Category Archives: culture

Mar 22

ES569: People and Culture featuring Serial Entrepreneur Josh Pokempner

Posted on by

Tuesday night’s class focused on People & Culture, the most important part of any organization (in my opinion).  Our guest speaker was Josh Pokempner, serial entrepreneur & founder of several successful companies.  Below are some of my raw notes for that night’s discussion with Josh:

  • Business is trying to control circumstances so intended results happen.  my response:  life is trying to control circumstances to intended results happen.
  • we can’t control how well a product does, but we can control our corporate culture.
  • how to create that great culture?
    • servant leadership
      • rich person = someone so in love with what they do, so much they can’t wait to get out of bed to do it. can’t wait for alarm to go off so you can get out of bed. my response: what is it that i can’t wait for? what is it that makes me wish my alarm will go off?!
    • create & practice a shared mission, vision & values
    • “5 ways of being”
  • book recommendation: “Man’s Search for Meaning” – achieve happiness by dedicating yourself to someone or something.
  • “there’s a soul to a company” – JP
  • “In this business you have to be comfortable with bumpy flights” – JP on the life of an entrepreneur

After Josh shared his stories & wisdom, students asked some thought provoking questions.  Some that were especially thought provoking for me include:

  • How do you balance sharing information with your company & sharing information that scares people? (for instance, the company is low on cash, & you don’t want to scare people into thinking they’ll be cut)
    • Josh recommended “Just tell them”
    • In my own experiences an open book culture is a powerful way to get the team to take ownership & better know how they can impact the success of the business.  People cannot act in the best interests of the company when they don’t know what those interests are.  Being honest & open beats little to no transparency.  Be authentic. Don’t unpleasantly surprise your team & they won’t unpleasantly surprise you
  • For companies early on, low on resources, how do you build a fun team environment?
    • My thoughts: So you don’t have cash to take your entire team to Cedar Point, how do you still incorporate fun team activities (if that’s part of your culture)…do it within your means.  You don’t have to spend a ton of money (or any at all) to build culture through activities.  Going to a park & playing frisbee will cost you the price of the frisbee.  At Iorio’s we do team bonding activities when times are flush & when times are less cash rich.  It doesn’t matter.  Be creative & find a way to make it work.
  • How did you find the people you hired?
    • Josh brought in people he had worked with before.
    • If you don’t have that luxury & you’re starting for the first time, or you need to hire more people than you have previous colleagues, remember this – building your culture starts with your job posting & application.  What do I mean by this?  The language of your job posting & application sets a tone.  If you are a fun & creative company, make your job description & application fun & creative.  This is the best way to attract talent aligned with your culture & give you a great pool of candidates to hire from.

After Josh finished speaking, the discussion about culture & people continued.  A few nuggets of wisdom to share:

  • “Culture is based on 99% of what the CEO does & 1% on what he says” – Fry
  • “Culture is the single most important factor in recruiting & retaining key employees” – Fry
  • “Employee behavior consistent with the culture should be recognized” – Fry
  • CEO plans culture, lives it, reinforces it, manages it, tracks & measures it, modifies as needed
  • “Personnel selection is decisive. People are our most valuable capital” – Joseph Stalin
  • “as leadership changes, the effectiveness of people may also change”

And some questions that were asked:

  • Should vision statement be about 1 product (if company only has 1 product) or something bigger?
    • Tony thinks it should be bigger
    • I think a vision is big.  Your core vision for your company is that north star…what are you reaching for.  For instance, Disney’s vision is to “make people happy”.  At Iorio’s our vision is to “deliver sweetness”.  These visions are big & broad.  I have found it helpful to also write “vision statements” that may reflect more tangible, shorter & longer term visions for specific aspects of the company.  A vision statement that is written out could be short term focused & looking out at 1 year from now & that may only include 1 product.  I recommend writing vision statements when launching a new product, taking on a new initiative, starting a new company etc…answer questions like “what does this product/company look like?” “how do our customers respond?” “what are the challenges we are overcoming?”  paint a picture of the future.  Put yourself in the future.  A vision statement should be written as if you are in the future.  For more visioning tips I recommend reading some of Ari Weinzweig’s tips on visioning. I, and many others, have learned from him.
  • What do you think comes first, the culture or the people?
    • Tom mentioned that half the people he meets that start companies don’t think about the culture, even if, as an investor, he hints at its importance.
    • I think culture is an iterative process, especially early on.  Like product iteration.  Create culture consciously. Bring on people that align with that culture, learn from them & team dynamics, iterate culture consciously, bring on more people. Rinse & repeat.

Bottom line: Create culture consciously & continually.  All this talk about culture in class has me enthused about learning more & sharing more about what I’ve learned about culture.  What questions do you have?  What would you like to learn about culture & people?

Venture on,

MEL aka Venture Gal

Mar 15

Growing Companies – Culture & Leadership Featuring Serial Entrepreneur Jennifer Baird

Posted on by

This week our class hosted our first guest speaker for the semester.  Jen Baird, serial entrepreneur, currently CEO of Accio Energy & former founder & CEO of Accuri Cytometers.

Jen got her interest in being an entrepreneur when interning for a VC firm.  After graduating from the University of Michigan with a psychology degree & from Kellogg School of Management with her MBA, she worked in consulting for over half a dozen years.  After consulting she took the leap into carving her own path, a route that was quite challenging for her.  When she co-founded Accuri Cytometers she was at the start of a 5 year journey creating, launching & scaling a product & team.  She grew the company from 2 to 80 employees, raised close to $30M in capital, launched a European subsidiary, & approached profitability.  Jen claims to really excel at is the people part of the organization (which I would argue is the most important part!).  She claims “companies are built of people.  They are the building blocks”.  This makes sense given her psychology degree & operational experience building & leading teams.  She clearly has learned a lot from her experiences.

What really stood out to me about Jen is that she knows herself well, exudes passion, is very personable, & is quite confident.  In particular, this is what I learned from listening to Jen & reflecting on her discussion:

“Power of focus is what you choose NOT to do”

On any given day my to do list could be pages long, but really do I need to be doing all those things?  Where is my time best spent?  I have been attuned to this lately & the way Jen described “choosing NOT to do something” caught my attention as a different way of thinking about prioritization.  Another piece of advice she had was to check in every 6 months to see what else can be delegated or eliminated.  Otherwise I become a restraint (similar to how I felt at Iorio’s – stifling our growth).

There are aspects of us that are similar.

Jen’s open style of management mirrors my open book philosophy & values based management style.  A few things we both advocate: all hands meetings, open door policy, building trust & communication.  She also mentioned that she likes to share details & has learned that sometimes it’s better to not share too much.  Something I’m working on also.

I still have questions I’d like to ask Jen, & I will ask her:

  • How do you decide which business opportunities to pursue?  Why Accuri?
  • Challenges you faced as female? How did you overcome them?
  • Where do you learn? (books, people, etc)

Following Jen’s talk Tom discussed management styles.  The key thing I took away after this lecture is that knowing who you are you are is a continual process/discovery that never ends.  In particular he asked: Who are you?  What is your impact on people?  What are your values?  What does success look like for you?  We need to figure out who we are.  It is hard enough to be ourselves, let alone someone else.  If we don’t know who we are it’s difficult to hire people around us to make us better.  Tom recommended developing a vision for yourself.  Know what you’re good at & what you’re not good at.  How best to do this?  I’m still figuring that out.  I do know that spending time with myself, in silence, thinking & reflecting has helped me.

He also emphasized the importance of trust.  To earn the trust of others (e.g. board of directors, customers, employees) you must first trust yourself.  If you don’t trust yourself, it will show, & others won’t trust you.  A great book I read that goes into detail about trust is “The Speed of Trust” by Stephen M.R. Covey.

We also questioned “what is the role of the CEO?”  50-75% of the time she/he is working with people. From time to time GreatLakesVC shares his Weisdom with me & he once told me that the job of a CEO is to make everyone else better at what they do.  To achieve the most in a resource constrained organization, the CEO should be controlling about the company vision & values because every employee should know the story of the company & exactly what the company is trying to accomplish.  The danger of being controlling is slowing down progress & not empowering people to the fullest.  The more someone wants control, the more things need to go through that person, & it slows things down (exhibit ME/Iorio’s).  It is really important to get the message right for the first people you hire & make the culture & values clear.  This way, when you stop hiring people, the people who are hiring people get the message right & hire based on the culture & values of the company.  Recently at Iorio’s we saw a great example of congruency without our organization.  One of our team members created a series of “Iorio’s Ten Commandments” to be a way to share the ground rules & operations of the business.  The result – a set of guidelines that scream Iorio’s culture as we created it.  The fact that we didn’t write them…& that they are so spot on to our culture & values is a huge testament to our ability to create congruency in our business.

Eccellente!

Venture on,

MEL aka Venture Gal

Mar 06

Learning about happiness from the CEO of Zappos

Posted on by
Image representing Zappos as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

Learning about Happiness from the CEO of Zappos

I recently finished the book, Delivering Happiness, by Tony Hsieh, the founder and CEO of Zappos.  My interest in reading this book came from some of the anecdotes I heard about Zappos’ company culture, others’ recommendation of the book, and the success of Zappos (Amazon acquired Zappos for more than one billion dollars).

From my various work experiences I’ve learned that a fun place to work is more satisfying and does trickle down into the financial bottom line.  Working at Zingerman’s, a place that focuses on three bottom lines (food quality, service quality, financial results) really opened my eyes to how a company can be great for people and great for growth and financial return.

There are a few key things that I took away from Delivering Happiness, and summarized below:

1. People Matter. Employees and customers alike are REALLY important.  Zappos attributes much of its success to its investment into customer service, culture, and employee training and development – all of which focus on people.

2. Continuously Improve. Zappos asks employees to make at least one improvement every week that makes the company better reflect its core values. Not only does Zappos encourage continuous improvement within the company, but also encourages employees to improve themselves – recommending they wake up every day and ask themselves not only “what is the 1% improvement I can change to make the company better”, but also “what is the 1% improvement I can change to make MYSELF better personally & professionally.”  A company is only as strong as its team, and a company cannot grow unless the individuals grow as well.

3. Never Outsource your Core Competency. Zappos’ core competency is its customer service, so if the company had call centers run its customer service they do not control that experience and are not delivering their core competency.  You want to deliver your core competency…it’s key to your company and your position in the market.

It was challenging to narrow down my key takeaways to only three, so I also jotted down all of my notes, which you can check out here.

Have you read Delivering Happiness? What did you learn?

Venture on,

Mary AKA Venture Gal

Enhanced by Zemanta

Oct 11

There is No “I” in Team

Posted on by

This may be another sports analogy, but not entirely. In sports, “There is no ‘I’ in team” is a common statement from coaches, captains, and parents (though not always practiced). In reality, it’s true in sports and in entrepreneurship.

In sports, a team that depends heavily on one player is unlikely to reach sustainable success. This past weekend, the University of Michigan versus Michigan State University football game illustrates this point. Even though a team that depends on one person may experience a few victories early on, as the team faces more challenging competitors it will be difficult to continue a winning streak.

With entrepreneurship, a one person team may work out for awhile, early on, but as the company needs more resources and the one person finds her/himself strapped for time (and sleep!) the company is not likely to succeed without building the team.

This all being said, there are always exceptions to the rule. For the most part though, there is no “I” in team, but there is ‘us’ in success!

MEL aka Venture Gal