The Trump Card by Ivanka Trump

Author:Ivanka Trump
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2009-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

BULLETINS FROM MY BLACKBERRY

CHRIS DEWOLFE— Co-founder, co-creator, and former CEO, MySpace

ON TEAMWORK AND INNOVATION

One of the keys to success is to work with people who complement your strengths and weaknesses, and one another’s. It doesn’t matter if it’s a for-profit business, a nonprofit, or any other endeavor, this applies across the board. You want to make sure your core values are shared around the table. If your team is working in different directions, analysis, paralysis or infighting can overshadow productivity.

At MySpace, we experienced some early turnover because not everyone shared the same core values or the mission of what we were trying to accomplish. It’s easy to talk about values, but they become real only when they’re written down and everyone on the team internalizes them. So that’s what we did, and these were the qualities and values we wanted everyone on our team to share:

1. Competitive; passionate about the product or mission

2. Exceptionally smart, creative thinkers

3. Nonbureaucratic, nonpolitical—just results-oriented

4. Open-minded and collaborative

5. Big thinkers striving to make a big impact

6. Aggressive movers with the ability to change direction when things aren’t working

7. Unwilling to accept mediocrity

8. Deeply curious with a desire to evolve and challenge tradition

Now, these eight attributes might not be right for every company, but identifying them in this specific way and socializing them throughout our organization led to a collaborative, fast-moving atmosphere and allowed us to keep our focus where it needed to be—on providing a better product or service. It allowed us to create an environment for taking risks, and it’s been my experience that all successful inventions or projects are a result of taking risks somewhere along the line. Of course, any risky decision needs to be carefully considered and have buy-in from the team. You need to make sure you’re all headed in the right direction when you reach that inevitable fork in the road where one decision can drastically change the course of your effort. It’s crucial that you foster an environment that includes everyone in the ideation process and doesn’t punish an individual for an idea or strategy that fails. The person who generated the idea should be rewarded for creative thinking—never punished. Taking it a step further, he or she should be congratulated publicly by all team members. Send out an e-mail to the whole company, giving kudos to the individual who championed the idea. Even if things don’t quite work out the way you envisioned. This reinforces the value of taking measured risks—which at the end of the day leads to innovation and growth.

In the early years, we began expanding into other countries with the goal of adding “a few countries” a year. After eighteen months, we had sites in thirteen different countries. International users now account for 45 percent of users who visit MySpace. It’s one of the fastest-growing divisions of our organization. Yet if the international team hadn’t aggressively lobbied for this investment, MySpace would have missed the boat outside the United States.

Listen to your core customer, not supposed experts.

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