The Little Book of Big Scale by John Hittler

Author:John Hittler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houndstooth Press
Published: 2022-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

You could add your own ideas on how such a simple directive creates systems that assist in achieving a commercial outcome.

Do other cultural values exist for Matt and his team? Of course, and they follow as natural corollaries to this one core directive, because no team member anywhere loves endless hours in meetings.

Remember, the whole purpose of having only one core value directive is to build and nurture a culture that accomplishes the commercial objective of your company. Vetting ideas from the position of “yes, accepted” optimizes the process of decision-making, eliminates and significantly reduces the hours spent in meetings, and limits discussions on topics not yet sold. It represents a counterintuitive approach that positively affects the energy of the teams, rewards ingenuity, and creates a natural idea meritocracy.

All of this nurtured by an effective single core directive!

Now meet Doug Thede, the CEO of Lytho, a company that helps brand creative teams and optimize their creative operations.

Doug deployed the “one core directive” idea, when he took over as CEO in April of 2020. When hired, Doug knew the organization needed a cultural reset—a boost, if you will. The culture he inherited seemed much too passive. He heard this a lot when assessing team members: “___________ is a really good person.” In Doug’s listening, that translated to: “She’s not very effective at her role, but we should keep her because she’s a decent human being and she has worked here for a while.”

That “really good person” characterization repeated itself time and time again and felt like a road to slow growth. The possibility for scaling was simply missing in such a culture. His proposed replacement: “Let people run!”

That’s it.

Consider your own experience if you now worked for Doug. If you had worked in the organization for a while, might you start to run? Might you at least check your pace? If you were already running, would you run faster? Who would enjoy the pace now, since walking (or crawling, perhaps) was just too slow? Who might opt out and move on? The directive has both effects on people.

As Doug put it, “We started hiring people who wanted to run rather than walk. We started asking teams for more ambition, more speed, more impact. Some loved the shift. Others struggled, which seemed like the perfect confirmation that we were on the right track. After all, if we could walk and achieve our highest results, then we would not need to let people run.”

How about prospective new hires? Would the hiring process emphasize and attract those who wanted to run and repel those who did not? Ideally, it would do both, and to everyone’s satisfaction.

Now multiply the effects on teams. As Doug stated, “Does your individual contribution allow everyone around you to run, or are you the proverbial roadblock or pothole slowing things down? Managers and leaders started considering their ability to speed up the pace as one criteria for their effectiveness.”

Single core directives affect every aspect of a company, most notably, hiring and onboarding new talent.

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