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Learnings

You can learn business.  My journey building M5 was all about accumulating knowledge to be a better entrepreneur, manager, and leader.  This blog is to help me keep some of the notes from that trip, and sharpen my thinking for the next one.

Jamming Again!

12/29/2017

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Seeing people rock together for the first time is one of my greatest joys. And in December, we held the first Circles company jam. Yes! So much of what we’re working on now is directly connected to finding that jam spark, that mixture of mischief and camaraderie and amazement at your collective achievement. When was the last time you left a team meeting feeling like that? M5’rs and friends who have experienced this know what I’m talking about. It’s a feeling that has run like a current through my work over the years. Helping groups achieve that is, in short, what we're up to at Circles.

Backstory
More anecdotes and updates from the past couple of years are in the Circles Blog, but here’s the condensed story: I spent my first sabbatical year in Barcelona learning about learning. I read some great books, and talked to authors. I invested and worked with a few startups and nonprofits. In year two, I found my idea right under my nose. In my previous quest to be a better CEO, I had enrolled in courses, worked with coaches, and learned from consultants. But the monthly meetings of my CEO peer group were the most impactful of anything I tried. Why doesn’t everyone in the world learn this way? Would building tools to make it easier to form and run peer groups spread continual, self-directed, learning? Here’s this same story in a comic strip.
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After some self-funded testing, I founded Circles Learning Labs, Inc. in April, 2017. Enormous thanks to the friends and co-believers who invested $2MM in our seed round, and to those who have given their time as advisors. As we hit the early market, one part of the vision proved hard and another got rave reviews. We didn’t have the scale to source and match peers into groups from the open Internet that would stick, so we stopped working on that. But when companies and communities sent us people, it worked. Our nascent video room, with a few basic processes and features inspired by the forum/peer group world, consistently produced deep conversations, continual learning, and circles of people that loved being together. By going to where people already gathered, attendance went from 65% to 95+%. Our business moved from getting everyone into forums to bringing forum practices to everyone.

I think the early job of a startup is to distill an idea to the essence that solves a customer need. In hindsight, chasing that feeling I referenced in the opening paragraph, when people groove together and make music, lay underneath everything we were doing all along. When was the last time you were in a circle of people that felt like that? What if teams felt like that? Learning? This connected my past work on culture, early experiments in learning like Battle of the Bands, my eye-opening Henry Crown Fellowship, and the growth I experienced in EO and YPO forums.

Our startup is making it easy for small groups to become circles that learn, grow and work together. Members of a circle share openly and count on each other. They groove. Too many teams don’t, but they could! The fact that our peers are distributed makes it harder, sure, but it also allows us to inject technology. Circles can take many forms, like a forum of peers, a work team, or a study group. They share an ability to have deep conversations and a high level of trust that leads to breakthroughs. The importance of this work is nicely summed up by this classic Margaret Mead quote, “Never underestimate the power of a few committed people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only way.”​


Call You to Action

“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”
​― R. Buckminster Fuller.

Circles has three offers, which we think about, of course, in concentric circles. Our long-term strategy is to provide technology, at the center. We’re making a tool for learning and growing in circles, not rows.
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The Video Room. In our early testing, we noticed that most video rooms, just like most classrooms, are built for one person to present to many. We built an interface for conversations, not presentations. Then we added features like timers to enforce equal participation, on-screen agendas tied to a progress bar, and music to set mood. Participants report that they’ve never been in a video meeting where everyone was so present, feeling like a team should. They started asking us to use it for recurring meetings. Many early participants are now forming a community of practice, trading agenda ideas and even services as guides. We’ll launch our technology as a stand-alone product soon. For now, you can take a short tour here.

The Workshop. We’ve learned a ton about what makes a small group groove as a circle. Thanks to having lots of professional educators on the team, we designed a four-session workshop for whole teams, leaders and guides. The workshop is led by one of our 30+ certified guides and is done in the Circles Video room. Whether you want to develop your team, improve your meetings or get started with peer learning, the workshop is the best first step. From a business model point of view, we expect it will lead to subscribers and bigger programs. After much beta testing, this will launch on January 15th. Email me for a discount code.

Company and Community Programs. Tetra Pak is a 24,000 employee Swedish company that was concerned that when their annual leadership training program ended, valuable knowledge and social connections would evaporate. Their global leaders have loved meeting in circles to continue helping each other after the program. One participant reportedly had a deep conversation with their CEO that “never would have happened if it weren’t for Circles.” Tata Trust just started building a network of cancer centers in India and hired us to guide their initial team meetings in the video room as they create a culture of interlocking circles. Cleveland Clinic and The Growth Institute did something similar. GAMA is a community of financial services professionals - after a year of testing, we’re launching a major initiative at their annual conference in March to match cross and intra-company peer learning “study groups” across their membership. Like many successful communities, they are looking for ways to balance their growing breadth with more depth and engagement. They are also rebuilding their signature leadership training program on circles. A Circles program involves our expertise, project management, guide force and technology to set up and manage a scaleable number of circles.

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Our Team
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I love loving the people I work with. We’re now a distributed circle of six, plus three developers who work for my dear comrade, Franko, the mastermind behind M5 Network’s core “ELVIS” technology. We’ve been using our own tools consistently on ourselves and are “jamming.”

We’ve got one core value, stated as “Learn and Grow” and when we do gather, bringing this to the fore has helped us jell as a team. The Jam session above was from our most recent in a series of offsites every 2-3 months. The one before that featured Wim Hof’s (see this post about Wim Hof - the inspiration behind our very first Circle test) lead learning designer teaching us all to endure an ice bath. Which is good, because that feeling echoes many days on this start-up roller-coaster.

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My Innermost Circle
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Since it is the end of 2017, and I haven’t posted to this site for three years, and don’t send holiday cards, I’ll include a quick family update. Julie is doing really well after a challenging year, although is pining for the  beauty of Barcelona. She’s done an unbelievable job of slogging through a year-long renovation of our home in Park Slope, Brooklyn. But her creativity is most widely seen outside our house on Halloween (hello washing machine and fortune teller!). Audrey is in love with gymnastics, working out four hours a day and reminding me what working hard at your passion looks like. And Hazel reminds me every day how to be positive and hilarious. Poop!

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Happy 15th Birthday, "The Matrix"

3/27/2014

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15 years ago today, “The Matrix” opened.  I had recently moved to Hong Kong, and to ease the cultural shock, I think I paid to see it in theatre five times.  I love that movie. Thinking about it makes me want to start wearing tight-fitting black latex suits.

I now know that humans actually would not work as batteries. 

Nevermind, the matrix contains three of my favorite ideas.  I know, I know, they aren’t original to The Matrix.  But, they are still great ideas, so I was inspired to write them down in tribute.

• I know kung fu
• There is no spoon
• Beat the machines

What I mean is:


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Is This My Highest Priority?

3/10/2014

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The story became company legend.  Our CTO, let’s call him “Eric,” interrupted band practice to check a developer's status on an important project.  Getting a lukewarm response, Eric shot back, “Is band practice really your highest priority now?”  After he left, the group realized they had found their band name - “Is This My Highest Priority?” They went on to win the first battle of the bands with an electrifying rendition of “Seven Nation Army.”  Inc. magazine published a photo of them practicing above their article on the program.

In my experience, Eric’s skepticism is the norm.

Knowledge acquisition is mostly an afterthought at work.  Managers relegate learning programs to the province of HR, where executives have other priorities, like compliance or making the workplace equitable.  Some companies run, “Welcome to your new job” boot camps, but learning curves are most often viewed as a one-shot climb.  And most staff see themselves as educated - past tense.

How high should learning be on the priority list? 

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The Container Store is Cool

1/13/2014

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“Most businesses take care of their shareholders first.  We strongly believed it was employees first ..." - Barbara Anderson

I recently spoke with Barbara Anderson, one of the first employees and a leader at the The Container Store for over thirty years. This company has been a favorite for a long time, partly because they invest 263 hours for each full-time employee's education. This was my first conversation with a founding exec, and I thought I’d write it up.

Check out the wikipedia overview if you don’t know them. The Container Store, which invented a retail category, opened in 1978 and has grown steadily at 22.4%+ annual compounded growth rate to 63 stores today.  Barbara told one story that underscored their success. After selling to retail-focused PE Leonard Green in 2007, The Container Store was the only portfolio company to stay in the black and not downsize during the Great Recession.  They are a great proof point in the power of investing in people as a competitive advantage.

The conversation underscored a few business design principles I believe in:


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What the Hell is Company Culture?

12/11/2013

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David Foster Wallace, one of my favorite authors, gave a graduation speech called, “This is Water.” Cleaned up and shortened for youtube (worth the 9 minutes), Wallace starts by telling about an older fish greeting two young fish, “Good morning boys, how’s the water?” After he swims off, one young fish says to the other, “What the hell is water?”
I get lots of agreement and nods when I quote Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”  Culture is what every profiled CEO in the NYT’s “Corner Office” talks about.  Culture is what the Admiral I met on the USS Harry Truman waxed on about as the key to his success.  But often, people don’t know what it really means, or how to work on it, even though it is everywhere.

And I didn't either.  Jack Daly once challenged me, “Do you have a culture by default or a culture by design?”  “Um,” I thought, in 2003.

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What I Learned Under Hypnosis

11/21/2013

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In 2005, my wife Julie ranked thumb-chewing (and the resultant callouses) as my #1 most irritating behavior. Awesome.  I like nothing better than to knock tasks off a prioritized list,  but I did not know how to fix this sub-conscious self-cannibalization. Cayenne pepper spray, perhaps?  Later that year,  I randomly met Scott Weiner, PhD and hypnotist, at a networking event.  I took a shot. He was so confident. “No problem," he said. "2-3 sessions, $450 a pop and consider it done.”

It worked.  Completely.

Almost.  Seven years later after I decided to sell and then leave my company, I relapsed.  This summer I called Scott.  “A tune-up?” No problem.  One session.  Consider it done.

It worked again.

Scott and I have talked a little bit about his practice.  He juxtaposes hypnosis to meditation.  Some forms of meditation empty the mind.  Hypnosis, on the other hand, suggests specific instructions.  It is not far from “Inception.”  I’m not writing this blog to promote hypnosis.   I’ve had three friends try.  Two were satisfied, one wasn't.  I'm writing because I boil down hypnosis' near-magical effectiveness in to three worthwhile principles that I’ve since applied other places and you might try them too.

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Four Skills CEO's Can Develop

11/6/2013

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“Human beings may be miserable specimens, in the main, but we can learn, and, through learning, become decent people.” 
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

Josh Waitzkin commented that one of the most impactful features of the M5 Jiu-Jitsu program was that the CEO was wearing a white belt, symbolizing that I was learning with everyone else.  

My modeling of thirst for knowledge helped foster this value in the company.  And as I’ve often said, a staff of people who love learning is like a CEO’s wish for more wishes.  The tightest bottleneck for us was not capital, or market demand, or technical limitations - it was me, the team, and our own capacity to get stuff done.  So I’d better be working on that.  Besides, improving my own skills on company time was genuinely fun, a borderline guilty pleasure.  C’mon, the training montage is the best part of every action movie - epitomized by one of the best sci-fi books of all time, now a movie, Ender’s Game. (Get it, the game is the end?)

I thought I’d use four concrete skills as examples. Working on these paid big dividends for me.  This is not ...


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Mission-Driven Companies

10/25/2013

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"If you don't know where you're going, it doesn't matter which way you go."
- Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland
 
"Those people that find higher purpose to business than earning money are the ones making all the damn money." - Greg Glassman, Founder and CEO of CrossFit
I used to ask new hires if their prior company had a mission.  They almost all said yes.  When I asked, "Was it relevant in day-to-day life at the company?"  They would say no.  It was usually on a poster somewhere and too long, not memorable. Research backs the widespread lack of relevant, authentic company missions.  For example, a quantitative study by Christopher Bart points out, “The overall conclusion is that, in any sample of mission statements, the vast majority are not worth the paper they are written on and should not be taken with any degree of seriousness.”  

Mission statements were not part of MBA dogma when I was an student in the 90s.  Instead, Wharton taught about the overarching purpose of creating shareholder value.  We debated the perils of straying from the primacy of wealth-creation.  I was left wondering why the legendary Dilbert Mission Statement Generator (sadly no longer online) didn’t just repeatedly spit out the one-size-fits-all mission, “Make Money.” 

However, I've found purpose to be one of my absolute favorites in the leadership toolkit. Used wisely, it creates shareholder value and provides some benefit to society. 

You might think of mission as the ball.  Share price or market share or another more traditional method of 

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STFU and Design a Great Product

10/8/2013

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Yesterday I heard that the head of product I hired didn't last the year.  Product innovation was one of the hardest things for me to scale.  One of the purposes of this blog is to clarify my mistakes so I can avoid them next time, so I thought I'd tackle this topic. Besides, I just read Eric Ries' "The Lean Startup," which also reminded me of how hard this is, and suggested an answer.

To continue the setup, I met an old friend who just closed his startup.  They spent one year, solved many technical hurdles building a cool app, but never got any real market traction.  The entrepreneur's decision pleased his VC, as most companies linger for much longer. The developers who built intensely all year, pleased not so much.

And then I had lunch with a WIBO graduate that spent two years building a service that converts your business card collection into electronic contact data magically. She now knows her costs to the penny and has paying customers validating her price.  But she doesn't yet know how to sell or market, so she doesn't yet know how to cost-effectively distribute yet. Should she raise capital?

The Lean Start-up is one of the hottest business books now. Distinctions like "Minimum Viable Product" are infused in Silicon Valley's air.  Ries is a disciple and successful practitioner of Steve Blank's Customer Development philosophy, and I also recommend (as does he) Blank's "The Four Steps to the Epiphany".   It reminded me of the path my product organization, and these entrepreneurs, kept wandering from. Here's my summary:
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Knowledge Work is New

10/4/2013

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"In 1900, 3% of Americans practiced professions that were cognitively demanding. Today ... 35%." - James Flynn, Ted Talk
I like TED talks for the same reason I like business books.  Inhaling someone's passion and life's work is inspiring, and gets my ideas flowing.  TED talks work well while on a machine at the gym.

This talk gives is a brief history of our cognitive development.  The type of work that the (almost) majority of humans are working on all day has shifted radically in this century.  So the most fundamental ways we think have changed as well.  The opportunity to design new tools and arrangements to meet this challenge is staggering.  We're a completely different animals than we were three generations ago, and it is very disorienting.  Opportunity!  
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