Why Boards Should Care

Boards should care about company culture because good cultures outperform bad ones. Full stop.

Boards always want strong performance, yet surprisingly few pay close attention to culture. Isn’t that crazy?

Consider research cited by Denise Yohn in “Culture Oversight — A Mandate For Boards of Directors.” According to the Financial Reporting Council in the UK, only 1 in 24 executives report that culture regularly appears on board agendas.

Perhaps this gap in oversight explains why regulatory bodies have stepped in. The UK’s Corporate Governance Code now explicitly requires boards to “establish the company’s purpose, values and strategy, and satisfy itself that these and its culture are aligned.”

Yet even without regulatory mandates—particularly in the U.S. and for unregulated mid-sized companies—the proven correlation between culture and performance alone should compel boards everywhere to take culture seriously.

Why It Seems Hard To Gauge Culture (But Isn’t)

The reason why culture is so rarely examined is because it seems hard to define and inspect.

Every board deck presents the company’s financials, sales forecasts, and other operational metrics; all of which are instantly decoded and understood around the table. This is the language of boards. If the culture or something else is messed up, board members presume the effects will travel downstream and eventually hit the key metrics.

But why in the world are boards willing to let a culture collapse surprise them?

“Culture” seems hard to define and measure, like some kind of subjective magic trick — but it’s really not.

To simplify, rely on what I call the Leo Tolstoy Rule; as Tolstoy observes in Anna Karenia’s opening line:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Maybe you get marbles in your mouth when trying to explain or understand “culture.”

I’m here to comfort you. It’s simple.

Every great culture is alike.

And easy to spot. And easy to measure.

Good, high performing cultures do not fumble around with hot air platitudes like “people first” and “work life balance.”

Happy, high performing cultures simply obsess about their shared fate.

They are crystal clear on the vision, behaviors, and plan, and aligned and foaming out of the mouth to achieve those together.

That’s it.

In fact, consider the UK above definition of culture and the board’s role. It’s almost perfect: “establish the company’s purpose, values and strategy, and satisfy itself that these and its culture are aligned.”

Since a board’s window into the company is its CEO, boards should ask themselves these two simple questions.

1. Can the CEO articulate the vision, values, and strategic plan simply and concretely, ideally in 10 words or less?
   
2. Does she do it constantly?
   

If you — the board member — cannot regurgitate this yourself, then open your eyes wide!

The team probably can’t either.

And all happy, high profile cultures are alike.

What Boards Should Hear About Culture

While CEO at Levelset, culture was important to me, and that was evident to our board because of how I reported on it.

I didn’t simply drop a comment in my updates that “moral is good.”

No! At nearly all board interactions the People Operations leader sat at my side. We reported and talked about culture in tangible ways. We constantly showed the board and the internal leadership that we paid attention to culture, and importantly, that it was a board level priority at all times.

Here are some examples:

• People Operations leader always present and active participant in board agendas and discussions.
• Board decks and agendas had space to review engagement metrics (which, of course, were tracked in real time)
• Glassdoor reviews (good and bad), and other employee comments and stories, shared and discussed.
• Surveyed board members to discus plan, values, mission, and culture, asking questions like, “what does the mission mean to you?”
  

Every company will not be a top 5% or 20% cultural juggernaut. But boards that expect high performance aught to expect good, above-average culture. And the higher the better!

Plus, culture observations can be a true canary in the coal mine for boards.

Boards should not leave culture insights under the hood. They should expect insight, and can specifically ask for it. In doing so, boards should look for two key things:

1. Tangible Team and Engagement Metrics that are measured and reported consistently, just like sales and financial reports;
   
2. People Ops presence — so boards hear from the horse’s mouth.
   

Consequences of Ignoring Culture

Culture insights are an interesting topic for CEOs and boards because, on the one hand, it presents an upstream opportunity to gauge and strengthen performance, but on the other hand, it calls forth a possible responsibility that can have messy consequences.

The Tolstoy Rule comes back here for the opposite reason.

Instead of highlighting how easy it is to spot a good culture, here it warns that bad cultures are bad for a million different reasons; and some of those reasons are very bad.

What is a board’s responsibility for a company’s bad culture?

Just last week, Rippling filed a lawsuit against Deel for unfair trade practices that implicates senior leadership and, possibly, board activity. This is a much better culture story for Rippling than the company experienced in its early innings as Zenefits, which of course, is a case study in bad culture! And any marketplace observer can rattle off examples of culture destroying company value, like Wells Fargo’s ethics scandal, Uber’s culture crisis, and the Boeing 737 Max failings.

The point is that things can get real sticky for boards.

A board’s legal culpability and responsibility here is a difficult question with moving targets and competing arguments.

But exact liability issues aside, boards definitely want to avoid bad circumstances, because it’s just bad business!

Culture Signals Boards Should Watch

I was on the board of a company who had the bottom suddenly fall out.

Circumstances soured very fast, and the board saw company operations first hand. It was not pretty. Red flags began to hit us over the head.

And then, we did something simple — we noticed the company’s Glassdoor reviews. All the red flags were right there in black and white. We could’ve read them at any time.

Now, of course, anonymous employee feedback on channels like Glassdoor must be ingested with caution and context. Good reviews can be faked. Bad reviews can come from bitter and unfair circumstances where there are two sides to the story.

Nevertheless, these review platforms can be useful data points, and part of a broader story that boards can observe about their companies.

Other places to look include:

• Employee turnover metrics
• Net promotor scores
• Speed that open roles are filled
• How often employees share or comment on social media posts
• Exit interviews on leadership turnover
  

One of Levelset’s board members, Ho Nam, used to comment that “employees vote with their feet.”

This is wise, and I think it can be extended to “employees vote with their enthusiasm.”

To peer into a company’s culture, boards should seek to gauge employee enthusiasm.

Ideally, the CEO and people leader is reporting on it. But, if not, there are tea leaves all over the place, and boards should pay close attention to them.

How Boards Can Impact & Help Culture

I believe boards can be an incredible fulcrum for leaders to reinforce and strengthen culture.

The board structure is so familiar to CEOs and Directors that they forget how unfamiliar everyone else is with it.

But the “board” is a big, mysterious, black box of a thing for most people.

And if there’s one thing that groups don’t manage well…

It used to surprise me when, after a board meeting, team members and leaders would rush up to me and ask “what did the board say?”

The tone wasn’t filled with curiosity. There was more tension and turbulence in it than that.

I eventually noticed the huge information gap about boards. Let’s call it the Board Mystery Gap.

This gap creates a cultural headwind that grows stronger as the organization grows.

Can you flip the effect?

By closing the Board Mystery Gap, can you turn the board into a cultural tailwind?

By frequently exposing the team to the board and the board to the team, the Board Mystery Gap closes, and boards can help their company’s culture, and help by a lot.

Here are some examples of what we did at Levelset.

1. Always Share Board Materials

Immediately after every board meeting, call, or email update, I would share the written materials to the entire team. This was not just a post somewhere in the dark corners of our intranet. I affirmatively shared it.

Of course, we removed sensitive items that needed privacy or confidentiality; but it wasn’t much.

This invited the entire team into the board relationship.

Not only did it close the Board Mystery Gap, but it also helped the team better understand our business and strategic plan.

And — bonus! — it became another way to manage the team.

This effect reminds me of what Bob Iger described as “management by press release.” In his book Ride of a Lifetime, he explains:

Hearing it communicated broadly, particularly to investors, and witnessing the reaction to it, fueled everyone with the energy and commitment to move forward…There were now expectations that we had to live up to. That meant added pressure, but it also gave me a powerful communications tool within the company…

In big, publicly traded companies, you can “manage by press release” like Bob Iger. In private companies, board communications can have the same effect.

2. Invite, Invite, Invite

It’s common — and mostly well adopted — advice to invite and leverage key leaders in board sessions.

Consider going even further.

We’d always pull a person or two from the ranks and let them join and observe board meeting.

This reduced the information gap, enabled context to spread into the team, and because an important personal development opportunity for the observer.

3. Let Boards Into Operations!

What about the other way around — bringing board members into operational meetings?

Harvard Business Review profiled this in How Netflix Redesigned Board Meetings.

At Netflix, board members periodically attended (as an observer) recurring senior leadership meetings. I like this idea.

We didn’t do this as programmatically as Netflix, but we did weave board members into operations more ad hoc. I’d frequently set up 1:1 meetings between team members and board directors with applicable experience to a project or role.

We also had working sessions with board members and advisors who had great operational experience. For example, we had some amazing marketing and communication sessions with advisor Chip Heath. And likewise, fintech operational work done with Karla Friede and Michael Gollner.

This provided amazing value to the team members involved. The direct impact helped the underlying project. The indirect impact closed the board<>team gap.

4. Socialize!

Put the board and team into social settings as often as possible, letting the context cross-pollination happen naturally.

If possible, every board meeting should be paired with a board dinner or other social engagement. And keep that audience wide. Dinners can’t become parties and events, of course, so headcount must be reasonable. But be liberal. Mix the audience around.

And then do host events, too.

At a company where I sat on the board, we held a happy hour with the team and it was a big cultural success for them. At Levelset, we invited board members to holiday parties, happy hours, and other full-team events, bringing positive effects every time.

5. Town Halls With The Board

Companies frequently host AMAs and Town Halls with the CEO and other leadership…consider doing it with the board, too. Again, this gives both sides valuable context.

We did this at Levelset and it was one of our best AMA sessions ever.

No moderating the questions and sanitizing the thing. No fearful restrictions. Just get the CEO and the Board on the Zoom and let it rip. If there are bad and uncomfortable topics…trust me, they aren’t getting better under the rug.

6. Get and Advertise The Board Members’ Point of View

Each board member is part of the business for a reason. There is some reason why they believe in the enterprise. Some reason why they are involved.

These reasons are actually quite good and more pronounced than even other executives and leaders. Their connection to the business may actually rhyme more with the Founder or CEO’s impulses, because, after all, i’ts usually quite an intentional or focused effort for a board member to get involved with a business.

Companies should use that!

I would survey the board each year and ask them questions like, “What does Levelset’s mission mean to you?”

Their answers were amazing. And, more importantly, authentic.

I’d reflect these answers right back to them. Literally, sticking their own quotes in the board deck to frame the start of our meetings. And I’d also incorporate the comments into all-hands meetings with the full team or executive team, helping to reinforce our vision and culture.

Boards Really Can Impact Culture

Is your board too removed from the broader team? Be careful. This is not a “culture neutral” situation. The Mysterious Black Box Effect may be a culture headwind.

Leaders and boards that work together can thoughtfully close the mystery gap and create (1) boards with more business context and (2) teams with more board context. This helps on multiple fronts.

Boards That Care About Performance Care About Culture

Happy, high performing companies are all alike.

Great boards care about culture because happy, aligned teams deliver sustainable performance.

They demand visibility into culture just as they demand financial data or strategic plans. They don’t wait for culture problems to surface; they actively look for evidence of employee enthusiasm and engagement. Most importantly, great boards help close the information gap—ensuring clarity flows not only from leadership to teams but also back up to the boardroom.

The post What Boards Should Know About Culture appeared first on Scott Wolfe.

Founders think leadership is about strategy, execution, hiring the right people, buzz, and a hundred other qualities; but great leaders know that leadership is about communication.

If you want to succeed, be ready to repeat a message that is cut, polished, set, and sized to fit.

At Levelset, once we figured this out, everything changed. We scaled past 400 people with a culture that fueled our performance. This article presents the Founders Communication Framework we used to build a high-performing team—not by pushing harder, but by marketing the vision from the inside out.

Leadership Is an Internal Marketing Job

When startups are new and the team is small, communication hurdles are low. Small teams are close-knit high-performing hustlers by nature because all the business’ core information fills the space like oxygen around a small group. They have “shared consciousness.”

Once the team size grows and crosses modest thresholds (30, 50+ people) communication hurdles compound and the group dynamics get complex.

This effect is labeled “Communication Network Theory,” which — like Reed’s Law for networks — observes that as group sizes increase, the number of potential communication channels grow exponentially.

To illustrate:

• Team of 2: 1 possible interaction (A-B)
• Team of 3: 3 possible interactions (A-B, A-C, B-C)
• Team of 4: 6 possible interactions (A-B, A-C, A-D, B-C, B-D, C-D)
• Team of 5: There are 26 possible interactions!
• Team of 50? Over 1,200!

And so on.

Very quickly, a startup can lose shared consciousness and find itself in communication chaos.

It’s no surprise that founders feel like their team just “doesn’t get it anymore.”

I had all of these feelings at Levelset as it crossed stages, growing from a team that fit around the conference table to a multinational group of over 400. And now, as advisor and director, I’ve seen founders struggle here.

The knee-jerk reaction is to crave more performance!

Everyone loves performance.

Boards pull out the McKinsey 9-Box Grid and push founders to “level-up” their teams. Founders tighten the screws on OKRs and “weed out the low performers,” and spend their crucial communication attention on “execute, execute, execute..

Alas, the problem isn’t because people aren’t working hard; they lack information! Founders think they are “transparent” and sharing all the information, but they are failing to communicate it.

What looks like an execution problem is actually an internal marketing problem.

The best leaders market their message inside their company, so the message becomes the “AIR” the team breathes:

1. Articulate the core information to something simple & repeatable
2. Instill it through rituals, repetition, and storytelling
3. Reinforce it through systems and incentives

We figured this out at Levelset, cultivating a high-performance team to deliver a life and career changing outcome for hundreds.

We understood the communication hurdles. We knew success depending on delivering a message.

As Founder and CEO, my #1 job was clear to me: internal marketing.

Articulate The Core Messages

“Innovation is articulation,” observed Walter Isaacson in his study on innovation. The same can be said about leadership in general; it’s simply articulation.

Thus, the first element of the Founders Communication Framework is to articulate your company’s core information.

There are 3 ares of “Core Information.”

1. Who You Are
2. Your Behaviors
3. Your Plan

Aim for high-level articulation in each of these areas. Not a research report, a paragraph, or a slide-deck with an avalanche of bullet points.

More like Southwest Airlines capturing their mission as “THE Low Fare Airline,” or Danny Meyer’s restaurant group capturing their behaviors and excellence standards as “Centering The Salt Shaker,” or Alan Mulally capturing his plan as the “One Ford” Plan.

This is a distillation journey.

It requires you to really, really understand your core information, and then to package it.

Who You Are Examples

At Levelset, we were big fans of Netflix’s Culture Deck and the Valve Handbook for New Employees. This inspired us to create our own tome about our company’s point of view, the Levelset Field Guide. The first line was “Why You’re Here,” and immediately it gave the readers the commanders intent: we empower people to always get what they earn.

This lived on everyone’s desk and in everyone’s heads. We communicated who we were, and had the core scripture in place to build upon.

Behavior Examples

It was always clear to me that “core values” were actions and not beliefs.

I love how Danny Meyers recounts his journey to understanding this. Meyers, the man behind Shake Shack and a pile of acclaimed New York restaurants like Gramercy Tavern and The Modern, banged his head against the wall in his early days, writing in Setting The Table that he couldn’t figure out how to get his “standards” met once he opened his second restaurant location. Things worked right when he was physically at one location, but suffered whenever he wasn’t there.

“The situation was my fault,” Meyers said in an interview, “because I had never clarified with words. I was doing it all, but I never clarified.”

Meyers needed to demand the next level of his expertise. The exquisite level.

Realizing that “language is the most revealing and powerful artifact of any culture,” Meyers realized he needed to distill his behaviors into words.

I presented to new Levelsetters on Day 1 explaining our shared behaviors through examples and storytelling, with me going through each behavior one-by-one, always stopping on the last identified behavior to call attention to the first word: Make.

“Notice anything about all these behaviors?” I’d ask the new hires.

“They all start with verbs,” I’d explain, “Create. Do. Start. Learn. Make. These are all actions.”

Words matter.

And these “core values” were not the only place we modeled behaviors. Inspired by Meyers, we also had internal management mantras and aphorisms. They were documented in our Field Guide as “Things We Say.” They were incorporated to the building as conference room names. They were on walls. They were on coffee mugs and swag.

Mantras like “We are all customer success, or “more comma more,” or “turkey popper problems.” These mantras were part of our shared language that “Sprinkled Scott Dust” across the team and shaped behaviors.

Plan Examples

Too often, I see leaders conflate their metrics and objectives with the notion of having and communicating a “plan.”

It’s not enough. And, in fact, it’s probably harmful.

No need to take this message from me. You can go straight to the horses mouth — to the OKR grand marshal himself, John Doerr, who wrote in his metrics manifesto Measure What Matters:

Leaders must get across the why…their people need more than milestones for motivation. They are thirsty for m meaning, to understand how their goals relate to the mission.

Leaders can make large teams (150+, 500+, etc.) feel like they are part of something. They do that through content and narrative.

“The Plan” for a business is not the metrics. It is not the quarterly objectives. It is not the three most important projects or customer accounts.

“The Plan” is the narrative.

The narrative explains in simple, memorable terms why your goals, metrics, and objectives matter in the larger scheme of things.

As the great turn-around CEO Greg Brenneman explains

If you require more than one page to lay out the key parts of your plan, then you’ll have almost no chance of actually executing it.

At Levelset, we distilled this into a 1-Page document called the “Payment Help is Here” plan.

The Plan segmented the business into neat divisions that were labeled and branded.

Yes, we literally branded our internal strategic pillars by giving them its own colors, logos, and swag. Every single person at Levelset knew where they fit into the broad “Plan.”

OKRs and metrics came and went within the Plan. We had a lot of “management.” We had lots of projects and experiments and priorities. But they were always discussed in the context of The Plan.  

Other great examples of “Plan” narratives are:

• Alan Mulally’s “One Ford” plan
• Greg Brenneman’s Continental Airlines “Go Forward” plan

Instill with Rituals & Repetition

Just like a preacher or a congregation leader, there is discipline and craft in preaching a message. Or, as Patrick Lencioni wrote in his terrific book on this topic, The Advantage, “great leaders see themselves as Chief Reminding Officers as much as anything else.”

To create an engaged, high-performing team, leaders must establish rituals and rhythms.

These are not meetings with productivity-based agendas, crafted to be as short and infrequent as possible’s and always having next steps. 

No, these rhythms are more like going to church.

They are shared gatherings or communication moments that pull believers together and remind them of the core information (mission, behaviors, plan).

At Levelset, our rhythms included:

• Weekly CEO Email or Slack Message
• Recurring All Hands (weekly, or monthly, depending on team size)
• Quarterly and Annual Themed All-Hands

Did it feel repetitive?

Eventually, yes, things felt repetitive.

Actually, some of the longest serving Levelsetters could just take the reins from me and run the whole communications show if I disappeared for a few weeks.

But that was the feature of the system. The holy grail.

As Daniel Coyle noticed in his research for The Culture Code, “what seems like repetition is, in fact, navigation.”

And here are some key things to keep in mind about your rhythms:

The Magic Number 7

In advertising, messages should be short to be remembered (as little as 3-5 words). And it’s marketing 101 that messages get through only after being repeated many times in many different formats (visual, auditory, kinesthetic), with 7 being the magic repetition number.

So, abide by this.

Repeat your core information often and leverage different formats.

Frame Everything Around Your Plan

Greg Brenneman framed everything around his Go Forward Plan at Continental (now United) Airlines:

Every time you speak, you talk about the Go Forward Plan, over and over and over again. Do it until you think everyone gets it, and then do it a thousand times more. Drive it into the organization with a jackhammer. Ask them to repeat it back to you in casual conversations.

Too many founders orient their rhythms around their company’s departments. It’ll be the sales update, the product update, the finance update, etc. What exactly are they wanting people to remember?

Everything needs to be oriented around your plan.

NFL coaches are terrific at this. A few years ago, I was invited to the owner’s suite at the New Orleans Saints game, and general manager Mickey Loomis talked to the group before the game. He said, “today, the Keys to Victory are to win the offensive line battle, get over 100 yards rushing, and win the turnover battle.”

I promise you that Sean Payton’s all team meetings and updates that week were not “the Offensive Coordinator Update” and “Special Teams Update.” The message was “These are the 3 Keys to Victory.” Over and over again.

Names, Names, Names

Everyone understands the power of recognition. Communities pay attention to people in their community. I love the story about Hoover Adams, who founded a local newspaper in Dunn, North Carolina, called the Daily Record. Told in Made to Stick:

I bet if the Daily Record reprinted the entire Dunn telephone directory tonight, half the people would sit down and check to be sure their name was included…when someone tells you, ‘aw, you don’t want all those names,’ please assure them that’s exactly what we want, most of all!

Adams created a shorthand for his commander’s intent: “Names, Names, Names.”

I stole these words, making them instructions to our People Operations team.

We weaved names into all of our rhythms and messages.  

When we had something to say about our mission, our behaviors, or our plans, we said it by using a name, showing that person as an example.

Reinforce Through Designed Systems

Go beyond just repeating your core information…design systems throughout the company that reinforces and repeats the core information for you.

This creates a culture flywheel that regenerates its own energy.

Here’s how.

Unleash Your Herd

Scott Abel was a mentor of mine and Levelset board director, and I’d often lean on him to talk about people operations and culture building. His company, Spiceworks, had a dynamic, talent-magnet culture that he credits to Jen Slaski.

Who is Jen Slaski?

Jen wasn’t a Human Resources hire, a communications hire, or an executive assistant hire — she was the company’s first marketing hire. And because Scott spotted her as a culture torchbearer and empowered her, she becomes a crucial part of “cultivating” the Spiceworks team.

“We’re able to try things and see what happens,” says Jen in an interview on the culture, “the leadership team…unleashed everyone to use their creativity and passion to shake things up.”

Jen was a spreader.

Danny Meyers curated people like this, too, who he called “culture carriers.”

Professional sports organizations are amazing at this by leveraging the power of “team captains.”

At Levelset, we pulled language from Chris Zook’s book The Founders Mentality:

Every company can identify some employees, not necessarily department heads or people with big titles, who have a disproportionate impact on the performance of the company and its delivery to customers. We call these employee’s “franchise players.”

We anointed some of our team members “franchise players,” and unleashed them as culture carriers. They self-organized. They met. They put their ear to the ground to listen to the team. And they were models to everyone else to reinforce our culture.

Use Perks to Reinforce Behaviors

“Culture” can be a vastly misunderstood concept, and I always had strong distaste for corporate extravagances and perks thrown at employees that — I felt — was nutritionally bankrupt. This was prolific in the early Google and Facebook days. People would sometimes suggest this stuff to me and I’d usually dismiss it, calling it “ping pong management.”

Culture is more true to the etymology of the word. The word comes from the latin “cultura,” which means to “cultivate.”

And when it came to spending resources on “perks” and benefits, we didn’t want culture junk food, we wanted perks to reinforce and cultivate our culture.

For example, two of our most talked about and meaningful benefits revolved around and reinforced one of our core values, “Learn Enough.”

We bought unlimited books for our team members about anything as long as they passed along “what they learned” to others in a Slack message, and every employee got an international travel stipend they could use annually toward international travel.

Make Core Measurables Tangible Messages

In college, I got my private pilot’s license, and remember clearly a key milestone during my training: my first solo flight.

It’s scary. I touched down after my flight, got congratulated by my instructor, and then cut off the tail of my shirt to hang on the flight school’s wall, and it got stapled on the wall with hundreds of others.

Before my tail went on the wall, the other tails were up there reminding me of two very important things: that this was an important milestone I needed to reach, and I could do it because many others had done it.

This is a brilliant cultural reinforcement tool. We’d leverage this concept at Levelset, designing reinforcing systems like this to power a culture flywheel. Here are some examples.

The Taylor Wall

“Wow’ing” customers was a key behavior so we obsessively counted new 5 Star reviews. Every time we got a review we rang a bell and the person who sourced the review posted a “Taylor Swift” poster on the wall. This started because we “unleashed” our support manager Julie Leveque, a Swiftie. And this wall became famous. And our 5-Star reviews came in every day.

Closers Get Bats

Martin Roth, Levelset’s CRO, watched the Taylor Wall reinforce behaviors and created his own version. In Martin’s early selling days he took sales calls holding a baseball bat, and he turned this into a tradition. Every time a new sales person hit their first $100k in bookings, they received a custom bat with their name on it in a “Bat Ceremony.” The bats got lined up on the walls of the sales room in New Orleans and Austin.

The Chief Marketeer

Great startup teams are not divine talents with supernatural “self motivation.” They just have extraordinary information and contextual symmetry.

Small teams share history and feel like they belong to something together. They know the mission and point of view intimately. They are creating the team’s unique behavior profile. And the Plan is etched into their day-to-day minds.

When teams grow, they hit a communications wall.

Searching for the “high performers” and “self motivated” is a quest for fool’s gold.

Focus instead on communicating context. Articulate your key information, instill it through repetition, and reinforce it with systems and flywheels. Be great at your #1 job: being the chief marketeer.

The post How Leaders Create Believers appeared first on Scott Wolfe.

The victory held up for a short while — some months, maybe more than a year — but eventually the Natchez tribe became complete toast. The remaining few shipped off to Haiti as slaves. Recounted by Wright Thompson in The Barn, the Natchez chief was last seen in Haiti by a French bureaucrat who “recognized him and walked over to reminisce about their days as enemies. The chief greeted his old foe with melancholy in his eyes and said he wanted to go home.”

Thinking of the brutality is somewhat paralyzing. The Natchez tribe of men, women, children, families, stories, and lives, violently driven out of their homes and reckoning with an upturned civilization. The French settlers, full of men, women, children, families, stories, and lives, ransacked one night, dads getting butchered and scalped, families splintered. Can you imagine being one of those people on either side? 

I sit in my rocking chair this morning, enjoying a perfect breeze, seeing a bright yellow butterfly flicker through the sky, bobbing in and out the holes of my Japanese Blueberry trees, and simply can’t imagine the world that way. Somewhere right now, someone does. 

This morning some people wake up in rubble. There’s a lot of “right” and “wrong” arguments to be made. Just like the Natchez tribe and the French settlers, so much history piled up, so many perspectives and complexity.

And if we mentally fast-forward a couple hundred years in time, all the dust from that rubble is long gone, evaporated into the universe just like the sound from all the screams, and the breath from all the life. Everything ages out into a complicated blip of this and that. Topsoil today. Subsoil tomorrow. And then it’s all just the land.  Home always dissipating. Melancholy always compounding whenever anyone reaches backward toward anything.  There’s nothing backward to ever get.

“The chief greeted his old foe with melancholy in his eyes and said he wanted to go home.” 

The post Barns appeared first on Scott Wolfe.

“Cups go here.” 

“You want the utensils to be facing up.”

Emily could write the “Tiffanys Table Manners” book for loading the dishwasher. She has such a clear vision for the load when she takes on the chore. And more than anything else — more than passenger seat driving, selecting a TV show or restaurant, or overhearing a conversation between me and my mom — Emily is over my shoulder whenever I grab a dish to put in.

Tsk. Tsk.  

Have I ever gotten it right?

I feel like I’ve loaded the dishwasher a million times since we started living together, and honestly, all the dishes are fine. They really are. I have a perfect record.

It’s not a favorite activity of mine, either. Getting dishes from the sink covered in food, sauces, and gunk, half-filled with water, with things floating around — who can like that or care about it one bit? 

Now I’ve come to be a bit of a pro at it.  I’ve learned all of Emily’s rules.

And my passion for doing the dishes has grown out of hating the messy sink.  I always keep one eye on the sink whenever streaming through the kitchen, in a never-ending quest to stay ahead of anything being left inside. If there’s room in the dishwasher and I know the applicable rule, it goes in. If not, at least I get it rinsed off, dash some dish soap on it, scrub it a little, and put it on a drying towel. 

Should there ever be a dirty dish anywhere in the kitchen, ever? 

Boy, Emily has trained me well.

Funny that I remember doing dishes a million times in a thousand ways with Emily over my shoulder, yet I can’t remember doing the dishes a single time  before we got together.  Literally, not a single time.

Did my parents ever require me to do the dishes as a chore?  What did I do with my cup after having a glass of milk?  Where did my dinner plate go?  Did I just leave it on the table and walk away, or did I throw it in the sink?  It’s a complete black hole.

When I went off to college, my dorm room didn’t even have a sink. There was no such thing as a dish.  I moved into my fraternity house, and again, no sink, no dishes.  Two full years of my budding adulthood, and there wasn’t a kitchen sink, dish, or dishwasher to be found!

I moved into a little single family house after that with a roommate, and that place had dishes, a sink, and a dishwasher.  The same was true for the house I moved into after college, during law school.  All those years living with a sink, a dishwasher, and dishes before living with Emily…but was any of it ever used?  

Did I just use a glass and leave it on the table and walk away then?!  People would have noticed dishes piled up all over the house…

Maybe…just maybe…yes, it must be true, I must have put the dishes in the dishwasher even back then. 

It must have been a perfect record back then, too. All the dishes survived.

The post The Dishes appeared first on Scott Wolfe.

If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you’re functionally illiterate.

General James Mattis

KING by Jonathan Eig sits on top my navy blue leather desk creased at page 133. It rests in-between reads next to the Essential Goethe, both finding a little space among piles of papers, notebooks, and mementos spread across my office.

Now that I have more time than ever before, I’ve unpacked hundreds of items from the past few decades. Tons of ticket stubs, photographs, programs, journals, and more, tossed one at a time with no rhyme or reason into bins that have moved between closets and attics, waiting for their day in the sun to guide me through my nostalgia.

In all the stuff I notice how much I’ve learned.

I used to be such an idiot.

My travels, my friends, the movies, the plays, the performances, and the books. It shouldn’t possible for someone to escape decades of life with the same point of view. The point of view has to change.

And just like your body changes depending on what you feed it, so too does your point of view. And General Mattis is so correct and wise that unless your mind is saturated by real information — books — “you’re functionally illiterate.”

It does take hundreds of books.

Martin Luther King Jr. is a good example for me. Eig’s KING is now filling in cracks left between a variety of other books like David Blight’s Frederick Douglass, Kennedy & King, Barracoon, No Ashes In The Fire, Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Glaude’s Begin Again, and more.

I’ve read a bunch of articles, and I’ve visited a bunch of museums, and these contribute to some literacy about MLK and the civil rights era. But it’s only when I sit with many books on the subject that my brain gets the time to accumulate enough knowledge to be literate in it.

It doesn’t mean I become “correct” or that I develop the right, or most astute and perfect point of view. It just means that I become literate. And General Mattis is right that if I didn’t learn enough about KING through all of this reading, I would be “functionally illiterate” about the subject.

Yet that wouldn’t stop me from tossing opinions into the world’s pit of shallow, fragmented information.

Functional illiteracy is not illegal.

It’s just stupid…and simple to overcome.

The post Functional Illiteracy Is Just Plain Stupid appeared first on Scott Wolfe.

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.”

Today — August 29th — is a notable day for New Orleanians like me. On this day nineteen years ago, I woke up at my girlfriend’s apartment in Decatur, Georgia, after monitoring weather news reports late into the previous evening. Hurricane Katrina impacted New Orleans, and water was pouring into the city; the severity of damage wasn’t yet known, but would reveal itself over the next few days, and change my life a great deal.

It’s hard to state just how different life could have turned out if the hurricane had missed the city just a little. August 29th was a true fork in the road that turned life upside down, and like a river carving its own way through territory, Hurricane Katrina’s impact carved its way through me.

Now, nineteen years have flown by, each one heavy with change and growth. An enormous amount happened. An entire life was built, and achievements piled up like bricks.

I look forward and marvel at what other wonders can unveil themselves over the next nineteen years, and what else could be built and accomplished.

Then again, I shiver at how much those nineteen years took and how lucky I’ve been.

Has my life or career already seen its high water mark?


This Virginia Woolf quote resurfaces to me this morning, causing me to pick up this notepad and write “what I wish.” A few little contemplations to add on the pile, as another sheet on the calendar turns, and I bear through more writers block.

The ink used to flow so liberally.

My head was full of vision and shades.

I’d wake up every morning before the sun, hurry to my desk, and write anything I wanted for hours. I had a vision, built an audience, and turned the flywheel year after year, building and building and building up from Katrina’s groundzero.

And it was wonderful. As Virginia Woolf explains, it was all that mattered.

The hours turned into days and years and then, out of nowhere, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, came a Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand.

Nineteen years ago, Hurricane Katrina upturned my life and claimed every possession, but injected sparks of vision and ambition.

Years later, with a beautiful life built and great accomplishments recorded, this Headmaster showered me with possessions, but claimed my vision and ambition.

And left me here alone to write on a rainy day.

Anything I wish.

The post Writing What You Wish: Still Rebuilding 19 Years After Katrina appeared first on Scott Wolfe.

Despite its ubiquity, articulating vision is hard work.

The vision must be remembered, and it must shape behavior. That’s a tall order.

I constantly worked on this at Levelset and understood that “vision” cuts across three essential horizons:  The core, the compounding, and the far-out point of view.

Vision Horizon 1:  The Commander’s Intent

There’s an essential difference between forcing business through the door and having a salient vision for how the company approaches getting business.

This first Vision Horizon — the “Commander’s Intent” — is the simple, elegant, and instructive mantra at the heart of a company’s economic engine.

Jim Collin’s famous “Hedgehog Concept” instructs here.

The “economic engine” is a critical element, but it’s incomplete until the company knows and articulates what it’s passionate about and best at.

Every business has sophistication, but you must radically simplify.

One of my mentors, Chip Heath, wrote about this in his excellent messaging bible, Made to Stick.

Southwest Airlines’ famous  “THE Low Fare Airline” mantra isn’t simple because it’s “full of easy words” and “dumbed down,” explains Heath in Made to Stick, but because it has elegance and prioritization.

“A well-thought-out simple idea,” writes Heath, “can be amazingly powerful in shaping behavior.”

With this simple phrase — “THE Low Fare Airline” — the CEO makes her First Horizon Vision crisp and clear and gives her entire team direction. The “Commander’s Intent,” so to speak, empowers the team to execute.

The Levelset business was complicated with all the standard SaaS and go-to-market metrics.  Our CFO circulated a 3-page spreadsheet to the management team each Monday, and it was full of green, red, and yellow cells connected to almost 100 metrics.

This report was super valuable.

But it wasn’t the “Commander’s Intent.”

At Levelset, we eventually boiled that down to “Help First.”

It was simple, elegant, instructive, and emphasized what the company prioritized, and it was the heart of our economic engine.

At one point, we reduced our company’s metrics to two things and put them on all the office screens: (1) How many 5-star reviews did we get today? and (2) How many net new software deals did we close?

This was our Commander’s Intent Vision, and 100% of the people in the company understood it.

Patty McCord is a People & Human Resources leader who made her mark as Netflix’s Chief Talent Officer, and I love her observation about this point.

In her excellent book Powerful, McCord says:

“Companies [invest] so much in training programs of all sorts and spend so much time and effort to incentivize and measure performance, but they fail to actually explain to all of their employees how their business runs.”

Why do so many companies “fail to actually explain how their business runs?”

It’s because the business is a complicated, jumbled, unarticulated, and unspoken mess. The CEO hasn’t reduced and articulated a simple, crisp, First Horizon “Commander’s Intent” vision.

Sure, it may call for “growth.”

“Growth,” explains Collins in Good to Great, “is not a Hedgehog Concept.”

Vision Horizon 2: The “Special Business”

The “Commander’s Intent” is the company’s underlying revenue fuel, which makes the business a business.

Now, what makes your business special?

That is the CEO’s focus in the second Vision Horizon.

A company is “special” when it has a compounding element that enables it to build value beyond market-rate valuation multiples.

Getting more and more SDRs to call prospect lists is not a compounding element. Getting 500 people to attend your webinar last week is not a compounding element.

But, when Zillow publishes tons of daily property and content updates as part of its long-term investment in a “Power to the People” strategy, or Disney creates another generational character and IP asset…these companies broaden their “brand mass” (thanks to Brian Megless for this term!), which is a valuable, compounding element.

Not every company can be special.

After all, it’s special to be special.

For this reason, this second Vision Horizon is more challenging to find and articulate than the first.

These compounding models make sense in retrospect but are hard to find in spreadsheets.  CEOs must creatively manifest these and then aggressively fight against detractors.

Walt Disney has a great quip on this point.

The Disney story was turbulent for decades.  Lots of downs. Lots of running out of capital and convincing investors to believe in what looked like a financial model pipe dream.

Walt’s brother, Roy, was in charge of finance and making the models make sense.  And here’s Walt’s perspective found in Neal Gabler’s biography:

“I found out the people who live with figures as a rule, it’s postmortem, it’s never ahead, it’s always what happened,” Walt would say dismissively of Roy’s objections, “Well, in my particular end I was always ahead.”

I love it so much: “Well, in my particular end I was always ahead.”

Walt had this creative, soft, squirrely, and manifested Special Vision in spades.

When I first started Levelset, I was nervous about sharing my vision before coming across this brilliant quote from engineer and scientist Howard Aiken: “If it’s [an] original [idea], you will have to ram it down their throats.”

This brings me to my Special Vision Litmus Test:

If you’re not shoving your Special Vision down someone’s throat, it’s probably not a Special Vision.

Counting all the “problems” with the business model we pursued at Levelset is hard. For example, Levelset had two entire investment categories sucking cash without a straight line to revenue (Data Science and “Escape Velocity” Content).

It took a long time for our imagination to play out. Many investors didn’t get it, and even some executives struggled.

As CEO, I was an aggressive advocate for this Special Vision.

We branded the vision as “Escape Velocity” with logos, t-shirts, color schemas, and more.

I would put “Escape Velocity” at the start of Board and Investor updates, and it would be the lead topic in Board meetings, frequently before basic revenue and financial updates.

Growing revenue was important at Levelset, but everyone understood what would make us Special.  We knew that the company’s long-term business model started with Escape Velocity, and as CEO, I was relentless in making sure it never took a back seat.

Slowly, the future bent in the direction of our Special Vision.

The power of this kind of imagination and reality distortion is real.

In The Innovators, Walter Isaacson‘s study of innovation, Isaacson recognized that “having a healthy disregard for the impossible” is vital to innovating and winning.  “This is a really good phrase,” Isaacson continues, “you should try to do things that most people would not.”

Or, as Isaacson concluded in his Leonardo Da Vinci biography, “sometimes fantasies are paths to realities.”

Vision 3:  The Point of View

Bryce Hoffman’s profile of Ford’s turnaround CEO, Alan Mulally, in American Icon is one of my favorite CEO biographies.  And from that profile, I especially love Mulally’s “Working Together” formula, which starts with this requirement:

“You need a point of view about the future.”

Here are a few things that are not points of view about the future:

• Being successful

• Winning

• Growing revenue

• Listening to customers to build product features customers want

• Reacting to competitors

There are three reasons to shun hollow approaches like these in favor of a point of view and true cause.

First, it’s meaningful to you.

You may think you care about “growing revenue,” “being successful,” “being your own boss,” and “doing it your way,” and all that extremely un-unique dime-a-dozen junk.

But come on, is that the whole thing for you?

Getting caught up in commerce and forgetting about your soul is easy.  Like this Jerry Maguire scene asks, “It wasn’t always for the money, was it?”

I have regrets from my experience starting, growing, and selling Levelset. Still, I am incredibly grateful to have worked on a meaningful problem and appreciated the joy of the journey.

As Randy Komisar said in The Monk and The Riddle, “It’s the romance, not the finance, that makes business worth pursuing.”

A CEO must have some impulse that brought her to the business.

There must be something about the world that needed to be different.

“Be the change you want to see in the world,” explains Eric Ryan and his co-founders in The Method Method, who would eventually rally their team, partners, customers, and others together in a “People Against Dirty” movement.

Without meaning, it’s all going to be too hard!

And crucially, the CEO needs to have a meaningful point of view about the business, because if she doesn’t, there’s zero chance it will have meaning to anyone else.

Second, it’s meaningful to others.

Meaning is important for everyone else connected to the company: your team, customers, partners, and investors.

This is probably why GE’s Jack Welch once said CEOs should “think of themselves more as CMOs: Chief Meaning Officers.”

Simon Sinek has called it the “Chief Vision Officer, or CVO.”   In The Infinite Game, Sinek challenges leaders to articulate the company’s “Just Cause” in clear, affirmative, tangible terms:

“It is a statement of who we are, the sum total of our values and beliefs. A Just Cause is about the future, it defines where we are going.  It describes the world we hope to live in and will commit to help build.”

Building a business with large ambitions and a community of stakeholders is tough, and it will experience one crisis after another.

It takes an exceptional company to survive each crisis and continuously build more and more value.

Sinek speaks the obvious about this:

“No one is inspired to sacrifice going on frequent business trips and being away from their family so you can make the best products at the best possible value.”

Walt Disney was one of these leaders, and Gabler explains how Disney leaned into meaning with his growing team:  “Walt did what he had always done when faced with a crisis: he appealed to the missionary zeal of his employees and their belief that they were not merely industrial workers toiling for a wage but were engaged in a great enterprise.”

At Levelset, our “Just Cause” was to empower people always to get what they earn.  It was at the top of our job postings, recruiting conversations, employee onboarding, sales decks, at the start and end of every meeting, on the walls, and woven into how we talked and thought about everything.

It single-handedly gave thrusts to our successes and got us through difficulties.

The one thing that will always go to work for you…is meaning.

Third, it’s materially more likely to succeed.

The Roman philosopher Seneca said it best:

“If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.”

A strong point of view about the future makes it more likely that a company will succeed.

These points of view create a spirit for the company that attracts and energizes employees, customers, partners, and investors. It makes it easier for companies to decide what to invest in and where to focus, serving as a map for the company and its market.

“When companies have a strong point of view,” the authors explain in their book about category winners, Play Bigger, “their actions always seem inevitable.”

Looking back on Levelset now that it’s sold and gone, I’m astonished by the truth in this statement.

Our point of view pushed us to become an industry news source and watchdog, to create “Payment Profile” pages that acted as the industry’s Glassdoor, to nurture a vibrant community of construction attorneys shelling out industry help, and on and on…

Our point of view was so crisp it spawned products, services, markets, and strategies that now look so obvious and inevitable, and we could have gone on for the next 100 years!!

In the Harvard Business Review article “Don’t Sell A Product, Sell A Whole New Way of Thinking,” the author observes: “We all know the saying ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ but when it comes to innovation, the truth is often ‘I’ll see it when I believe it.”

When you give the market a reason to believe in your company, the market can perceive it, and they’ll reward the company with loyalty and advocacy.

“Belief is irresistible,” says Phil Knight in Shoe Dog.

Caution: You can’t make yourself believe.

Here’s the problem: You can’t summon this vision at will.

You can’t create a “point of view” project.

You actually, authentically need the point of view.

Creating a vision like this is like creating a piece of art, so this reflection from pianist and pop artist Ben Folds is on-point:  “I wish I could squint my eyes, imagine something, and make it so.  But only a true believer can fall under the spell of creative visualization. You can make believe, but you can’t make yourself believe.”

When you are a true believer and have a true point of view, Frederic Laloux observes in Reinventing Organizations, “the outside world comes knocking on your door with opportunities.”

Just follow Sir Paul McCartney’s advice from there:

“Open the door and let them in.”

The post The Art of Setting A Company’s Vision appeared first on Scott Wolfe.

I woke up with an incredible lower back ache, struggling under the covers to simply turn from side to side or move my legs up. Maybe the blame goes to a bad pillow. It could also be my recent habit of sitting and reading for hours and hours with little else to do. 

There was a tiny struggle to get to the bathroom, picking up my Theragun massager along the way to roll up and down my hips. Brushed the teeth. A warm shower. A close shave.  A walk toward the kitchen to grind coffee beans and make that first cup of the day.  Nora woke up fairly early today – especially for having a friend sleep over – and they both walked through the kitchen asking for donuts and wishing me ‘Happy New Year.’

“Happy New Year, baby, I love you so much,” I reply, grabbing the coffee while steam still spirals from its roof, and I walk across the damp lawn to a backyard office. 

Turn on a jazz station. Flip the lights. Ignite a candle.  Sit down and feel a zip of pain in my back and shoulders.

That’s the inventory of this morning, the first morning of 2024. 

I crack open Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, and the next story is Cherry Brandy. What a joy.

If you read enough, you periodically bump across perfect material; little insights from other people, sometimes long dead, that could have come out of your own mind. Except these people have figured out how to wrestle those ideas into perfect prose, to get it published, to get it to breathe across decades or centuries, and then to get it into your little hands.   I have some awe for that, and it pisses me off slightly, too.

Cherry Brandy is a short profile of a dying poet in the Kolyma gulags.  

The book as a whole is starting to grow on me, but this particular story is a direct strike on recent struggles. 

I was walking with Emily yesterday, lamenting about how difficult it was to get motivated. When you work 15 years on building something (like a company) that becomes quite successful, sells for half a billion dollars, and then just — POOF — disappears from your life, the whole thing leaves you somewhat disoriented. It’s like someone snatched me from an ordinary day, mid-gait, and flung me into outer space, and there I am, floating way up in the outer atmosphere.

Out of one eye, I see the whole world spinning around and around. Out of the other eye, I see the cold, dark, eternal emptiness littered with stars, galaxies, and mystery.  And then, in my own head, the only thing I hear is my breath, over and over and over again.

“Do I want to start another company, I don’t know,” I tell Emily on the walk.  

There are a lot of reasons for this.  For beginners, it’s really hard, long, and fraught with uncertainty.  And then, when it’s all said and done, what is really created?  What really lasts anyway?

This hit me very early after selling the company when the writing was on the wall: my creation was dying.  Some notion of it would linger a few years longer, but then it would be gone, cold and dead, lost to space and time, persisting only as a fading memory to a very small number of people.  

I was reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63 at the time.  That man is incredibly productive.  The amount of things he’s written.  I thought about how nice it must be to be someone like Stephen King. All of his creations were right there in print. No one could “buy them” and just shut them down. They were right there forever for him.  And then, when he passed, they would still be there. Something left behind for the world.

Forever.  

Forever?

My next remark to Emily was something like this: “What’s the point of anything really?”  

And continuing, “Sometimes I feel like I want to write, but then I read so much, and there’s so much out there, so much getting printed every day; what in the world can I add to the heap of everything?  Who am I even writing to?”

Then another damn year comes along the very next day. 

I wake up and crack open this eccentric book about the Russian gulags and get this story of a dying Russian poet struggling with his thoughts, and his thoughts about thoughts.  

On his deathbed, rhymes, verses, and prose keep coming to and going from his mind, as he drifts between life and death. 

These thoughts, rhymes, words, verses, observations, and inspirations, shouldn’t he be writing these things down?!  

To the dying poet, “[t]he whole world rushed past with the speed of a computer. Everything shouted: ‘Take, me!’ ‘No, me!’  There was no need to search – just to reject.” 

What’s the point of anything really?

“And who cared if it was written down or not,” the poet thinks, “Recording and printing was the vanity of vanities.”

So I think back to Stephen King and his ability to own his work forever and leave behind all that tangible production, whereupon all of my work disappears almost immediately.   

But how different are we really?

Bertrand Russell, a British mathematician and philosopher, reminds me of a cold truth:  

“All the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.”

Bertrand Russell

The difference between me and Stephen King is just a detail: time.

And thus, perhaps we are both just pissing in the wind. As the great existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre surmised, “Life itself is drained of meaning when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.”   

But just like the dying poet in Cherry Brandy, there are just some things that I cannot prevent. 

I get hungry. I get tired. I become awake. I want to write things down. I want to make things so.  

“Life entered by herself, mistress in her own home,” the Cherry Brandy poet observed. “He had not called her, but she entered his body, his brain; she came like verse, like inspiration.”

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