Day 1 CEO
You just hired a new CEO for one of your companies. Congrats.
On Day 1, they start doing what most CEOs would do:
- Meet and greet the team
- Get access and permissions to tools
- Start coming up with a big-picture plan or vision to present to the team
You pull them aside and tell them about a different way you learned from Nat Friedman.
Nat was named CEO of GitHub, and what he did on Day 1 was amazing.
At 8 am, everyone in the company got on a call. Instead of sharing the vision and multi-year plan, Nat screen-shared and displayed a giant list of 100+ issues and complaints from customers.
He said, “Today, we’re going to find one item on here and fix it.”
“And tomorrow, we’re going to pick another one and fix that.”
“And the next day… And the next… Until we’ve nailed 20+ of these.”
This did three big things:
- Shock Therapy: The team used to think in quarters and years. Suddenly, the timeline shrinks to “ship something today.”
- Taught Him the Business, Bottoms Up: Where are the problems? Where’s the tech debt? Which teams are good at getting things done?
- Action Speaks Louder: Customers were worried when Microsoft bought GitHub. Will they ruin it? Should we leave? But immediately seeing the product improve built faith that things will be OK.
You call this the ‘Broken Shelf Approach.’
Every home has broken shelves. The people living in the house have learned to ignore them and just live with them.
If you want to make an impression when you move in, find the broken shelves and fix them first.
Hugs through cyberspace!
Stay woke, my reader folk.
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