Communication, communication, communication (worth repeating).
Thereâs a hunger for people to connect to the mission and vision, culture and values.
âRepeat them over and over and over. When youâre sick of hearing
yourself say them, thatâs when theyâre beginning to hear you.â
-Jeff Weiner, CEO LinkedIn.
Jeff, along with every one of our speakers, was stressing the importance of communication. It came up over and over across the three days: once the visionâââthe âwhere are we heading?ââââhas been honed, itâs about aligning the team ruthlessly against that goal. How? Repeated, clear, motivating communication. Repeated and repeated again.
Thereâs the apocryphal story of JFK asking the janitor at NASA for his job description and receiving the reply, âIâm here to help put a man on the moonâ. Last week we were hearing from the people whoâd made such a single-minded vision a reality in the companies theyâd influenced. Dave de Walt gave us his version from his time as CEO of Documentum . The company supplied cutting-edge document management systems to the pharma industry, but Dave framed it that they were doing nothing less than helping cure cancer. The rationale stacked up: better document management; faster process; better, faster research; a quicker route to finding the cure. His company loved it.
The theme continued as Steve Lucas of Marketo named the âdeep intrinsic kernel of what mattersâ that any good CEO should be personifying and communicating from dawn âtil dusk. Joni Reicher, formerly Steve Jobsâ Director of Human Resources, put it in terms of a âcontinuous articulationâ. When asked what the company is here to do, any single employee should give the same answer, without hesitation.
Jeff Miller, as CEO of Documentum (Jeff hired Dave de Walt to succeed him), grew the company from a staff of 15 with $500k of sales in 1993, to a listed company of 1,200 with revenues of $200m in 2001. On the subject of communication, he put it bluntly: âDo not underestimate the number of times your people need to hear the same message -and it needs to come from you!â. Our own John Hamm, Octopus venture partner, put it even more viscerally: âRepeat it âtil your tongue bleedsâ.
Your Customers
Tom Reilly of Cloudera (which just recently merged with Hortonworks to create a $5.2bn companyâââvirtually as Tom was speaking to us) turned the focus to the customer. âItâs not exactly what your product doesâââitâs how you communicate the value of it.â Others had cited this too: the ability to tell a story, or âevangeliseâ to your customer. Steve Lucas outlined the narrative his former sales team at Salesforce had used. It started, âI have a secret, and this secret will have a profound impact on your cash collection and cash flow. Do you want to know what it is?â This played into the realm of Customer Success, shifting from a product-centric to a customer-centric worldview, which weâll cover in subsequent posts , but it served to nail the communication mantra firmly to the customer relationship.
âCommunicate a lot. Tell the ugly and what youâre going to do about it.â
-Barry Eggers, Lightspeed
Your Investors
Barry Eggers of Lightspeed Ventures, expanded the message out to the importance of communication with investors. âGood things and bad things happen. But if you donât tell me the bad things how can I help?â. Barry pushed the point: âCommunicate a lot. Tell the ugly and what youâre going to do about it. Transparency, trust and respect is the most important thing. I pick CEOs based on that.â
Your Board
Finally, Tom Reilly covered all bases by touching on communication with the Board. Tom has established a âbuddyâ system at Cloudera, where every Non-Executive Board member communicates directly with a member of the Executive team, based on their respective expertise. This creates a two way system, where responsibility is shared across the Board. It also ensures that Tom as CEO isnât the focus point of all communication.
Your Vision
An overarching point, made by Steve Lucas, highlighted the importance of a founder CEOâs vision, even over the product itself. âYour vision must transcend where your product is nowâ, Steve said. Companies that grow with the speed and durability of our guest speakersâ (the combined shareholder value created by our line-up is in the region of $200bn) have done so by looking beyond the product and the company as it is today. What they see on the horizon is what needs to be communicated, constantly, to their employees, their customers, their investors and their board.
Identifying then communicating the vision until itâs embedded in the DNA of every company member takes a special kind of leaderâââa subject our speakers also had plenty to say aboutâââand weâll be covering âLeadershipâ among other themes in the forth-coming series.
âThis was, I can say without exaggeration, the most intellectually stimulating, relevant, actionable and generally inspiring three days Iâve spent on learning about anything to do with making a business.â
-Ed Cooke, Memrise