a former google exec on how to make tough decisions quickly - quartz

1/8/2015

A former Google exec on how to make tough decisions quickly - Quartz

A former Google exec on how to maketough decisions quickly

Think fast. (Kirby Lee-USA TODAYS PORTS

)

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WRITTEN BY

Dave GirouardContributor, First RO UND

Ive long believed that speed is the ultimate weapon in business.All else being equal, the fastest company in any MARKET willwin. Speed is a de ning characteristicif not the de ningthe leader in virtually every industry you look

Review

July 31, 2015

http://qz.com/465060/the-art-of-knowing-when-to-make-a-decision/

In tech, speed is seen primarily as an asset in product development.Hence the move fast and break things mentality, the commitmentto minimum viable products and agile development. Many peoplewould AGREE that speed and agility are how you win when it1/10

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comes to product.YOD AoeXik Q2qXB1v tTz Gb5

What they fail to grasp is that speed matters to the rest of thebusiness toonot just product. Google is fast. General Motors isslow. Startups are fast. Big companies are slow. Its pretty clear thatfast equals good, but theres relatively little written about how todevelop the institutional and EMPLOYEE muscle necessary tomake speed a serious competitive advantage.I believe that speed, like EXERCISEhabitual.

and eating healthy, can be

Through a prolonged, proactive effort to develop these good habits,we can convert ourselves as founders, executives, andEMPLOYEES to be faster, more ef cient company-buildingmachines. And, when enough members of a team exhibit this set ofhabits, and are rewarded with reinforcement, compensation, andpromotions, the organization itself will gain velocity.This is how CATEGORYmade.

Speed, like EXERCISE andeating healthy, can behabitual.

killers are

So lets break this down. What are thebuilding blocks of speed? When you think

about it, all business ACTIVITY reallycomes down to two simple things:Making decisions and executing on decisions. Your success dependson your ability to develop speed as a habit in both.

Making decisionsA good PLANnext week.

violently executed now is better than a perfect plan

General George Patton said that, and I de nitely subscribe to it. Doyou remember the last time you were in a meeting and someonesaid, Were going to make this decision before we leave theROOM ? How great did that feel? Didnt you just want to hugthat person?The PROCESS OF making and remaking decisions wastes aninsane amount of time at companies. The key takeaway: WHEN ahttp://qz.com/465060/the-art-of-knowing-when-to-make-a-decision/

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decision is made is much more important than WHAT decision ismade.If, by way of habit, you consistently begin every decision-makingPROCESS by considering how much time and effort that decisionis worth, who needs to have input, and when youll have an answer,youll have developed the rst important muscle for speed.This isnt to say all decisions should be made quickly. Somedecisions are more complicated or critical than others. It mightbehoove you to wait for more information. Some decisions cant beeasily reversed, or would be too damaging if you CHOOSE poorly.Most importantly, some decisions dont need to be madeimmediately to maintain downstream velocity.Deciding on when a decision will be made from the STARTprofound, powerful change that will speed everything up.

is a

In my many years at Google, I saw Eric Schmidt use this approachto decision-making on a regular basisprobably without eventhinking about it. Because founders Larry and Sergey were (andare) very strong-minded leaders involved in every major decision,Eric knew he couldnt make huge unilateral choices. This couldhave stalled a lot of things, but Eric made sure that decisions weremade on a speci c timeframea realistic onebut a rm one. Hemade this a habit for himself and it made a world of difference forGoogle.Today at Upstart, were a much smaller

Its important toINTERNALIZE howirreversible, fatal, or nonfatal a decision may be.Very few cant be undone.

company, and were making decisionsthat matter several times a day. Weredeeply driven by the belief that fastdecisions are far better than slow ones,and radically better than no decisions.From day to day, hour to hour, we thinkabout how important each decision is andhow much time its worth taking.Thereare decisions that deserve days of debate

and ANALYSIS , but the vast majority arent worth more than 10minutes.Its important to INTERNALIZE

how irreversible, fatal, or non-

fatal a decision may be. Very few cant be undone.http://qz.com/465060/the-art-of-knowing-when-to-make-a-decision/

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Note that speed doesnt require one leader to make all the callstop-down. The art of good decision making requires that yougather input and perspective from your team, and then push towarda nal decision in a way that makes it clear that all voices wereheard. As Ive grown in my CAREER , Ive moved away fromtelling people I had the right answer upfront to shaping andsteering the discussion toward a conclusion. I wouldnt call itconsensus buildingyou dont want consensus to hold you hostagebut input from others will help you get to the right decisionfaster, and with buy-in from the team.This isnt a vote for rash decisions. I can be a little too pedal to themetal at times, and sometimes my co-founder Anna will say, Thisis a big DECISION . Even though we think we know what to do,lets give it 24 hours. Shes SAVED us multiple times with thatwisdom.

Theres an art to knowingwhen to end debate andmake a decision.

Theres an art to knowing when to enddebate and make a decision. Manyleaders are reluctant to make the nalcall when there are good arguments anda lot of emotions on both sides. Weintuitively want the team to come to theright decision on their own. But Ive

found that people are enormously relieved when they hear thatyoure grabbing the baton and accepting responsibility for adecision. Using the CEO prerogativeto make the nal callisntsomething you ought to need every day. As long as you do itsparingly, you can actually make your employees moreCOMFORTABLE , and engender more trust by pulling the trigger,logically explaining your choice and sticking with it.In fact, gauging COMFORT on your team is a really helpfulmeasure of whether youre going fast enough or not.You KNOW

youre going fast enough if theres a low-level

discomfort, people feeling stretched. But if youre going too fast,youll see it on their faces, and thats important to spot too.While I was at Google, Larry Page was extremely good at forcingdecisions so fast that people were worried the team was about todrive the car off a cliff. Hed push it as far as he could go withouthttp://qz.com/465060/the-art-of-knowing-when-to-make-a-decision/

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people crossing that line of discomfort. It was just his fundamentalnature to ask, Why not? Why cant we do it faster than this? andthen wait to see if people STARTED screaming. He really ralliedeveryone around this theory that fast decisions, unless theyrefatal, are always better.

Executing decisionsA lot of people spend a whole lot of time re ning their productivitysystems and to-do lists. But within the context of a team and abusiness, executing a PLAN as quickly as possible is an entirelydifferent concept. Heres how Ive learned to execute withmomentum.Challenge the whenIm always shocked by how many plans and action items come outof meetings without being assigned due dates. Even when dates areassigned, theyre often based on half-baked intuition about howlong the task should take. COMPLETION dates and times follow atribal notion of the sun setting and rising, and too oftentomorrow is the default answer.Its not that everything needs to be done NOW , but for items onyour critical path, its always useful to challenge the due date. All ittakes is asking the simplest QUESTION : Why cant this be donesooner? Asking it methodically, reliably and habitually can have aprofound impact on the speed of your organization.This is de nitely a tactic that starts with

Today is better thantomorrow, right now isbetter than six hours fromnow.

individual employees rstideally thosein senior positions who canINFLUENCE others behavior. As aleader, you want them to make things Ilike to do become things we like to do.This is how ideas get ingrained. Ive seentoo many people never question when

something will be delivered and assumeit will happen immediately. This rarely happens. Ive also seenideas oat into the ether because they were never anchored intime.You dont have to be militant about it, just consistently RESPONDhttp://qz.com/465060/the-art-of-knowing-when-to-make-a-decision/

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that today is better than tomorrow, that right now is better than sixhours from now.Theres a funny story about my old pal Sabih Khan, who worked inoperations at Apple when I was a product manager there. In 2008,he was meeting with Tim Cook about a production snafu in China.Tim said, This is bad. Someone ought to get over there. Thirtyminutes went by and the conversation moved to other topics.Suddenly Tim looked back at Sabih and asked, Why are you stillhere? Sabih left the meeting immediately, drove directly to SanFrancisco Airport, got on the next ight to China without even achange of clothes. But you can BETfast.

that problem was resolved

The candle is always burning. You NEED

leadership to feel and

infuse every discussion with that kind of urgency.Recognize and remove dependenciesJust as important as assigning a deadline, you need to tease out anydependencies around an action item. This might be obvious, butmission critical items should be absolutely GANG tackled by yourteam in order to accelerate all downstream ACTIVITIES . Thingsthat can wait till later need to wait. Ultimately, you cant have teammembers slow-rolling on non-vital tasks when they could behacking away at the due date for something that is make or break.A big part of this is making sure people

Mission critical itemsshould be absolutely gangtackled by your team.

arent waiting on one another to takenext steps. The untrained mind has aweird way of defaulting to serialACTIVITIES i.e. Ill do this after youdo that after X, Y, Z happens. You wantpeople working in parallel instead.

A lot of people assume DEPENDENCIES

where they dont even

exist.How can you turn serial dependencies into parallel action? As aCEO, I insert myself at different points in a PROCESS

to radically

accelerate things. For example, if were coming up on anannouncement and time is of the essence, I might jump in and justwrite the blog post myself. Its not that my team couldnt do it. Ihttp://qz.com/465060/the-art-of-knowing-when-to-make-a-decision/

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just know it would be faster since Im the one whos picky about thecontent anyway. As a leader, its your job to recognize thedependencies and non-dependencies, and take action dependingon how critical the thing is and when its due.Ten times a day Ill nd myself sitting in a meeting saying, Wedont need to WAIT for that thing, we can do this now. Thatthought is so common. Its just that people need to say it out loudmore often.Eliminate cognitive overheadRemember when you used to DOWNLOAD

lots of songs on

iTunes? It was so painfully slow if you wanted to buy a whole albumat once. Youd have to wait for one to nish downloading so theycould all speed up. Projects are like this. Sometimes a project is socomplicated that it feels like youre downloading six albums at onceso everything else grinds to a halt too.OUR PICKS

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I cant even count the number of meetings I had at Google relatedto enterprise app identities versus NORMAL

consumer Google

IDs. We launched a project to x this, but it was so complicated thatthe rst 30 minutes of every meeting were dedicated to restatingwhat had happened in the last meeting. The cognitive overheadwas mind boggling.This is how I learned that if you can knock out big chunks of aproject early, you can reduce the overhead of the remaining partsby 90%. You should always be on the lookout for theseOPPORTUNITIES .Often, it will be one tiny element of a project thats adding all ofthe complexity. For example, our business at Upstart has to complywith a lot of regulations. Theres not a lot we can do until we knowwell have legal APPROVAL , so we used to spend a lot of timedancing around whether something was going to be legal or not.Then we thought, why dont we just get a brain dump from ourlawyers saying, Do this, this and this and not this, and youll bene. Having that type of simple understanding of the problemdrastically reduced the cognitive overhead of every decision wemade.If you can assess, pull out, and stomp on the complicating pieces ofhttp://qz.com/465060/the-art-of-knowing-when-to-make-a-decision/

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the puzzle, everyones life gets easier. The one I see the mostandthis includes at Google toois that people hem and haw over whatthe founder or CEO will think every step of the way. Just get theirinput rst. Dont get your WORK reversed later on. What afounder might think is classic cognitive overhead.

Use competition the right wayTalking about your competition is a good way to add urgency. Butyou have to be careful. As a leader, your role is to determinewhether your team is going fast because theyre panicked, or if theydont seem to be paranoid enough. Based on the ANSWER ,competition is a helpful tool.At Upstart, we constantly say that while were working hard on thisone thing, our competitors are probably working just as hard onsomething we dont even know about. So we have to be vigilant. Alot of people say you should ignore competition, but byacknowledging it, youre incentivizing yourself to set the pace inyour MARKET .

You can either set the paceof theMARKET or be theone to react.

You can either set the pace of theMARKET or be the one to react.Whoever is fastest out of the gate is theone everyone else has to react to.When we were launching Google Apps,

we were coming out against MicrosoftOf ce, which had this dominant, monopolistic ownership of thebusiness. We thought about what we could do differently andbetter, and the simplicity of our pricing was part of it. We offeredone price of $50 per employee per yearcompared to the wacky 20page price list Microsoft would drop on you. We didnt agonize overwhether it should be $45, $50, or $55I think we decided that in ahalf hour. We just wanted to be able to tell people, We may not befree, but well be the simplest decision you ever made. That was usre-setting the bar for the MARKET and pushing it hard soeveryone else would have to react to it.Rally support for decisionsAlmost nothing in tech can be done in a vacuum. Basically, onceyouve made a decision, youll need to convince others that yourehttp://qz.com/465060/the-art-of-knowing-when-to-make-a-decision/

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right and get them to PRIORITIZE

what you need from them over

the other things on their plate.INFLUENCING a decision starts with recognizing that yourereally just dealing with other people. Even if its a vendor oranother company you need to rally, it boils down to one personrst. Given this view, you need to make a point of understandingthis person, what their job is, how their success is measured, whatthey care about, what all of their other priorities are, etc. Then ask:How can you help them get what they want while helping you getwhat you want?Ive seen this done by appealing to peoples pride. Maybe you tellthem that you used to work with a competitor who was quitespeedy so that they have incentive to go even faster. Ive also seenthis done by appealing to human decency and being honest. Youmight say something like, Hey were really BETTING heavily onthis, and we really need you guys to deliver.Whichever route you CHOOSE , you want to back up yourargument with logic. You should gently seek to understand whatshappening. I tend to ask a lot of questions like: Can you help meunderstand why something would take so long? Is there any waywe can help or MAKE it go faster? Really try to get to the heartof the actions theyre taking and the time theyve carved out to doit. And if this works, be sure to commend them to their boss.I highly recommend this over a brute

How can you make otherpeopleLOOK good?

force method of escalating things to thepersons MANAGER or throwingcompetition in their face. That doesntserve them, and theyll be much lesslikely to serve you as a result.

How can you make other people look good? How can you makemeeting your needs a win for them inside their company?All of this comes back to making things go as fast and smoothly aspossible. When you feel things START

to slow down, you have to

keep asking questions. Questions are your best weapon againstinertia.To keep things moving along at Upstart, I ask a lot of hardhttp://qz.com/465060/the-art-of-knowing-when-to-make-a-decision/

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questions very quickly, and most of them are time related. I knowthat we execute well and are generally WORKING

on the right

things at the right time, but I will always challenge why somethingtakes a certain amount of time. Are we working as smartly as we

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can?Too many people believe that speed is the enemy of quality. To anextent theyre rightyou cant force INNOVATION

and

Today is a blue moon: What doesthat really mean, anyway?

sometimes genius needs time and freedom to bloom. But in myexperience, thats the rare case. Theres not always a stark tradeoff

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organization use that as a false shield or excuse to lose momentum.

between something done fast and done well. Dont let you or your

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The moment you do, you lose your competitive advantage.

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a former google exec on how to make tough decisions quickly - quartz

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