certain size, there has to be planned meetings. And I think that's what I was getting back to about maybe our department the last year, is that not having a regularly scheduled meeting when you have seven to 16 faculty members, depending on if you count the people who just teach in the department but aren't part of it becomes problematic when you just have two or three faculty members and your offices are all next to each other. Sure, but I only ad hoc meaning scale, I think.
Molson Hart: Okay, so there are kind of three options here, as I understand it, for these big meetings, and you guys probably know better than I do, because I'm just a small company guy. Ad hoc meetings, regularly scheduled meetings, and then having the departmental manager just schedule a meeting whenever he thinks it's necessary. And to me, the third option is really the right way to do it. What do you guys think?
David Short: Isn't that what an ad hoc meeting is? What has.
David Kopec: Yeah, I was about to say the same question.
David Short: A third.
Molson Hart: Well, to me, I think I interpreted an ad hoc meeting as like meetings that just happen randomly. Like you're walking through the hallway and you're just like, hey, you guys want to talk about it? And then it's like the individual members of the department as opposed to the person who oversees it deciding when to do a meeting. So to me it's different. Maybe I don't know the meaning of ad hoc.
David Short: Got it. Yeah. I think that's more of just like a conversation rather than when I think of a meeting. I do think of something that was scheduled, I guess is the distinction that we were making. I think that ultimately larger organizations, it does make sense, but you should be careful about it, because as there are many layers you can end up in. Just like, I don't know, I have literally five different all hands meetings each month with different organizations that I report into or relate to in some level. So that's 5 hours a month that I'm spending on a like hundred person plus meeting where oftentimes it's very not relevant to actually what I'm doing. And so I am pretty mindful with those types of things, of just looking at the agenda. Is there something that actually either. There could be something that's not relevant to me that I just find very interesting? Oh, you know, data science did some new model on something that doesn't actually matter to me, but I would just be interested to learn more about it. And then, or we're actually talking about some project that I'm either directly responsible for or have some small role in, in which case I'll make sure to prioritize them. I think it to Kopec's perspective, I think you're right that you do need to. Once you get beyond probably it is, I don't know, seven or eight people, some kind of regular touch base. Maybe it's monthly. It doesn't necessarily need to be weekly or whatever. And being mindful about everyone's time is certainly important. But it does make sense to have something on the calendar because things fall through the cracks otherwise.
David Kopec: Okay, so how can listeners get in touch with each of you? And is there anything that you want to give a shout out to? Any plugs you want to make?
Molson Hart: You can get in touch with me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is my first name, Molson, like the beer. M o l s o n hart. H a r t, which is my last name. And I guess I'll just shout out the companies I manage or run. Viheart.com. we sell toys, edisonlf.com and then more recently, oilstub.com. you can just check out the things we do, maybe find interesting, and you.
David Short: Can reach me on Twitter as well. Avidg short I'm not going to pitch other things, but I will check out your oil company, Molson. I'm excited to find out about it.
David Kopec: And you can reach me at davekopeck. D a v e k o p e c thanks so much for listening and we'll see you next time. Join the book club. Next month our book will be my life and the principles for success by the late, great Ross Perot. Links to the book are in the show notes. See you next time.