Tag: extreme ownership

What are your patterns?

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My grandmother used to say call a spade a spade a lot. And she did. By the time I knew her, she was not afraid to speak her mind. She probably always was that way, only getting ornery as she got older.

One of our themes around here is to talk about the thing we want to talk about. Like Wharton professor Cade Massey interjects in his podcast, “let’s be precise“.

Another one of our themes is to think of things conditionally. Is something good or bad? It depends. Weaknesses are strengths and strengths are weaknesses (WAS A SAW).

Those ideas meet in Andrew Huberman’s podcast with Kelly Starrett, who (speaking about the human body) said:

“And I wouldn’t even say that weakness isn’t even the right idea. Just like here is a pattern that I’m not as effective at, as efficient at. So when we go into the gym sort of with this great curiosity, then it’s a really rich place and a really, frankly, the only safe place because there isn’t contact and sport and we’re not fighting and dancing and moving and we can really do this controlled formal movement where we can really see inputs and outputs.”

He’s talking about physical training but what a great idea!

  • It’s not that I lose my temper, but my impatience is a pattern that I’m not as effective at.
  • It’s not that I’m bad at math, but it’s a pattern that I’m not as effective at.
  • It’s not that my relationships at work are bad, but it’s a pattern that I’m not as effective at.

This framing also applies some ownership (another form of being precise). To take things back to Starrett’s conversation: our tight hamstrings are not a genetic pattern but something we can control.

For a science podcast, this episode (implicitly) covers a lot of spiritual ground as well as systems theory.

Freezer doors

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There’s something mentally stabilizing, even encouraging, to know what’s going to happen.

Not precisely. Not like a crystal ball. Just generally, like a heads up.

At a parent meeting, my daughter’s volleyball coach said, the season is long and the work is hard, at some point your kid will want to quit, don’t let them.

That was good. It prepared the parents.

We don’t always get this information

Sometimes we get the “Instagram” life. That’s unhelpful.

…

In 1987, Ben & Jerry’s had their best summer ever: a year-over-year sales increase of 60% to 32 million dollars.

Financially things were good.

Functionally things were a mess.

At their brand-new plant, the freezer doors didn’t have “tolerance”. The sliding doors were only just large enough for a forklift to perfectly pass through. Sometimes it didn’t. The result was that after enough banging on the freezer frame, the staff left the doors open and relied on the plastic strips to insulate the ice cream as best it could.

“The term freezer door,” wrote CEO Fred Lager, “became a metaphor within the company for anything that wasn’t working and was being ignored despite a painfully obvious need for attention.”

Human resources, processes, and candy chutes were all freezer doors.

They had to address these growing pains.

At an all-hands meeting after the busy summer season wound down, Ben Cohen gathered everyone and gave a state of the company. To address the freezer doors he asked everyone to form groups and create a list.

There were a lot of complaints, but Ben took them all in stride. “It’s only an indictment of management if you think that a well-managed organization doesn’t have problems,” Fred recalled Ben’s comments, “This was just telling us what we had to work on and letting the employees know that we knew about it.”

It was a heads-up.

…

These wrap-ups that lead to heads-ups are post-mortem reviews. At the Rewired Group, they are a mandatory part of the process. But they don’t just successfully happen.

Our egos can get in the way. Post-mortems are NOT to assign blame. Howard Marks called this book, “a very interesting book on self-justification” – aka somebody f’d up and it wasn’t me.

What works better is a culture of extreme ownership. This starts at the top. Ben Cohen wasn’t a perfect leader. No one is. In Lager’s book, he comes off as demanding and not fully aligned with the rest of the ice cream crew. But what he does do is avoid the ego trappings of the top position.

“Eighty-five percent of all problems,” wrote Deming, “are system problems not people problems.”

Be wary of the ego. Address the system. Fix the freezer door.