David Dodson: Bam
Julie Edwards: ahead and let people in
Julie Edwards: welcome. Everyone. I see you joining us. This is Julie Edwards, with Niche Academy. We'll get started here in just a minute, but I want to give you a second to come in. Get situated in the room. You're welcome to hop over to the chat if you would like. Say, Hi, let us know where you're from. We do publish the Chat Transcript on the blog. There's often so much great information that goes back and forth. So you don't have to use the chat if you don't want to. But if you would like to, you're welcome to
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Julie Edwards: We are right at the top of the hour, and so we will go ahead and get started. Please keep joining. Say hello to us. Say hello to each other, but we will officially launch this webinar. I am Julie Edwards, an instructional designer with Niche Academy, and I would like to welcome you to this webinar on 5 critical skills to lead an organization and how to master them.
Julie Edwards: Niche Academy is an easy to use all-in-one learning platform to help organizations create and deliver effective training, measure, success and improve your organizational health.
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Julie Edwards: you're welcome to turn on closed captioning at the bottom of your screen in zoom. If you would like to use that.
Julie Edwards: please continue to chat with each other in the chat box, but if you have a question for the presenter. Please use the QA. Box on zoom. We have over 300 people registered for this webinar. There are already over 90 of us in the room, and so things do get lost in the chat. If you put a question in the Q. And A. Box, I'll do my best to moderate those at the end of the webinar.
Julie Edwards: So this webinar is part of our new and expanded offering to professionals in the training, talent, management and learning and development space. I'm so happy to see so many of you here from all over the country today we have more free upcoming webinars, and I will drop a link to our blog in the chat, so you can see and register for those
Julie Edwards: I'm happy to introduce our presenter today. David Dodson.
Julie Edwards: David is on the Stanford University's graduate school of business faculty, where he guides students in tactical execution. He teaches one of the most sought after courses at Stanford, and in 2023 the Economist listed his course as one of the 3 hottest courses at Stanford.
Julie Edwards: He recently received the Msx teaching excellence award, and is a six-time speaker. In the Graduation last lecture series David began his career as a Mckinsey and Company consultant, then became a serial entrepreneur operating 6 companies as CEO, or executive chairman.
Julie Edwards: He has since served as a board member of more than 40 companies, and has been an active investor in over 150 businesses. He's a frequent business commentator on Cnbc. And Fox News, and has been published in the New York Times, Boston Globe Fortune Magazine, Forbes, Cnn. Business insider, the Hill, the Denver Post, and other publications. I am so thrilled to have David joining us today, and I will turn the webinar over to him.
David Dodson: Great Julie, thanks. I appreciate that. And I think that the reason why the course that I teach at Stanford the economist said it was one of the hottest courses.
David Dodson: is because the subject matter is so interesting, and most people who are leading organizations as managers recognize how important this is so what I'd like to do. I'm really excited to be here and to be, and I didn't know about the Nisha Academy until Julie had reached out to me, and I was just fascinated by what you're trying to do and how effective you are. And so I'm really happy to be here with you, and I thought about as I was getting ready for today's webinar, I thought about what would be interesting to people who are attending.
and I decided to give you a little bit of kind of behind the scenes view on what happened that led to the book, the Managers Handbook.
David Dodson: I didn't intend to write a book. I certainly didn't intend to write a book that was gonna be a Wall Street journal bestseller. But I sort of stumbled upon the material. And I wanna take you through the the path that I went through stumbling upon this material because I think it is so relevant to what everybody here on this webinar is is facing in terms of day to day management issues, and why they're so important and why they can be so effective
David Dodson: when we titled the book the last part of the subtitle of the book is pressure competition, and that may not make sense. Right. Now, when you think about, you know, day to day management, you know. Who do I hire? How do I let someone go? How do I give feedback and so forth.
David Dodson: But I think by the end of this webinar, you're gonna really realize what? How these 5 basic skills of management are. Extraordinary competitive weapon. So if you'll let me. What I wanna do is I wanna first kind of walk you through. How this whole book came about, which is not something that's in the book. So it's just something that I prepared for for the Nisha Academy.
David Dodson: Talk about a couple of the areas of the book to give you a sense of what's in the book. We're not gonna obviously get through all the material in the book, but at least then you would know whether that whether it was something that you wanted to pursue further.
David Dodson: And then Julie and I were talking a little bit about this before the webinar, how we wanna make sure that there's an opportunity to ask some questions. So please fill up the question box with questions, and I'm gonna make sure that we have time so that we can talk about the things that are that that you're finding and most important to you. So let's let's go kind of behind the scenes if we will, on what led to the manager's handbook. And and to begin, I need to explain that, as Julie said.
David Dodson: I was a II went to business school at Stanford. I was II got my economics degree there as well worked at Mckenzie went back, and then I became an entrepreneur. So I. So my roots are as an operator. But along the way I was able to accumulate some capital started investing and created an investment firm, or we invest in small and medium sized companies, probably companies in organizations very similar to the types of organizations that are on this call and the issues that you're facing
David Dodson: and the primary metric that we use to measure. How we're successful with our investments is moic, which just stands for money on invested capital
David Dodson: fancy and Mba speak for saying, if you put in a dollar, and then later you get $2 and 50 cents back, the moic would be 2.5.
David Dodson: So with that. this, these are our results.
David Dodson: So nice distribution. Most of the companies have a good successful moic. Some are successful more than sexual, successful than others.
David Dodson: and I got wondering a few years ago. Well, what actually makes for a good business or good successful investment, which is a successful investment is just an ex a way to think about a successful company. And I listed the things that I sort of been taught in business school, and then I had operated under
David Dodson: and compare them to what our actual results were.
David Dodson: Now, I'm not gonna take you through all of them cause. I don't need to to make the point. I'm just gonna pick one, which is whether you're in a fast growing industry or not. And I spent a lot of my time in Silicon Valley, where we're all talking about fast growing industries and so forth. And I thought, Okay, well, if that's true.
David Dodson: then the company, the companies that we invested in that happen to be in fast growing industries should do better than the companies that are in store growth industries, and it would look something like this
David Dodson: that if you were to graph the Mo. IC on one side and the industry growth on the other, that the outcomes which are those dots should sort of correlate with the industry growth.
David Dodson: bigger the industry growth, the higher the moic. So that's what I expected to see.
David Dodson: So then we went back 18 years and graphed it. and this is what we saw.
David Dodson: II was shocking, and it was not at all what I expected. Now I'll get rid of the white dots, so you can really see what we're looking at. There was almost no correlation between the market that we're in
David Dodson: and how well the company did. So I'm scratching my head, I'm thinking, okay. I don't know what's going on here. But sometimes we make investments, multiple investments in the same industry.
David Dodson: Well, those dots should all be closely clustered together because everything else is the same. Well. first, when I looked at was this, I mean, the outcomes were all across the board, even though the industry growth rate was exactly the same.
David Dodson: and I saw this over and over again.
David Dodson: but there was no correlation there.
David Dodson: and, in fact, when I looked at everything together, and I took all of our investments that we're ending up in in stable businesses and high growth industries.
David Dodson: It was actually evenly split. I wish it wasn't exactly 50 50, because it would make the I wasn't. This is not supposed to be a representative chart. It actually literally was.
David Dodson: 50% did better than 2 and a half times our money and 50% did worse. Alright. So maybe this is about me, I thought, or how are the kinds of investments that we do? So for fun? I said, All right, I'm gonna test this out.
David Dodson: and I looked at the Forbes 400 which every year Forbes magazine lists the 400 wealthiest people in the in the United States. I took out people who had inherited their money. I took up people real estate. I took up people in sports and entertainment, so I didn't think that that would that would be relevant. And I just put them into buckets. Did they make their money in a stable business, or did they make all their wealth in a high growth business.
David Dodson: And this is what I saw.
David Dodson: It's actually really pretty close to our own direct experience. And, in fact.
David Dodson: more of the billionaires that are self made billionaires in the United States to them in stable businesses. Okay? So at this point, I really did feel like we were out of something. But again, I wasn't asked to write a book.
David Dodson: So we went and we looked at industry after industry. And I'm gonna just quickly go through a couple of the industries that we saw just to sort of make the point. So for fun, let's look at the airline industry. So this is these are. These were the top airlines in 1950. So way back, when in the United States
David Dodson: and 20 years later.
David Dodson: only those are surviving
some new entrants.
David Dodson: and you can see by what's grayed out in the past
David Dodson: companies that are airlines that are out of business. And so it went.
David Dodson: The new ones. The list of new ones kept getting smaller and smaller lots of new entrants. And, in fact, in this last list there's only 3 airlines that are top airlines today that were top airlines in 1950.
David Dodson: Now pause and think about this.
David Dodson: All of these companies are competing for the same passengers.
David Dodson: the same employees. They fly out of the same airports. They buy jet fuel from the same energy companies. They buy planes from the same manufacturer planes, and yet
David Dodson: there's so many different changes and winners and losers. Something's going on here.
David Dodson: and that confirmed my earlier charts, so did another one very briefly. So there were these 3 or 4 primary department, you know, discount department stores in the United States, all all form sort of around the the turn of the century, and then around my birthday. Kmart, Target and Walmart all came to be. And of course here's what happened
David Dodson: makes no sense at all. Walmart and Kmart are really the only 2 survivors, and Walmart, of course, is the hands down the survivor. You think about Sam Walton's life in Arkansas when he opened that first store in 1961 he was competing for the same pieces of real estate.
He had no cost advantage when he went to Procter and Gamble to buy toilet paper that he was gonna sell. He was paying a higher price than everybody else, because he just started with one store.
David Dodson: He had no advantages at all, and yet he completely annihilated everybody else. That doesn't make any sense.
David Dodson: It shouldn't. It shouldn't happen that way. So I thought, okay, fine. That's airline department stores. What about really fast growing businesses. What happens there?
David Dodson: So looked at, for example,
David Dodson: personal computers. So these are all the companies that started in the personal computer business way back when and if most of those names are not familiar to you, that's kind of the point.
David Dodson: Apple. And actually that apple should be on the other side of Dell, but doesn't make any difference.
David Dodson: That apple only came in after all of these other companies.
David Dodson: And here's where we are today. The personal computer industry is dominated by 3 companies, none of which were early interests.
David Dodson: none of which invented anything. Apple didn't invent the PC. They didn't invent the mouse. They didn't invent the interface. They didn't invent the printer. They didn't invent any of those. They were just much better at implementing against all these other companies that had a big head start. Well, same thing with smartphone. We think about Apple, the smartphone. But look at this. Ibm and Nokia HP. Ericsson qualcomm blackberry Motorola.
David Dodson: big, established, wonderful companies that all had a huge start over Apple
David Dodson: and Samsung which now dominate the market. They were actually the last companies to come into the market.
David Dodson: and just for fun. If you think about the the Smartwatch, I think everybody thinks about Apple with a smartwatch. What they didn't realize is the Smartwatch was invented about 15 years earlier, and companies like Kco and Microsoft had Alt. Ibm. Had all tried to develop a smartwatch and were unsuccessful at it.
David Dodson: Facebook, by the way, Facebook had a 3, 3 years. They were 3 years behind their primary competitors, who had 150 million subscribers and were venture capital backed.
David Dodson: and Facebook came and dominated them all. My favorite, frankly, is Amazon Jeff Bezos did not invent online retailing that was invented, you know, nearly a decade earlier.
David Dodson: and he employed all of the same technology and plumbing that was already established. They weren't even the first store, the first company to sell books online that happened 3 years earlier.
David Dodson: And right after they started selling books, online borders, books, and Walden book. And so all the other major retailers tried to do the same thing, and, by the way, they had a lower cost of goods
David Dodson: they had distribution. They had brand, they had the employees. They had the relationships with the publishers like App Amazon had no right to win, and yet they did
David Dodson: so. It brings me back to this curious chart
David Dodson: that I realized that something else was going on. And so the the next chapter, if you will, was me figure out, why is this so because it's not explained by the markets. It's not explained by the industries.
David Dodson: And I went back and I looked at all of the companies and industries that I really admired, that I thought were were exceptional. What they did, and what I found over a period of a couple of years was that they all were good at 5 things.
David Dodson: and, by the way, there were, there were no exceptions to this. All of them were good at 5 things.
David Dodson: and the 5 things are outlined in the book which are a commitment to building a team a willingness to seek and take advice. Fanatical custodian of time obsession with quality.
and setting it adhering to priorities.
David Dodson: And each one of those were discovered as a part of the process, something like a commitment to building a team might have seemed obvious. and it was frankly
David Dodson: but a willingness to seek advice. How I first got thinking about that. As I looked at the relationship between Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. and how much Bill Gates relied on Warren Buffett for advice early on, and what I realized for these great leaders were actually voracious consumers of advice, and they did it for 2 reasons.
David Dodson: The first reason was
David Dodson: that they knew that if someone else had seen that same problem before, and they had pattern recognition around it. 2 things were gonna happen.
David Dodson: One was that there was going to be a they were gonna be able to get to the answer faster. And the second was that they were gonna be right more often than their competition or their rivals. So if in a typical situation, when you're addressing a complex problem, you're right, 70% of the time.
David Dodson: And you can figure out a way by just asking someone else who's seen the problem multiple times. You can be right, 85% of the time
David Dodson: and get it done in a fraction of the amount of hours and time spent. That's a big competitive advantage, which is why the best leaders do that. Excuse me.
David Dodson: which led to being a fanatical custodian of time.
David Dodson: and the story behind that one started when I was having coffee with a friend of mine, Tom Staggs, who at the time was the chief executive or chief operating officer of Disney. So Tom had about 220,000 people reporting to him in his entire organization across 6 continents.
David Dodson: We're having coffee one day at Stanford, and we were meeting at 100'clock in the morning, and I got there about 4 min late, and I was thinking about all the emails that I hadn't gotten done and what I the unanswered things on my to do list. And of course I was late.
David Dodson: And there's Tom, this calm as can be. He's got a quarter of a million employees
David Dodson: operating across 6 continents, and I'm the one who's late. So I said Tom, like like what's going on? I need. I need some explanation here. And he said 2 things. First, he talked about how surrounds himself with good people.
But the second thing is, he said, he is very, very careful with how he spends his time.
David Dodson: And so we talked about that, and I realized that.
David Dodson: How can I? How can somebody manage a quarter of a million people in the same number of hours in the day or same hours in the day, as I have managing at the time, just basically my staff at Stanford University.
And so I looked at the I looked at how these people manage their time. And I was talking to Professor Michael Porter about this. Who's up quite famous professor at Harvard University, said, I can help you with this statement, he said, we actually studied 17 high performing Ceos, and we followed them around. Imagine this.
David Dodson: and we looked at what they were doing in 5 min increments. For weeks after weeks after weeks he actually collected 60,000 h of data
David Dodson: on how these high performing leaders spent their time. Any one of the things that they realized is that they were ruthless about managing their time well, because they knew they only had so many hours in the day
David Dodson: so then I went, and I looked at what they did, and and and what I found is that they did not do. They didn't go to weekend seminars and completely change how they manage their day, because those things of course, we all know we slip back and go back into our old bad habits, but they had a handful of very simple things that they did that allowed them to run organizations, that in the case of my friend Tom Staggs. A quarter of a million people.
David Dodson: Then As a result of being very good at how you're managing your day and your time. Then that allows you to be very focused.
David Dodson: And setting and hearing to priorities is one of the primary things that people are able to do who who are able to move organizations quickly and fast and accurate, and achieve the kinds of things that we saw earlier in the presentation.
David Dodson: because they focus on the things that matter, and they don't focus on the things that don't matter. And I want to come back to this in a minute, just to illustrate the example, and then the last one, which was which which for me was, was a discovery I would not have expected.
David Dodson: and it came to our late in the research was an obsession with quality. and what the the reason why it was so much fun to stumble upon this is, it became so obvious in the end. You know, if I asked everybody, I mean, we've got 122 people on this call, and I asked if everybody or obviously we can't do it. It's too bad that it would be kind of fun to do if I asked everybody right down 3 or 4 companies or organizations that you really admire. And I'm not saying just because they're they're they're doing things today. But
over a P. Over a period of time, the last 10 years or something. You really admire these companies, and you and you and you like what they do.
David Dodson: Every single company on that list organization would have a high quality product.
David Dodson: So what I realized is, it's a requirement to survival. But the other is that it's actually the best way to the best way to make money. If you have a high quality product, there is no better way to keep and retain your existing customers, because then we live in a world where information is nearly perfect. You can go on so many sites on the Internet and find out who is the best person at mowing the lawn, who is the quickest person and picking up a delivery. So information on quality is almost perfect right now in today's day and age
David Dodson: the easiest thing to do is to keep an existing customer where you could only really do that with quality.
David Dodson: Second thing is the easiest way to get a new customer is to have a high quality product because price because price has an adverse effect on on profitability. And if you have a high quality product. You can charge more. And the additional ma amount that you charge goes straight to the bottom line. There's no cost associated with the price increase. So that's why this obsession with quality.
David Dodson: Was one of the 5 characteristics.
David Dodson: Alright. So I identify these 5. And then it was time to think about. Well, I'd like to. I'd like to do something with this. And I was talking to my wife, Wendy about this, and I said, You know, I've discovered these 5 things.
David Dodson: I could use it in class, maybe for a given class. But I actually really, really like to use this in a way to help transform organizations.
David Dodson: And there was a book that came out in the eighties called in search of excellence was that it was the. It was the hit book business book at the time written by 2 people at Mckinsey, and then a couple of decades later. A colleague of mine, Jim Collins, wrote a book called Good to Great, which was also a blockbuster business book.
David Dodson: I read both of them. I loved reading them. but I got thinking about it.
David Dodson: I didn't do anything differently. After I read the book
David Dodson: I behaved exactly the same as much as I love the book, and as much as the conclusions were in the book.
David Dodson: I didn't do anything different. So I'm gonna write a book. I wanna write a book that's gonna change people's behavior. That's gonna actually help them be better managers and help them transform their organizations.
David Dodson: So in order to do that, it's not, it's not sufficient to just say, Hey, go out and build a great team and you'll do well. I had to figure out how to build a great team. And so the building blocks of this book were to take each of these 5 things and break them down into what I ended up calling sub skills.
David Dodson: There were common common behavior traits to get to these major skills, we should commend to building a team. So let me let me let me explain it with an example. I think that would be the easiest. So let's say, commitment to building a team
David Dodson: broke it down into 7 things, and what I realized is, if you do all these 7 things. You will have a good team to think about it this way. I was watching my niece play the piano once, and she's a beautiful piano player. And I was thinking to myself, I can't play the piano. And I was thinking to myself, How does she do that?
David Dodson: Well, I realized, okay, she needed to learn how to read music
David Dodson: seem to learn the difference in a sharp and a flat.
David Dodson: She needs to know how to position her fingers over the 88 black and white keys. She need to learn how to do the pedals, each one of those sub skills. If you will.
David Dodson: Pretty manageable. you learn them, and you master them. You put them together. You're playing beautiful music.
David Dodson: or alternately, II tried to play golf. I'm not very good, golfer, but I know enough to know that you can't just hand someone a golf club and say, go golf. you have to teach them the difference between a driver and a putter. You have to tell them how to hold, hold, how to hold the club, where your feet need to be, how to read the green, and you put all that together, and then you learn how to play golf? I thought, Well, why don't I apply those same concepts of music and athletics to business practice. So we take the the idea of a commitment to building a team, and I break it down into 7 individual pieces.
David Dodson: How to interview and and hire well how to onboard people. Well. how you coach people
David Dodson: how you handle people who are underperforming, how you collect information. So you know how well, you're doing through 3 60 reviews and exit interviews. And of course you're never gonna have a high performing organization if you not able to let people go. But there's right ways to let people go that are consistent with your values and your brand, and knowing that you're letting the right people go so that they can end up in a in a job where they can succeed, and you can open up that place for someone else who Ca, who who will succeed in your organization.
David Dodson: So I broke it into each of these sub skills. And at the end of each chapter I said, you know what
David Dodson: I think people are gonna read some of this, and they might forget what they read. So at the end of each chapter, I just take half a page or a page, and I summarize the chapter. So, by way of example, let's say, in your organization, you read the chapter on How to do an exit interview. If someone leaves the company, whether they were asked to leave or they left voluntarily.
David Dodson: You don't have to reread the chapter just when you're going to do an exit interview. Go to the last page of the chapter, and there it is, and half a page, step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Then you'll do an exit interview as well as anybody can do an exit interview. So that's how the book. That's how the book was broken broken up. So that it can be very usable.
David Dodson: I thought I was done.
David Dodson: and the last thing you do when you're writing a book is, you write the introduction. You know it's the first part of the book. It's the last thing that you do. So I wrote the introduction, and I handed it to a a mentor of mine at Harvard Business School, Michael Porter, who I referenced earlier.
David Dodson: and I said, What do you think now, Michael Porter is the father of strategy, business strategy. He's written more business books than any professor ever, and sold more copies than any professor ever. So he's pretty good authority on this.
David Dodson: So I reading, he's reading the introduction, and I'm pretty nervous because I did wanna make sure that I done a good job. And he finished and he takes the paper, and he sort of slams it upside down. He's and he's he said you got it all wrong, like, Oh, my gosh!
David Dodson: Written this whole book. And now the whole book's wrong. That's the whole book's wrong. Your approach to it is wrong. What you've done is you've listed all of these chapters as if your reader can pick and choose which one they want to do.
he said. What you've done instead is, you've created a unifying theory of execution. and your readers have to understand that they go together. You can't just pick and choose, because if you do, you'll just do the easy ones.
and that, and that will not create a high performing organization. So we gave me an example, said he said, if you want to send it in here to priorities.
David Dodson: You have to have good people. You have to have good people. You have to be able to hire. Well, you have to give them good feedback.
David Dodson: Okay, he said. Also, you're never gonna come up with those priorities if you can't run good meetings. So you also have to. They also have to understand that they have to be good at running meetings. These are all chapters within the book. He took me through 4 or 5 examples to realize that, in fact, it was a unifying theory of execution that that I had stumbled upon. I didn't intend to.
David Dodson: and then the last piece of it was after I wrote the book. So this is sort of the end of kind of like the inside story that I wanted to tell you about. About. Behind the manager's Handbook, which is the book, was completely written, and if I could write one extra chapter it would be this one. I was on the on a vacation with a friend of mine who runs a very, very large real estate company, and we're talking about the book, and he'd read the book, and he liked it, and he said, he said, I got a question for you. What are some organizations that do all 5 of these things.
David Dodson: and as crazy as it sounds. I never thought about it in the context of an entire organization. I've always thought about it in terms of Steve Jobs or Michael Dell, or someone like that, or Sam Walton. And what I realized is that the last piece of this
David Dodson: was that they didn't do. They didn't do these 5 things themselves.
They viewed their job as teachers.
David Dodson: and they wanna. And and they built organizations that did it. I'm I mean, a famous example would be Jeff Bezos at Amazon. They run meetings in a very particular way to make sure their meetings are short and high impact. Well, Jeff Bezos recognized early on that. It didn't make any difference whether he was good at running meetings.
David Dodson: He needed to create an organization that was good at running meetings, and, in fact, if he had his choice between him running good meetings and everybody else running typical meetings.
David Dodson: or an organization where where he ran a typical meeting, ineffective and long, and everybody else. We're running highly effective meetings. That would be. That would be better. That was desirable. And so I saw that the that the best managers, and I'm not talking about anymore of the CEO of Walmart. I'm talking about us day to day managers.
David Dodson: The best managers view themselves in 2 ways. One is, I first need to master these skills, and then I need to become a teacher and teach my team how to be good at hiring, teaching my team how to be good at running meetings. Teach my team good at how to be a good custodian of my of their time, and that was sort of the missing ingredient to the to managers. Handbook.
David Dodson: No with the II what I thought I would do after consultation with Julie is I take about like I don't know. Maybe another 1015 min at the most.
David Dodson: and walk you through a couple of examples of this. Maybe take a little bit of a deeper dive. And then let's just have some questions, and let's talk about what's at what's on everyone else's mind. So I wanna talk about adhering to priorities. And the point that I wanna make here is that you could have a sort of platitude. And you say, Oh, well, we're gonna be focused and in here to priorities.
David Dodson: But that's really hard to do in day-to-day practice. So what the book does is it breaks it down into some specific steps that are actually quite easy from a bite size standpoint, to figure out what you should be working on. And this is not necessarily mean. You know what that, what the CEO of the company wants to work on. It could be what you're working on within your department. So let's just look at an example.
David Dodson: a setting in hearing to priorities. Think about 5 questions. These are 5 simple questions that you can ask of the people that work with you and for you and your customers to get a sense of what you should be working on and what you shouldn't be working on. So, for example, what's going? Well.
David Dodson: then, you might say. Well, she said, seems I mean you know you're a professor at stamp to come up with a more sophisticated question than that. But that's where all the strength is. Is your nice, simple questions that give you profound answers. What's working?
David Dodson: And that? Why is that important. Too often we get started with something, and it's working well, we go. Oh, cool. That's working. Well. So now I'm gonna go do something else. When the right answer is, just keep doing it over and over and over and over again as long as it's working.
So that's first act. What's working? Well. the second question would be.
David Dodson: What are we working on? That's a waste of time.
David Dodson: And a big part of setting and hearing priorities is learning to say no.
David Dodson: The third is, what do our customers care the most about? I was helping a CEO set in here to priorities, and he was talking he was. He was talking about how revenue, revenue revenue that I and I said, but what really matters to your customers? And then he was talking about pricing and so forth. You know what? Let's step back from this.
David Dodson: You drive home every night from work.
David Dodson: Where do you get your gas? He told me where he where he fills up his tank, and I said, Why do you do it there?
David Dodson: And as we talked about the realize, well, I do it there, because it's really easy to get off the street and fill up and get back on the street, because most of the gas costs exactly the same amount
David Dodson: that's figuring out what customers care the most about?
David Dodson: What are we better at than all of our competitors?
David Dodson: michael Porter, in his work on strategies identifies that in most walks of life are not like a business or not like sports. Where there's only one winner, there's generally multiple winners.
David Dodson: And the idea is figuring out what you're really good at and what your customers really care the most about, and spending your time there. And then, lastly. asking people that work for you.
David Dodson: if you or me, what would you be working on? And you'd be amazed at the amount of information that you can hear from your employees and people that work with you. And beside you so 5 simple questions.
David Dodson: another example of figuring out what you shouldn't shouldn't be working on would be 3 simple matrices.
David Dodson: The first one is, I named it after a friend of mine, Gerald Risk, who was the CEO of a large company that still exists, a company called a Sherin, which is an insurance company.
David Dodson: and he said, if you take all the initiatives that you're looking at, and you break them down, and you put them into these 4 buckets. And you think about things that have low and high impact and things that are easy and hard, and if it's low impact and easy, he calls that Temptation Island example. That would be just getting through your emails. For example, you get a kind of a quick little dopamine hit. And you feel a lot of satisfaction on getting your email answered. But you really not having any impact. And it's easy to do, which is one of the reasons we do it
David Dodson: high impact. Easy. That's where you should be spending almost all of your time and energy, although most people don't things that are hard and low impact. Obviously, no. And then, if it's high impact and hard.
David Dodson: not sure. So that's called what I call the Gerald risk matrix.
David Dodson: The second one is the Eisenhower matrix. Some people might be familiar with it.
David Dodson: General Eisenhower popularized this when he was the Supreme Allied Commander during World War 2 broke things into important and unimportant and urgent and non urgent. So it's different about this virtuous versus the Gerald risk matrix is, it introduces the idea of what is urgent versus not urgent and no surprise. If it's urgent and important, you need to do it. Now.
David Dodson: if it's important and not urgent, you schedule up for when you're gonna do it.
David Dodson: Not important, urgent, you delegate it, and of course not important, not urgent. You don't do it, and there are so many things in our day that if we just said, You know what I'm just not going to do it.
David Dodson: And sometimes we fall into it because we get behind and we don't have a choice. And we just say, you know what I'm just gonna hit delete delete delete delete delete and see what happens. And guess what world keeps rotating. So being able to say, You know what? Stop gonna do that. That's the Eisenhower matrix.
David Dodson: The last is the Ansof matrix which you look at your existing product, new product, existing customer, new customer. And the easiest thing is to sell more of what you make to your existing customers. They already like you. You don't need to attract a new customer.
David Dodson: If it's a new customer. A new customer in your existing product
David Dodson: attracting a new customer is hard.
David Dodson: It's either that or going to your existing customers and selling them that already, like you and selling them something new. It's not clear which of those 2
David Dodson: and definitely new customer new product is not something you do regularly.
David Dodson: I wanna tell you sort of the the person who I think is kind of, you know for me, the hero of having focus, which is Steve Jobs. Now, Steve Jobs, apple computer I was talking to Andrea Jung, who's was on the board? It's on the board of Apple and was on the board long during the Steve Jobs years. And she now we're talking about this last week, and she reminded me that Apple computer has more cash than most countries do.
David Dodson: she said. We could buy almost any kind of any company in the world.
David Dodson: and we have hundreds of great ideas that are generated every year. And the secret of apple success is how focus they are. And so since we're doing fine on temp time, I wanna play you a very, very short video that
David Dodson: is using class. And Johnny, I've was Apple's chief designer, and he reported directly to Steve Jobs. and after he retired. A couple of years ago he was asked in a Vanity Fair interview, what were 3 big takeaways from working with Steve Jobs. And I'm just gonna play you the first one and he has some very profound insights into the into the system of or into apple computer and Steve Jobs and focus. So let me play that
David Dodson: sort of 3 sort of life lessons you took away from working with him. This sounds really simplistic, but it still shocks me how few people actually practice this
David Dodson: and it's a struggle to practice. But is, is this issue of focus? Steve was the most remarkably focused person I've ever met in my life.
David Dodson: And
David Dodson: and the thing with focus is it's not sort of like this thing you aspire to, or you decide on Monday. You know what I'm gonna be focused. It is a every minute. II
David Dodson: this is what we're working on. You can achieve so much when you truly focus. And one of the things that Steve would say
David Dodson: because I think he was concerned that I wasn't
David Dodson: I would say, how many things have you said? No to.
David Dodson: and I would honestly I would have these sacrificial things cause that I mean
David Dodson: wants to be very honest about it. And so I say, well, I said no to this. A note for that. and
David Dodson: he! But he he knew that I wasn't vaguely interested in doing those things, anyway?
David Dodson: So there was no real sacrifice. What what focus means is saying? No to something that you, with every bone in your body, you think is a phenomenal idea.
David Dodson: and you wake up thinking about it. But you say no to it, because you're focusing on something else.
David Dodson: And I one of the things that I really I've watched that Clip of Johnny, I've so many times, and every time I watch it it just reinforces to me
David Dodson: how important focus. It's a relentless effort whether it's just in your department or what you're working on.
David Dodson: what you can achieve with focus. And the second is what he said at the very end, which he so he said, focus is not. is not about
David Dodson: not doing the things that you shouldn't do, because they're not good ideas.
David Dodson: That's easy.
David Dodson: What focus is is, he said, is not doing things that are truly, phenomenally good ideas.
David Dodson: because you're working on something else. And there's an expression that I that I use a lot, which is, it's easy to add, it's hard to subtract.
David Dodson: And what a lot of managers fail to realize is that when you get ambitious and you say I'm going to do multiple. I'm going to work on multiple things at the same time
David Dodson: you feel good in the moment. It's about all the things that you might accomplish. But if you get it wrong, the consequences are high.
David Dodson: If you, if you pick too many initiatives. So let's let's pick a an easy example.
Let's say that you're looking at 3 things.
David Dodson: Now, what you don't know is that you can only do 2, but you're looking at 3 good ideas. So you got 2 paths here.
One is that you are ambitious, and you say I'm going to pick 3 things, and I'm going to work on those 3 things.
David Dodson: Well, here's of course, what we know. What happens
David Dodson: is you've bitten off more than you could chew. You're working on too many things you don't want to give up on them.
David Dodson: You feel demoralized that you're not getting it done. You're frustrated with yourself. Maybe you're frustrated with your staff, and eventually, later in the process, you finally accept defeat, and you have 3 things that are sort of about one third done, and it's and it's it's demoralizing to the organization. Everybody feels a sense of failure.
David Dodson: That's what most of us do.
David Dodson: Now let's say you aired in the other side. Obviously, if you pick 2 and it was 2, it's perfect, but most mo most most of us don't get it right the first time.
Let's say you err in the other direction.
David Dodson: You miss Low. you only pick one.
David Dodson: and now you're into 6 or 8 weeks into into your year. And you're looking around. And you're saying, Wow, I
David Dodson: we're really crushing this.
David Dodson: We're doing really, really well, let's add another one. And then you add that second one.
David Dodson: Well, the cost of that is very, very low. You really it didn't cost you really anything, maybe a few weeks or a month's worth of initiative.
David Dodson: And then everybody feels good. We're like, Wow, we're like crushing this first goal. We got to add another goal that we were not going to do until next year, not going to do under Q. 4. That's the magic of it's easy to add.
David Dodson: And it's really hard to subtract.
David Dodson: Now this. What? What I have in front of us now is everybody's kind of familiar with sort of pareto principle. We say, Yeah, 20% of the effort
David Dodson: produces 80% of the result. Now, that's an observation that people have made. And it's a legitimate observation.
But what I'm asking people to do is challenge and say.
David Dodson: Well, does it have to be that way?
David Dodson: And what if it were not that way? What could your results be if a hundred percent of your effort reduced results.
A colleague of mine at Stanford, Graham Weaver, who runs now he teaches at Stanford, but he also runs a very, very large
David Dodson: investment firm, and probably the most successful investment firm that I've ever you know known about.
David Dodson: He's got this different idea, and he professes a hundred a hundred.
David Dodson: And that's what he tries to tell everybody within his organization is challenge ourselves. What if 100% of our effort
David Dodson: produce 100% of our results. What would those results look like? And if you believe in the Pareto idea that 20% produces 80% of the results. it means that you would have 4 times the output if everything that you did produced results.
David Dodson: Now, that might be unrealistic. And I accept that there are things that we're gonna have to do that don't produce results. And we make mistakes along the way. But what if we were just willing to challenge that Pareto principle a little bit, and think about how we spend our time as a good custodian of our time, and how we're setting and adhering to priorities and making sure we're working on the most important things, and we've surrounded ourselves with the best people.
David Dodson: and we can produce results faster and easier because we're willing to seek and take advice. Those are the things that get you to 100. 100.
David Dodson: Now the last thing I wanted to leave us with, and then I said, we try to leave about 15 min for questions. And I guess Julie's gonna curate. The questions is a story that I heard from a woman who comes to class each year, and she was the first woman to sell a company to Yahoo. Then ran a large social media company and then ran a huge part of Facebook, now Meta, where she was in charge of the groups, which is a, was a little over 2 billion people users.
David Dodson: and she was telling me a story the other day about the British rowing team, and some of you may be familiar with this story. They were miserable, and they never won in the Olympics. And one day the leader of the team said.
David Dodson: Well, what makes the boat go faster?
David Dodson: And everybody kind of chuckled because it was so simple, right? Kind of like going those 5 questions, because no, no, no, I mean, I mean, like, like.
David Dodson: what can we do to make the boat go faster.
David Dodson: And it was the beauty of the simplicity of that question that had all its power to it. And I started thinking, Okay, what does make the boat go faster?
David Dodson: And they challenged themselves on every single thing that they did about, whether it made the boat go faster or not, and if it did not make the boat go faster, they said, we're not going to do that. and if it, of course it did, that's what they worked on well, you can probably guess where the story leads to. The story leads to a gold medal in the Olympics, in the in the Australian Olympics, as rowing teams. And so this expression, does it make the boat go faster?
David Dodson: Is an extremely powerful, simple way to think about how you're managing your time. And, in fact, for the companies that I'm involved in. We take this notion of, you know. Does it make the boat go faster and we create little. Blue sight cubes that go next to everybody's computer. And it just lists
David Dodson: what their priorities are.
David Dodson: And then quoting from Johnny, I from Apple Computer, you know, what have you said? No to today? So that we're constantly reminding ourselves of being a good custodian of our time, focusing on our priorities, whether it's whether we run a meeting or not, or how we're working on building our team. All of these things fit together, as Michael Porter explained to me to create a unifying theory of execution. So that's a little bit of the the background, and and how the book came about.
and a little bit of a dive into some of the areas of the book.
David Dodson: It's a how to manual. I wrote every chapter in as few words as possible, because I know everybody on this zoom call, or webinar is busy. You don't have time to read books and books and books on hiring the entire hiring chapters. Only 20 pages.
David Dodson: Because, like you, I'm a busy person, too. And I wrote the book that I wish someone had handed to me when I was first running an organization
and, Julie, why don't I turn it over to you now? So that I can respond to questions and talk about things that are on the your
David Dodson: the mind of the people who are in the webinar.
Julie Edwards: Thank you so much, David. This has been excellent. Please feel free to keep adding your questions to the QA. Box. We'll jump right in. Several people have been asking. You've set this up as sort of a unified theory it's presented as sort of a circle. But where? Where would you start if you're in an organization that's maybe struggling, or you're in a team that's struggling, or you're just overwhelmed. What's the where's the place?
David Dodson: Yeah. So I'm smiling, Julie? Because,
David Dodson: if you would ask me a different question, which is, what's one chapter you wish you had written? It would actually be addressing this because I'm asked this question a lot. and I'm actually working on a companion piece, which I'll probably just post on the Internet, which is sort of how to implement it.
David Dodson: But here's the short version
David Dodson: is that accepting that it's it's a unifying theory. You can't just do the easy things. The question would be, asking yourself in the in these areas, where are you most efficient? So let's just say, since I used it before the golfing analogy, because I think, even if even if you're not a golfer, you can, you can relate to this. Let's say you're really good at putting
David Dodson: and you're really bad at driving. Going off. The T.
David Dodson: Well, that's actually where you should be working on is is your driving skills because your putting skills are an 8 out of 10, and you're driving is a 3 out of 10. So the question is I would look at. I would look at these 5 areas, and I would say, Where are we most efficient
David Dodson: and work on bringing those up? So rather than bring your hiring from an 8 to a 10. Let's say you're running lousy meetings which most of us are. Let's bring our meetings up from a 2 to an 8.
David Dodson: So that would be the first question. The second thing is that some people might say, Okay, well. you know, like the section on adhering to quality. I totally get all that, and that makes sense. And I do have a role in that. But maybe because of my span of control.
David Dodson: I don't have as much responsibility there as others. So the second thing I would think about is if you said, Okay, David, that that's fine. But but I just want to know what I should be starting to work on tomorrow.
David Dodson: I would say it's being a good custodian of your time, because that is 100% in your power and capability. And and by way of example, I talk about really, really simple things that you can do to get control of your time. I'll just give you one example.
David Dodson: Years ago, I said. I asked myself, what if all my 1 h meetings were 40 min, and all my half an hour meetings were 20 min.
David Dodson: and I cut back my meeting time by that. Not a big deal saves me 80 min a day.
David Dodson: So these are the kind of like quick hacks that that that are in that chapter where you can find yourself, what I think you can find yourself 2 h, 2 extra hours in your day. As a result of that.
Julie Edwards: that's fantastic. Thank you.
Julie Edwards: You mentioned quality, and which leads us to another question. There are a lot of people in the webinar who are in libraries or municipalities or other service industries, where the service is the product. How does quality apply in
David Dodson: in those realms? Yeah.
David Dodson: well, there's no just there's no difference between a physical product and a service when you're thinking about quality. So that's the first thing.
David Dodson: Second is that defining quality is one of the chapters in the book, because it's not obvious. And there's ways that you find out what matters to the customers or not.
David Dodson: An example would be I'll give you 2 quick examples.
David Dodson: One is intuit. So intuit's a software company. I realize this is a product, but it but but it won't, it won't it? It will address the issue about what might happen in a library or a restaurant or any other service. Industry
David Dodson: is a.
David Dodson: They have a. They have a a way of doing business which is called follow them home.
David Dodson: So they watch how their customers use the product.
David Dodson: It's very specific, they don't. And they look at how the end users use the product. So if you're in a if you're in a service business and you look at how your end users are actually using your product, you'll usually identify what matters to them.
David Dodson: The second would be. And this is a a service company called Safe Flight auto glass people probably familiar with them, and you know they they just replace chipped windshields. And yes, there's a windshield, but it's really a service business.
David Dodson: They use what's called the power of verbatim. So they don't do scoring of how do we do on a scale of one to 5, or hit the happy button? And so, whether someone's smiling or not, they use the power of verbatim where they talk to customers. So if you're in a library and you've got a customer, a a a user of your library, who comes up and they're checking on a book.
David Dodson: and you take the time because there's no one behind them, and you've got a minute and they're Ok with it and talk to them and say, Why do you come to this library?
David Dodson: What do you like about the library? If you were me, what would you change here? What do you wish we did more of what do you do wish we did less of that's how you get those insights
Julie Edwards: that's fabulous. Thank you. Someone is asking in the chat. What do you see as most important in an interview, the ability to communicate and be personable or skill set this person, says I, work in a library. Customer service is a must. But skill sets are important also. Yeah.
Okay. So there's the concept of having a scorecard.
David Dodson: And II the scorecard identifies 2. There's 2 types of scorecards. One is related to outcomes, and the others related to attributes. So an outcome might be. I want someone who.
David Dodson: I'm not a librarian.
David Dodson: but I have been to libraries, and my wife owns a bookstore.
David Dodson: so I know a little bit about books. Someone who can get the books in the right place after they're returned picking something very simple, something basic. That would be an example of an outcome. So you say, Okay, well, for this particular position. They have to take all these books, and they have to get them back on the shelves in a timely way, and they have to get them on the shelves in the right place. Otherwise our customers or our clients. Can't find the book.
David Dodson: so that's the outcome. The second half of the of of the scorecard is, how will I know, and you identify questions that you can ask, or things that you can do to identify whether this person can take the book and put it. Put the right book on the right in the right place on the right shelf.
David Dodson: Now, that might seem kind of prosaic, and you know a little bit dull than some of the fancy questions that you'll get if you Google, you know 10 best questions to ask in an interview. But that's really the outcomes that you want. That's what makes a good employee. The attributes.
David Dodson: which is a different scorecard, would be a good work. Ethic and a work good at work ethic might be. I want them to show up on time.
David Dodson: and I want when they show up on time. I wanted to make sure that they're clear headed, and they're clear headed that they're not they haven't been smoking pot in the in the parking lot just to be completely literal about it. And they're and they're dressed fine, all those kind of attributes that you're looking for, and then you ask, How will? How will I know?
David Dodson: And some of that might be reference checks. So so this is so, Scorecard is
David Dodson: to the questioner, what are the outcomes you want? And of course it's what it's it's laid out in more detail in the book. What are the attributes
David Dodson: and how you're gonna find that out. The last part about it, because you've mentioned skills in particular
David Dodson: is that there's skills and knowledge and attitude.
David Dodson: Okay? Or excuse me, skills, knowledge and attributes.
David Dodson: Okay, so a skill might be I'm gonna be. I'm gonna be a little bit sort of super basic. Just to make the point. Okay, a skill might be if you were doing a spreadsheet a skill might actually let me use an example I've used before, cause it'll be it'll be simpler than me making up one quickly about a library.
David Dodson: Let let's say that you're in the accounting bookkeeping business. Okay. a skill would be being able to use excel.
David Dodson: Knowledge would be what the current tax laws are.
David Dodson: and an attribute would be your work ethic and your your smarts and your wisdom around it. skills are easy to teach.
Knowledge is relatively relatively easy to teach.
David Dodson: Attributes are hard. So most people prefer to hire for attributes if they if they can, and teach skills and knowledge. And if I said to you, to the person who asked the question. I said, I've got 2 candidates. One knows the library business up and down, but they got a kind of a bad attitude.
David Dodson: or I got some one who has a great attitude and wants to learn. I think you would hire that other person 10 out of 10 times
Julie Edwards: fantastic example. That's really helpful.
Julie Edwards: Someone is asking. You mentioned willingness to seek and take advice. Do you recommend formal mentorships? Or is this less formal process, or both.
David Dodson: So there's different ways, you can see, can take advice. So one could be a a work coach or a life coach. So that would be an example. And there's a chapter on how you might go about finding those people. But let's pick something that's more day to day, which is you have. We all have people in our life who we think might know the answer or might be able to help us frame the answer.
David Dodson: And those those mentorship relationships or advisor relationships are usually not engineered. You don't go. I mean, I do get this because I because I teach at Stanford. I'll have a student might say I'd like you to be my mentor. But that's not usually how it works. It's more of an organic process.
So we have. And those those people develop in our life.
David Dodson: However, there's ways to develop those
David Dodson: relationships more effectively. And then, most importantly, there's ways to use those relationships, and they go hand in hand.
David Dodson: So I walk through a a multi part process about how you ask someone for advice. Typically, when someone's coming to me for advice, let's say we have a 20 min period for wh where they're they're on the calendar to to chat with me. We spend maybe the first 15 min where they're giving me all of this background information
David Dodson: way more than I need. I don't even know what the question is. And then at the end, as if they're writing a novel, or it's a Hollywood, you know, Hollywood show. they say. And therefore my question is, X.
That's a really ineffective way to get the most out of my time. What they want is they they need to. They want to get 2 h worth of information in 20 min. So I just walk them in. The first thing you do is you say this is the problem I'm trying to solve, or the opportunity I'm trying to take advantage of.
David Dodson: Step 2 is you provide the minimum amount of background information. Minimum means enough, but no more than enough, because you're you don't want to intrude on their ability to give you advice.
David Dodson: The third is, you add, you invite them to ask any clarifying questions, so that if you ended up forgetting something that they needed to know they have a chance to ask it.
and then you shut up and listen. Now.
David Dodson: by doing it in that order
David Dodson: you'll get way. More information from them, and I talk a little bit in the book a little bit more detail in it. But it's basically that simple. And here's the wonderful sort of flywheel effect, which is that when you call someone for advice and you spent 20 min of their time and they gave you like 4 min of advice. It's actually not very fulfilling for the other person. They'll still take your call, but not. It's not quite the same
David Dodson: when you address a a mentor or advisor, and you do it in this sort of organized way. They hang up the phone. And they're thinking, Wow, that was fun like this is something I really understand, and that was really fun to be able to help that person out. I care about them, and I added some real value there. So when you call them again, they're like, Yeah, I'll take your call again. So it's it's all reinforcing
Julie Edwards: excellent practical advice. We're coming right up against the top of the hour. So someone is asking really quickly, Do you have a favorite time management or focus strategy that you use in your life?
David Dodson: 2. One is, I cut all my meeting times back and do it tomorrow, or you can do it this afternoon, and you will find yourself, probably, you know, close to 80 min of free time.
David Dodson: The second thing is that I have a planning routine every morning, and I plan out what I'm gonna do. And I number them in order 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, I separated into into deep work and shallow work, which is explained in the book. And as a result of it. My productivity is so much higher than it was before. So those are my 2 favorite things, and everybody could read the book. It's a both of those are described in a couple of pages, and you could be doing them tomorrow morning.
Julie Edwards: That's great, and I have to end on this question. Somebody asked in the chat, what is the nicest way to give your CEO this book as a recommendation? Any suggestion? Should they just slip it on their desk after hours or
David Dodson: I think the book is written in a way. I hope the book is written in a way that's not offensive, that you could just say, Wow, I read this really great book, and I think we should be implementing it across our organization.
David Dodson: If you got a good boss they'll they'll accept that that's great. And you know this webinar will be posted on our blog. You're welcome to share it with your colleagues. Drum up some interest that way, and then move on from there as well. Get get more people on board, David. Thank you so much for your time this afternoon, your expertise, your enthusiasm. We really appreciate it. Thank you.
Julie Edwards: Thank you all for attending. I will be sharing all of this information in a few days. I really appreciate your time and questions, and we will see you all at the next webinar. Have a great afternoon. Everybody.