Introduction:
This is an article I really like, so I want to say a few more words about it.
When doing “Intoxicated Entrepreneurship,” I often ponder what kind of articles can be called “Chicken Soup”. Although this term has become increasingly common in public discourse, and we all seem to be consciously wary of it, very few people can truly articulate what “Chicken Soup” really is.
Clearly, if you cannot define something, then you do not truly understand it.
In my view, “Chicken Soup” has two core characteristics. First, it often overlooks the complex interconnections between things, bluntly asserting a causal relationship between A and B, which in psychology is termed the “fundamental attribution error.” The underlying implication is that “if you do A, you will definitely achieve B”—a common example is: just work hard and you will definitely succeed. Even worse are the lower-tier purveyors of Chicken Soup, who lack even basic operational methods. There is an interesting metaphor on Zhihu that refers to this situation as: “Only providing soup, without a spoon.” Ultimately, what is being sold is “false hope.”
The second characteristic of “Chicken Soup,” in my opinion, is even more insidious. It is its “falsifiability”. Of course, not all Chicken Soup has this trait—”If you dress up well, you can marry into a wealthy family” has many counterexamples… but some claims are more subtly hidden, such as this one:
“In the world of martial arts, speed is invincible.”
For a long time, this phrase has been used in countless articles in the internet industry. “Speed” seems to have become an unassailable truth. Everyone tends to use this quality to summarize those successful companies. Look, Momo went public in four years; Ele.me’s business increased a hundredfold in two or three years; Lei Jun once said everywhere “Focus, Extremity, Reputation, Speed”; and Didi Chuxing rapidly swept everything away…
Of course, I am not saying that “speed” is wrong. In fact, it is one of the qualities I admire the most. Every day I think about how to make my company faster. But without discussing whether “speed” and “success” really have a causal relationship, who can clarify what kind of speed can be called “fast,” or how to achieve that speed?…
Dave Girouard’s article in First Round Review answers this question. The reason I like this article so much is that he clearly provides insights. The article is filled with quotable lines: “A good plan executed immediately is better than a perfect plan executed next week,” “Worrying about what the founders think is a typical cognitive burden,” “It is very important to know whether a decision is irreversible, fatal, or non-fatal. Only a few decisions are truly irreversible”… and my favorite, which I am trying to practice: “When a decision is made is much more important than what decision is made.”
Well, that’s it. Just like we say at the end of each issue, “We will recommend some good articles about entrepreneurship, the kind that are truly good. Here are experiences, facts, and viewpoints, as well as Chicken Soup, methodologies, and operational guidelines.”
Enjoy reading.
Author: Dave Girouard
Translator: Dai Cui
Original link: http://firstround.com/review/speed-as-a-habit/
The author of this article, Dave Girouard, is the CEO of personal finance company Upstart and a former president of Google Enterprise Applications, known for building the Google Enterprise Applications division valued at over $1 billion. In this article, he shares some tips on making speed a fundamental principle of the company.
I have always believed that speed is the ultimate weapon of a business. In all other conditions being equal, the fastest company will always win, and this is true in any market. Looking around, speed is a typical trait that a leader should possess—perhaps sometimes the only trait.
In the tech industry, speed is often seen as an element of product development, which is why Facebook has the slogan “Move fast and break things” and why there is recognition of Minimum Viable Products (MVP) and Agile development. Most people agree that speed is the only way for a product to succeed.
However, what people often do not realize is that speed is also crucial for other parts of the business, not just for products. Google is fast, General Motors is slow, startups are fast, and large companies are slow. Undoubtedly, being fast is good, but very few articles discuss how to cultivate departments and employees to make “speed” a prominent competitive advantage for the company.
I believe speed, like exercising and healthy eating, can become a habit.
By continuously and proactively cultivating these good habits, we as founders, management, and employees can transform ourselves into faster and more efficient builders of companies. Moreover, when enough members of an organization demonstrate these habits and they are reinforced, supplemented, and enhanced, the department itself will also increase its speed.
This is how category killers are born.
Now, let’s break down the components of speed. Upon careful consideration, all business activities can actually be summarized into two simple things: making decisions and executing decisions. Your success depends on your ability to master speed in these two areas.
Making Decisions
A good plan executed immediately is better than a perfect plan executed next week.
This is something General George Patton said, and I completely agree. Do you remember the last time someone said in a meeting, “We must make a decision before we leave the room”? How did that feel?
The time wasted in repetitive decision-making processes in various companies is simply maddening. The most important thing to remember is: When a decision is made is much more important than what that decision actually is.
If you can develop the habit of considering how much time and effort a decision will take, who needs to provide input, and when a conclusion can be reached before making a decision, then you have developed the first habit of increasing speed.
This is not to say that all decisions need to be made in a hurry. Some relatively complex or important decisions may indeed require gathering more information first; some decisions cannot be easily overturned, and some mistakes can have catastrophic consequences. Most importantly, some decisions do not need to be made immediately because they do not affect the “downstream” speed.
Deciding when to make a decision from the outset is a very powerful way to increase the speed of everything.
During my years at Google, Eric Schmidt consistently employed this method for decision-making—he may not have even consciously thought about it. Because the founders, Larry and Sergey, were always very opinionated leaders who participated in every major decision, Eric understood that he could not unilaterally make major decisions. This could have delayed many things, but Eric ensured that every decision was made within a specific timeframe— a very practical and precise time. He developed this habit and allowed Google to change accordingly.
Now at Upstart, we are a much smaller company, but we still make several important decisions every day. We are deeply driven by the belief that making decisions quickly is always better than being slow, and not making a decision is the worst. Every day, every hour, we think about how important each decision is and how much time it deserves. Some decisions deserve several days of discussion and analysis, but the vast majority are worth at most 10 minutes.
It is very important to know whether a decision is irreversible, fatal, or non-fatal. Only a few decisions are truly irreversible.
It is important to note that increasing speed does not require a leader to make all decisions top-down. The art of good decision-making is to gather information and perspectives from the team and then make a final decision, indicating that all viewpoints have been considered. As my career has progressed, I have shifted from directly telling people I have the right answer to controlling and guiding discussions to reach a final conclusion. This should not simply be called reaching a consensus—you do not want consensus to bind you—but the information provided by others can help you make the right decision faster and gain the team’s buy-in.
This does not support impulsive decision-making. Sometimes I can be too “pedal to the metal,” and occasionally my co-founder Anna will say, “This is a significant decision; even though we think we know what to do, let’s think about it for another 24 hours.” Her wisdom has saved us many times.
Knowing when to end the debate and make a decision is an art. When both sides have strong arguments and intense emotions, many leaders are reluctant to make a call. Instinctively, we hope the team will come to the right decision on their own. But I find that when people hear you have taken the baton and are willing to take responsibility for a decision, they often breathe a sigh of relief. You do not need to use “CEO privilege” every day—i.e., making the final decision. In fact, as long as you use it judiciously, you will make employees feel more at ease, and by pulling the trigger, reasonably explaining your choices, and standing firm, you will gain more trust.
In fact, measuring the comfort level of the team is a good way to help you judge whether you are fast enough.
If people feel a bit uncomfortable and stressed, that proves your speed is fast enough. But if you are going too fast, you can also see it on people’s faces, and it is equally important to observe this.
When I was at Google, Larry Page was very adept at pushing for quick decisions to the point where people were always worried that the team would rush off a cliff at any moment. Without crossing the boundary of discomfort, he would push for decisions as much as possible. He instinctively asked, “Why not? Why can’t we be a little faster?” and then observed whether people would scream. He really united everyone around the concept that “unless it is a matter of life and death, a quick decision is always better.”
Executing Decisions
Many people spend a lot of time optimizing their productivity systems and to-do lists. However, executing a plan as quickly as possible within a team or organization is a completely different concept. What follows is how I learned to execute forcefully.
Questioning Execution Time
The number of plans and actions generated in meetings without specified deadlines often shocks me. Even when deadlines are set, they are usually based on unreliable intuition.Completion dates and times often resemble the concept of the sun rising and setting in tribal times, with “tomorrow” often becoming the default answer.
This is not to say that everything must be completed immediately. However, for important matters, questioning completion dates is often very useful; all it takes is to ask the simplest question: “Why can’t this be completed faster?” Asking this skillfully, reliably, and habitually will have a profound impact on your organization’s speed.
This is definitely a strategy that should start with individual employees—preferably those in higher positions who can influence others’ behavior. As a leader, you want to turn “what I want to do” into “what we want to do.” This is how ideas are deeply embedded in people’s minds. I have seen too many people who never ask when something can be delivered, always assuming that it will happen immediately, which is rarely the case. I have also seen creative ideas thrown out because a completion deadline was not locked in time.
You do not have to be too aggressive; just keep telling others that today is better than tomorrow, and doing it now is better than doing it in six hours.
A funny story involves my old friend Sabih Khan, who was in Apple’s operations department while I was a product manager there. In 2008, he was in a meeting with Tim Cook discussing the production chaos in China. Tim said, “This is terrible; we should send someone over.” After thirty minutes, the topic shifted to something else, and suddenly Tim looked at Sabih and said, “Why are you still here?” Sabih immediately left the meeting room, drove to San Francisco airport, and boarded the next flight to China without even changing his clothes. Then, you know, the problem was quickly resolved.
The candle keeps burning. You need to demonstrate leadership to feel and instill that sense of urgency in every discussion.
Identifying and Removing Dependencies
Just as important as setting deadlines is the need to eliminate all dependencies related to an action.This point may be obvious; key projects that determine task success must be handled collectively by the team to accelerate all subsequent activities. Things that can be dealt with later must be sidelined. Ultimately, when your team can complete a life-and-death task by the deadline, they should not be bogged down by non-critical tasks.
This largely means ensuring that people are not waiting for each other to take the next step.Untrained individuals often strangely assume that things are linear—e.g., waiting for X, Y, and Z to complete before you do that thing, and then I will do this. It is not like that; what you need is for people to work in parallel.
Many people think dependencies are simply their own misconceptions.
How do you turn linear dependencies into parallel actions? As a CEO, I intervene at various nodes in the process and aggressively accelerate things. For example, if we need to issue a statement and time is tight, I might take it upon myself to write that blog post. It is not that my team cannot do it; I just know that I am always very picky about content, so it will be faster if I do it myself. As a leader, you have the responsibility to identify these dependencies and non-dependencies and take action based on the importance and deadlines of the matter.
There are probably ten times a day when I will say in meetings, “We do not need to wait for other conditions; we can start doing this right now.” This idea is quite common; people just need to say it out loud more often.
Eliminating Cognitive Load
Do you remember the experience of downloading songs on iTunes? If you wanted to buy an entire album at once, the speed was incredibly frustrating. You had to wait for one song to finish downloading before the others could speed up. Projects can be the same; sometimes a project is so complicated that it feels like downloading six albums simultaneously, and everything else gets stalled.
I lost count of how many meetings we held at Google discussing the Google ID issues between enterprise accounts and regular users. We started a project to solve this problem, but it was so complicated that the first 30 minutes of each meeting was spent reiterating what happened in the last meeting. This cognitive load was simply maddening.
From this, I realized that if you can resolve the major issues in a project early on, the management costs of the remaining parts can decrease by 90%. Always be on the lookout for such opportunities.
Typically, the complexity is often increased by small details in the project. For example, our business at Upstart needs to comply with many regulations, and we could hardly do anything until we confirmed whether we could obtain legal permissions, so discussions about the legality of each matter often consumed a lot of time. Later we thought, why not just let our lawyers determine what we can do and what is problematic? This simple way of looking at issues greatly reduced the cognitive load of each of our decisions.
If you can identify, pinpoint, and resolve the most complex parts of the puzzle, everyone will have an easier time. I often encounter a situation—this is true even at Google—where people are always wondering how the founder or CEO will view each plan—so just ask them; don’t wait until later to find out that it was a waste of effort. Worrying about what the founders think is a typical cognitive burden.
Using Competition Wisely
Talking about competition is a good way to increase urgency. But you have to be careful. As a leader, your role is to judge whether your team is moving at full speed out of anxiety or whether they are not energized enough. Depending on the answer, competition can be a beneficial tool in different ways.
At Upstart, we have always emphasized that when we are working hard on something, our competitors may be working just as hard on things we do not yet know about. So we must remain vigilant. Many people say you should ignore competition, but acknowledging it can motivate you to set your pace in the market.
You can either set the pace of the market or become the one who is chasing. The one who takes the first step always forces everyone else to react.
When we launched Google Apps, we were competing against Microsoft Office, which had a monopolistic dominance. We thought about what we could do differently and better, and our simple pricing mechanism was one of them. Instead of getting bogged down in whether to set it at $45, $50, or $55, we made the decision in under half an hour. We just wanted to tell everyone, “We may not be free, but we will be the simplest decision you make.” This is how we set market standards and promoted them, forcing others to respond.
Getting Others to Support Your Decisions
In the tech field, there is hardly anything that can be accomplished in isolation. Basically, once you make a decision, you need to persuade others that you are right and get them to prioritize your needs over their other tasks.
To influence a decision, you must first realize that you are dealing with other people. Even in obtaining support from a supplier or another company, it ultimately boils down to one person. From this perspective, it is crucial to understand who that person is, what their job is, how their success is measured, what they care about, and all other things they consider important. Then ask yourself, “How can you help them get what they want while solving your problem?”
I have seen this achieved by boosting others’ self-esteem. Perhaps you tell them you have worked with their competitors, who are doing things quickly, so they will also speed up. I have also seen this achieved through personal charm and honesty. You might say, “We are really betting on this, so we really need you to step up.”
No matter which approach you take, you should support your argument with logic. You should patiently understand what is happening. I habitually ask many questions, such as “Can you help me understand why some things take so long? Is there anything we can help with or ways to speed things up?” Always try to understand the core of their actions and the time they are investing in it. If it is helpful, remember to praise them in front of their boss.
I strongly recommend the above methods instead of escalating issues to their manager or using competition to pressure them in a blunt manner; these are completely unhelpful and they are likely to stop helping you.
How can you make others look good? How can solving your problem also become a victory for them within their own company?
All of this ultimately boils down to making things progress as quickly and smoothly as possible. When you feel things are slowing down, you need to keep asking questions. Asking questions is the best weapon to combat inertia.
To keep things running at Upstart, I quickly ask many very difficult questions, most of which are time-related. I know we are executing well and generally doing the right things at the right time, but I often question why some things take so long. Are we working as efficiently as we can?
Too many people think that speed is the enemy of quality. To some extent, they are right—you cannot rush innovation; sometimes genius needs time and freedom to shine. But in my personal experience, this situation is very rare. The trade-off between doing things quickly and doing things well is not easy to balance. Do not let yourself or your organization use this as a shield or excuse to lose momentum. Once you do, you lose your competitive advantage.
Image by: Glenn Jones
—Feeling Like Your Company Is a Sloth
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