Welcome to the Make Work, Work Better podcast, where we delve deep into the minds and experiences of some of the most inspiring leaders in business today. I'm your host, Marc Reynolds. I am thrilled to introduce you to our special guest today, Matt Widdoes. I've been fortunate enough to be able to work with Matt on a bunch of other side projects. I'm just going to share this on your behalf. You used to be a lead singer of a group called Drop Apollo. Check them out.
It turned out being my son's favorite group, but has since gone on to do some pretty amazing things. So tell us a little bit about your journey. How did you get to where you are in the business world? Yeah, I started off working with Red Bull Energy Drink in college, which allowed me to grow there and eventually lead a team in Northern California. So was responsible for kind of event and experiential marketing in Northern California, based in in San Francisco.
I've been in San Francisco ever since, so I've essentially been in the Bay area for, I guess, coming 19 years, which is kind of hard to say out loud, but ended up moving into the startup world. And in 2006 or 7 joined one of the survivors from the dotcom era. And we were later acquired by Intuit. That makes TurboTax and quicken.
You know, my background is in growth and revenue, and the early days at Red bull that took the shape of of field, an event at a company called homestead that was the startup that was bought by Intuit. That was in a more traditional sales focus role. I kind of realized in that process that I didn't really like sales as much as I liked marketing, and I hated not having the data that we have for marketing and the ability to really understand how does that impact the results.
Whereas in sales, sometimes you're like, I feel I could do the same thing every time, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And I don't really feel like I have a sense for where I can improve. And so that led me to look back into going into marketing and mis marketing, and had an opportunity to join a friend's company that later gave me the kind of path into mobile gaming. So I joined a company called Score Streak.
It was funded by the two founders of of bills Xcom, and it was in the real money fantasy sports space. So it was an app that allows people to play for real money against other people in fantasy sports. We were going against DraftKings and FanDuel were kind of the top, the main two players. It's not fair to call them competitors because we were so much smaller than them.
But and as comparison, you know, our annual budget was half a million and DraftKings and FanDuel, I think in the first week, the opening week of NFL, just one of 16, 17 weeks, they spent a combined 100 million. And so, you know, very, very different story that led me into really into user acquisition where I've spent the last so essentially decade in and went to a company called Zynga that makes words with Friends and Farmville and was managing a around 180 million a year. There.
And then that led me to King, which makes Candy crush and a bunch of other games, and that was more like 250, 300 million a year. And then that led me to Maven and started Maven back in April of 2020. So we're coming up on our four year anniversary now. So that's it. Awesome. And tell us a little bit about Maven. Yeah, I mean our goal is to help companies grow. That's a very broad mission.
And I think the challenge and opportunity that we saw, and a lot of us have backgrounds in user acquisition, which is kind of Facebook and Google ads, etc.. But what we saw that I think others don't see, and that is often misunderstood part of a business is that I think a lot of leaders, particularly CEOs, they think that if we just have a better user acquisition team, we see all the Candy crush ads. So let's go hire the person who's responsible for those and we'll have equal success.
And what they're missing is that it's also interdependent, and that our user acquisition at Zynga works because everything else is working really well. So we have foundational data that's really clean, and we can rely on it, and we can slice it up in a lot of different ways. And we have data scientists who can use that data to predict the future, and we can optimize those models. So in the web world, we have landing pages that do a really great job at converting.
And we have really smart people working on that who are focusing on every little minor detail and running clean tests so that it's not okay. Blue button does better than than red button. It's it's more complex than that. And we have proper holdouts and proper statistical significance to make sure that that actually is indicative of of what's working. And it's not just some false positive.
We have really good life cycle teams that are doing email and push notifications, and they're optimizing their part of the world. And we have good creative. We have all these other things. I've used the analogy before of it's like teeth whitening at the dentist. You know, people look out and they see like, okay, well, straight teeth, white teeth, that equals good teeth.
And the reality is, you know, there's a guy at the mall who's got a picture with a gold chain and spiky hair and Jack looking at his phone, who will happily whiten your teeth for 25 bucks, who is not equipped to tell you whether or not that's a good idea? And he's not equipped to diagnose if you need a tooth pulled, and then you have a real dentist and that dentist, if you come in and you need a bunch of work, they're going to be like, well, we're not going to wait in the teeth.
We're going to do all these other things first. And there's plenty of people that get out of that chair and go to the they say, well, whatever, I'm just going to get my teeth whitening. That's the equivalent of just jumping straight to user acquisition. And so to come back to the core of your question on what does Maven do and what is our purpose? Our purpose is to help companies grow. But really that's through almost any means necessary.
And in the areas where we're not good, we'll just tell you. So a good example of that is like PR is another function of helping a company grow, and it relies on a lot of other things to make that work. We're not great at PR, we know companies that are if you need PR, we can recommend you to that company at the right time.
But really what we do is we bring in world class experts in each one of those seats, from data to user acquisition, creative lifecycle, etc. we diagnose what you need and we really operate like a full time internal team. Unlike traditional agencies that are vertically focused. So you have an agency that just as brand and an agency that just as PR and an agency that just does user acquisition and that's not really how it works in the real world full time.
And so you have these companies who are hiring agencies, and they're frustrated because the agency, they can't even put them in front of the data teams because they don't speak data, they just speak brand or whatever else they do. They're frustrated because the agency is trying to sell everything that they have. And it just so happens that exactly what's going to pull you up and out is what they sell.
So you have some SEO agency telling you you need $100,000 a month in SEO, backlink ING and all these other things. Which might be true. That would be the ultimate expression of what you could do in SEO. But that's not necessary. It's a whac-a-mole game. You don't want to just go all in on one thing. And so really what we do is we bring that holistic strategy that a consultancy would we bring in experts to actually do the work like a full time employee.
And we bring in the prioritization and the focus that says, okay, here are all the things that we could be doing. Let's have a conversation with your leadership team to kind of map out what we would do given unlimited budget and like, what would that sequence be? And then now that we know the limitations of the business, like budget or timeline or goals, this is how we would shape that. Would you like to do it? Which pieces would you like us to own? Which pieces would you like us to influence?
Which pieces would you like us to, you know, completely hand over to you and we go from there. So I think the easiest way to talk about what we do is you can think of us like an agency, but we're we're much more like a full time in-house team. So what I hear you say is really, you're an expert in making work work better? Yeah, I think so. I want to dive into questions about some of the things you're talking about in a second.
But before we do, I just want the audience to get to know you just a little bit better in a few ways. First, if I polled people you have worked with and ask them to describe your voice and what I'm saying, your voice. I'm not just meaning your spoken voice, but everything you communicate. If they had to really distill your essence down, what do you hope they would say about you as a leader? Yeah, it's a good question. I think first and foremost that I always treat them fairly and with respect.
If I can leave a trail of people behind me that all say that, that seems like a pretty good outcome. That doesn't mean that I'm always telling them what they want to hear, right? Because that's also not good, right? You wouldn't want that for really any relationship, right? So I think that candidness and I think a willingness to listen and to understand, like seeking to understand first assume positive intent as well. And so even when something looks messed up, it's like this can't be the case.
I'm assuming I'm misreading this. And then in a world where that's not the case, it's like, okay, well, that's not very good, right? Like it's pretty bad. You can still give feedback or criticism or, you know, things that traditionally might be labeled more negative in a way that the other person walks away saying, like, well, they listen to my side. It was candid. It was with respect and fair. And so hopefully that that would summarize it, at least at a high level.
Any leader who could walk away with people saying those things should be able to feel successful, right? That those are some key, really essential things. It might seem obvious and like all of that happens, but I mean, I think we both know that that is not that's for sure. It's a common, common thing. Yeah, honestly, it's not that difficult to achieve. I think it's really a matter of intent and a high degree of empathy as well. A lot of that actually comes down to tone, which is so manageable.
Right. It's like you might have to tie something around your finger to remind you of somebody has a tendency to get heated, or they have a tendency to sound sarcastic or demeaning. I don't know some other negative tone quality, but if your intention and empathy aren't there, there's no faking the tone either. So if you are inherently demeaning, nothing's going to fix that.
But for people who are misunderstood in that way, it's within the ability to manage and control, even if it took a little work. If you deeply seek to understand and you genuinely are putting yourself in the shoes of this other person, for better or for worse, it's going to show the tone will be impacted. The message will be impacted. How you approach it, the first five questions you ask, or if you don't ask any questions at all, you just start ripping into somebody.
That's all indicative of how you feel about them. It's all indicative of the internal perspective you have. If you approach that genuinely with that intent, then everything else kind of falls into line because you can't really have a negative, demeaning tone if you're genuinely trying to understand something. I know that you are one that has routines and you do a lot a variety of different things. You're also very curious.
Is there anything that you do to help prepare your mind or prepare yourself to have that empathy when you went from one meeting to another, or anything that you just naturally have in your routine that you found to be useful? I will say that one's ability to context switch and jump from a really difficult conversation with the internal employee to the next conversation, which is maybe with a client or it's a prospective client.
You have to sell and put on a happy face, coming right out of something that was really emotionally tough. That may just be innate. I don't know, maybe that's something that comes over time and maybe you just wake up whether you don't. Some people struggle with compartmentalizing stuff like that, and they carry it forward. I carry it forward as much as the next person. Because you're not a robot. You end up having to take the breath at the end of the day.
One thing that I found super helpful, and it's something I've had in some way or another for a long time, but have just recently, maybe in the last couple of years, have really been able to put a process to it. And you can find a lot of resources on this, but it's called time boxing. Harvard did a study and they interviewed the top, I don't know, 100 500 CEOs of the top companies or whatever time boxing out is the number one productivity tip from those people.
And so that gives a little bit of credence. What time boxing is, is setting up your day to where it's not just meetings. Right.
So yes, like today we both had a block on our calendar that says this is what we're going to be doing today at this hour, but it's about making sure that that next 15 minutes, maybe after we finish today's podcast, that that's actually blocked and that says, like, this is a time where I'm going to get water and I'm going to catch up on texts, and that's a 30 minute chunk maybe, or this is that four hour period that we're going to be rethinking
brand values, and I'm going to be preparing for this other bigger thing. And so what happens during the day? What happens during the day is things happen and stuff doesn't go to plan. I think the biggest, most important thing that I didn't do until a couple of years ago is rearranging those boxes to actually reflect what happened.
So if the 30 minute chunk I have for catching up on text and getting some water after podcast is over, if that ends up being 15 minutes or 2 hours, I have to one adjust the box visually so it actually reflects what I did to. I have to move boxes around, which is likely going to mean I need to move them into tomorrow. So it does a number of things. One, you can look back every week and see exactly how you spent your time, even if three hours were completely unproductive.
You have to be honest about that. And it's like, yeah, okay. And you start to better understand what you can and can't take. I also use color coding not to come off as too crazy, but, you know, external calls are purple personal events or red internal calls or blue work that I'm getting done that like has to be done for the business is green. Other things that are like less pressing but still need to be done but are less revenue generating are orange.
I could take off my glasses, and I could just tell you how much of my time is going to which function, and I could see, oh my gosh, I get a lot of purple. I'm doing a lot of external calls, and I'm not doing a lot of green stuff, which is meant to drive revenue. Should those be inverted? I don't know, but it gives you a point to say, what did you do last week and how is your time being spent? You can just say explicitly, down to the minute, essentially.
But coming to your point on what are some things that you can do to manage that and kind of avoid, not necessarily avoid, but manage that context switching I think is altogether you can avoid it. It also helps to have an executive admin because they can guard this for you. But it's like, okay, let's maybe not schedule that really difficult internal call just before a sales call. Why are we doing that. That's going to set us up for like weird setup here.
And so bringing some intention to that schedule. So one we can avoid scheduling these things as much as we can to we can kind of bundle things. So like I have Friday is almost entirely spent towards task stuff. And Friday is not a great day for people to take calls. Why even schedule calls on Friday? Let's just not make me available on Friday and we can avoid that altogether. And that's a much better day for tasks.
Early morning it for me is way better time to catch up on email and kind of get the day started, but having that plan as well. And again, coming back to your question, I'm able to as I'm going to bed, I always pull up tomorrow and I'm looking and saying, okay, what does the morning look like? Okay, I've got an early call. I need to make sure I'm up early enough for that or I don't have any calls until 11. Okay, that's pretty cool. And then in the morning I'm going to be doing this task, okay.
That's mentally a heavy task. It's going to be like cognitively deep. Then I do this and I can kind of like see what my day looks like in advance. So that next morning, as I'm going through it, I'm already mentally prepared for what I'm going to be doing. And in an event where it was unavoidable and I've got a really tough emotional call followed by a really tough cognitive call or another call where I need to be really bright and happy, I'm already kind of mentally prepared for that.
So as I'm going into it, I'm like, okay, now we're going to do this other mode and I'm not living minute to minute. I kind of already know what's ahead of me. Yeah, I love it. One thing that you come to realize that you were overly ambitious on what you think you can get done, and that the reality is you have decision fatigue. The premise is like everybody can make a certain number of decisions before they just break.
Some are higher than others, but there's some point where you kind of stop being productive and efficient. And so you also need to kind of figure out, do I like having calls in the morning or in the afternoon? Do I like having these more administrative, functional stuff at the end of the day, beginning of the day, do I want to stack everything on one day?
So anyways, those you can't if you're not tracking it, you don't have the data to kind of support what is maybe more of a loose feeling that you kind of can't put your thumb on it. One of the things that I've experienced that executives seem to really struggle with is self-care. A lot of the time is this just go, go, go in the machine, keep them going, and they feel this need to go all the time. Is all these people depending on me? But then they get depleted, they just get burnt.
So being able to plan through the day, hey, these are some things where I'm just going to take care of some of my basic needs here. I think more than just taking care of the basic needs is also a psychological choice to take care of yourself a little bit. Yeah. And I think to that same end, I typically try to work.
It's I try to not take anything really before 730, but I'm typically on and at my desk by 745 eight and I am off 6:00 sharp, full stop, always off at six because it's like I have two kids, I've got a wife. We we have dinner together. We dinner every single night together. We we did that. When I grew up. We played game every night before, after bath. We have a routine, right. And so I have obligations to make there.
And again, from a compartmentalization standpoint, I actually know that that will make me, by all accounts, technically, I should be less successful than somebody who's able to go seven at six in the morning to midnight every single night. And when you look at the super achievers, that's pretty common that they're not getting a lot of sleep. They're burning, burning, burning.
But from my perspective, and I'm making up numbers here, if somebody said, okay, you can do what you're doing now and we can predict the future and you're going to have 20 million by the time you retire, or you can go really hard and you have 200 million. It's not even a choice. Now, granted, probably everybody listening is like, well, yeah, who wouldn't who wouldn't want 20 million?
But even if some even if you change that and you said you can kind of do what you're doing now and you're going to have 1 million at retirement, or you could do it this other way and you'd have ten for me, it's not worth the trade off, because we've all seen people who've been raised with, you know, parents who are really super, super busy, super successful. But, you know, it's that classic. Nobody's on their deathbed looking back and saying, I should have worked more.
I should have spent even less time with my family, these things. So to that point, I think with that intention, too, if you really are trying to benefit or deliver for family or the people that are counting on you, do you need to sleep? I have no shame that I get about nine hours of sleep at night. Yeah, I actually need that. And I think a lot of people are like, that's weak. No, it makes it to where whenever I am performing, I'm ready and like, I have the energy to sustain that.
And you don't want somebody working on your business that hasn't slept in four days, right? That's like, that's not a good thing. It's like, yeah, we run it and we run it with really cheap gasoline. Isn't that great? It's like, no, that's terrible. No. And then the other thing is like that personal stuff for your own mental health. It's scheduling that as well. That's the period of the time when I go and do jujitsu. And here's a period of time where I go hit golf balls.
And that's as important as these other meetings. And again, with a family, I actually squeeze most of that stuff into the workday, and I encourage our team to do the same. So, you know, there's a lot of a lot of stuff structurally inside of our business that is meant to make sure that people have the space to take that time that essentially recharges them, so that when they're having to do work related stuff, they're at their absolute peak.
You know, I think what you're saying here feeds into a lot of different research, and it feeds into a lot of shifting perceptions in the business world of what success actually looks like. Are you really successful if you're making millions or $1 billion a year or whatever it happens to be, and your family's a wreck, or that you are destroying all your employees around you and they're miserable and feel terrified of you all day long because you're a monster.
Yeah. Or is it really success that you're able to provide what you need? You're able to take care of your family, able to grow and develop and offer value to the world. And on the flip side, also, research of people are more productive when they're happy and healthy and their needs are taken care of, and they're free to take care of themselves like they need to. One other thing I'd add there is that they feel safe, right? So it's like they're not they feel like they're in good hands.
They're supported. They can take risks, they can do other things. And that there is a net there that will catch them, and that there is a framework by which they can like, explore and be their best self versus that kind of example of somebody who's got like an over caring boss and they're layoffs all the time and everyone's like, why are you taking a three day week? And it's like, that's not a an environment where one would feel safe. It's not super conducive to productivity.
It's not super conducive to people speaking their mind and saying, hey, I think I found a little thing here that's broken that I think if we put it all put a little effort into it, we could kind of make the building stronger. And everyone's like the last guy that said that got fired because, you know, like highlighted that his bad manager missed it. And like, so all of that comes down to the culture and what you value.
And I think that the people at any company are really a reflection of the leadership and what they value, because those people flocked to that. They they met with those people at some point, and those people said, I like this person. I like something about them, whether that's they work all the time and they they build fiefdoms or whatever. At a company, we take some of those negatives.
If fiefdoms are rewarded and you look around at the most successful people in the company, and that's like watching Game of Thrones fold out, you know, with all this, like, Machiavellian and control and all this stuff, and you're not like that. And you look around and you're like, these guys just roam the halls, no problem. No, but everybody sees it. We all know it, and it's almost celebrated. But like, that person was now promoted to lead even more. And we all know how they are.
The people who don't value that leave because they're like, this is disgusting. I hate this and that. Why? Why am I working here? The people that are neutral and a lot of people are just neutral, and they're just happy to come in and hit the clock and go and they're like, whatever. I just don't raise my head and I don't get cut. We can kind of ignore that crowd, but that's actually a very sizable chunk.
And then you have the others who are like, yes, I have to go like usurp that person and do all these other things so that I can take over that piece. It's like complete chaos. And so if that's how people are, it's because the leaders are like that.
And so if people are really light hearted and they're willing to take risks and they're willing to communicate and they're willing to be vulnerable and they're willing to be wrong, that means that the leaders are likely like that because they haven't been fired. If somebody's super market value or whatever, the leaders are probably like that because they haven't been fired, either for better or for worse. And so anyways, we talk a lot about plan the work work plan.
And so if you don't plan the work, same thing if you don't plan your culture, if you don't plan your day, if you don't plan any of these things, you don't take some time to have that intention and purpose and like take the time to just say, okay, what am I actually trying to do here? Or what are we trying to what type of company are we trying to build? Or what type of day am I trying to have? Then everything else is just chaos. So like it all comes down to planning.
I think that being intentional that you're talking about makes a true leader arise, rather than a manager in your experience and working in different companies, whether they're companies that you worked for yourselves, run yourself or worked with, what would you identify as some of the things that get in the way of people's work most often?
What are the misery makers at companies that you see as pretty common patterns that if, when they're shifted, make a big difference in productivity or company culture? Assuming positive intent is really big. If you have people that aren't assuming positive intent, then they will hide things from you. They will see something and put their own spin on it and be like, well, he or she probably did that because of these reasons that are probably not true. So I think that that's a big one.
I think making decisions across the business based on intuition and gut, without any use of data, is also a big one. I think oftentimes the companies we've seen, like the most successful companies, are really, really busy early, often. And so because of that, if you kind of go back to the beginning of I take a Zynga super busy astronomical rise and same with King.
And what ends up happening is that you hire more people, get more things, and like lots of things are being built without the structure and without the process that you would typically find at a larger company. And so there's a person over here and a person over here both trying to solve some problem independently, both finding a solution, standing up a solution. And we don't realize for like two years that we have two different systems
that are meant to do the same thing. You oftentimes find two. That data suffers in the early days. And so later, once you're five years in, you've reached some stability and your thousand people and everyone's kind of has the time to take the proverbial breath. Somebody starts looking around, says, man, this system is like crazy. And like, this data is incorrect and this is incorrect.
And like, we got to marry that and mish mash this together and deprecate this and kind of rip all those things out. So basically I'm just saying that it's not uncommon to see kind of broken data, but it's but you have to kind of take that serious because if you're not using data to make those decisions or and this especially happens with like really strong personality leaders that they're almost borderline dictators where they're like, we're going to do this and we're going to do this.
And I was like, all right, we're going to do this. And you know, this isn't to say that there's something to be said for an intuition, right? Because oftentimes you're like, I know that this is sounds crazy. And maybe we looked at the data, but I still think there's something here that we're missing that the data doesn't tell us. Fine. There's something to be said for somebody being decisive and making a choice and going.
But if you're not testing that and using data to make decisions, that's a whole pain to you. Because if you're living within that or, or you're actively doing it, it's like you're you're just kind of making things up. And and so that's really dangerous.
And then I think the other piece is, you know, and there's probably a ton I mean, I could probably put together a hundred item list here, but really that desire to understand and communicate and being okay with failure is super, super important because there's a lot of organizations that aren't okay with failure, and they treat failure like this permanent state as opposed to just part of a path.
And I've dealt, you know, with this, with my daughter in that whenever she loses a game or something, she gets really frustrated. I mean, it's not like crazy, but she's like really hard on herself. And I have to talk to her like, hey, look, first off, you're going to fail constantly. So like, you're going to be way okay with failure because I fail every day all the time, right?
From little things to knocking over a drink to really big things like, I don't know, onboarding some really expensive software that I kind of knew we probably didn't need, but we just did it. And then I'm like, why don't I do that? And like, okay, but you get better if she stays with it, she eventually gets really good at it. And, you know, if a game was like, take a game like goldfish and we've all probably played goldfish. Well, goldfish is super boring game, right? If you're an adult.
But as a kid, when you first play it, you're going to make mistakes because you don't know what a seven is. The game becomes more fun when you do know what a seven is. So now we're making we're not making that mistake. The game becomes more fun when we remember that grandpa asked for sevens three hands ago and we just drew a seven. And so when it's our turn again, we're going to ask grandpa specifically for the sevens. Okay? Do you eventually outgrow that?
If I just said to my daughter, all right, I got a game you can win, I'm going to flip over a card and you tell me what color it is, how long you want to play that game. Things are fun. Not because of failure, like innately, but because we overcome that over time and we get better, right? So you look at something like golf, it's like golf is a miserable thing to start. You're going to be failing constantly, more than probably any other sport.
Like if I give somebody a basketball, they'll probably make a few buckets. They've never played golf or had any instruction. They're going to not have a good time, right? They're watching me like, this is pointless, right? But then that's where you see all these people kind of addicted to golf. It's because they slowly get better and better and better and is this infinite thing that you're kind of always going to be not great at.
And the difference between the Tiger Woods and guys who were, you know, really, really, really good at golf, who were like the best guy, you know, in golf, the difference between those people is paper thin with somebody finishing negative three on a course versus like over by five, like that's the difference between making millions of dollars a year and there are tons of guys that shoot five over that are never going to compete against Tiger Woods because he's five under. It's not a lot.
It's like one stroke, half a stroke, a hole or something like that. But that's that's what brings that joy. So anyways, coming back to that culture that you don't want to be celebrating failure. Yeah. Yeah. Because that's like that's also weird, right. But to see failure is like a necessary piece of the puzzle and a moment like a temporary state.
And again, necessarily if you're not making mistakes, you probably aren't really doing anything that difficult or that great or you're not on a crazy trajectory, you're probably doing something that's not very fulfilling and you're probably not the best at it. I have two questions that come out of this. Number one, there's the thought that if you tolerate a certain amount of negative behavior or poor performance, then that basically sets the bar for the entire company, right?
Then there's nothing more unmotivated than tolerated bad behavior. I'm talking about behavior. And then I we're talking about failure. I know they're not equivalent. And those are actually two very different things. But my question to you is, say you had to have a conversation with someone who just made a big error.
What does it actually look like to, for lack of a better word, celebrate the failure or talk with them and mentor them through making a better decision next time and not tolerating things that will ultimately undermine the company. If there was, if there was no learning in the failure, then something went wildly wrong, right? There's always a learning from a conversational standpoint. It's like, okay, well, let's walk through what happened.
This is that seeking to understand assuming positive intent. Right? I know you didn't mean to just cost us $1 million. Like you'd be a maniac to just intentionally do this. I know you didn't intentionally do this, but the fact remains, you did walk me through what happened. Let's debrief on this and deconstructed. Well, I looked at this and I saw this, and I saw this, and I saw this, and I said, okay, great. And then that made you think this. And so you thought that this next thing that you did
walk me through that decision. Right. And what did you think the outcome would be here? If we just really oversimplify this, it's like, oh, okay. And I forgot, I forgot to check the system B to make sure that that was correct. If you just check system B, you would have never click that button. Okay. Great. What should we do next? It's really allowing that person to talk you through and solve your problem. Right? It's like, I'm not here to solve every problem. I need you guys solving problems.
So what can we do next? Well, okay. One it begs the question why do we have system B and system? Might we be able to create a process by which that thing that you did can't happen unless somebody does check system B we actually make is there technology we can use to prevent that? How do we basically learn from it and make sure that that can never happen again? And then the classic case too is I can't remember that details.
Maybe it never even happened, but it was somebody at Google, the story goes, and they pushed a button last $1 million and they had this type of conversation. I'm sure, and somebody was like, so you're not going to fire me? Like, I thought you would fire me. And the reaction of the executive was like, I just spent $1 million training you. Why would I do that? Like, absolutely not. Like you're way more valuable now because you're never going to do that again.
Somebody is eventually going to push that button, and you have to push the button to realize you got to put a cover on it. But if we go to diagnose that and we're like, so what happened? Like, I don't know, I'm just doing this and it's like, okay, what would we do different in the future? I have no idea. It's like I'm just mashing buttons. It's like, okay, well, that's not okay. Right? So but again, that's lacking a bunch, a bunch of like awareness on the person side too.
I talk a lot about and it's something we value is do not bring me problems without solutions. Your solution doesn't have to be correct. It's fine. But like to say I've got this thing. Like, this thing is like whenever we push it, it's everything is like it breaks and we lose $1 million every time somebody push that button. What should we do? That's not okay. We think we should cover up that button. Okay. I actually think we should just get rid of the button.
Like, why does the button exist? But at least you have an idea. So I think part of this also is culturally what you value in hiring people who are problem solvers and not problem flaggers. You can be both. Let's say that you know a ton about the saxophone and you could say right now that this thing doesn't play and I don't know anything about saxophone, just one button doesn't play. And I could still say, okay, we'll have you check to see if it has all the pieces of the other buttons.
That might be a solution. Maybe it's missing a piece. You'd be like, man, that's so crazy. That's not what's wrong. But I can still offer a solution even if I know nothing about it. It might be wrong. That's fine. But it's the spirit of. I have given some amount of thought to this. And when you have that, over time people get better.
And yes, if you have like loss after loss after loss after loss, and you're constantly making poor choices that aren't showing any sort of when you walk us through the debrief, it's like, well, you didn't really think again. And like, remember how last time we talked and you need to kind of go slower here and you keep kind of not thinking about stuff that seems to be at the root of all these things.
Like at some point somebody's got to be able to get themselves over that hump and be like, here's my plan. And that that makes sense. And then that theory and act on that so that they're not constantly making making mistakes. What I really hear you saying is a form of leadership that takes a lot of care and attention, that requires you to not just measure metrics and numbers. Obviously you do, and you care about that.
You care about that feedback, but you're also focused on the soft things, the the behaviors, the attitudes. What are they bringing to the table as a person? Are they engaged? They're trying to offer solutions, and you're willing to have those conversations rather just like your numbers are off by your you're willing to see this as a person. Well, yeah, I mean, I don't I don't even think that's an option. We deal with the top half a percent in talent. Right.
And this is one thing that we've seen consistently is that you have to be likable. You have to play well with others. Okay. That's non-negotiable. I'll try to use somebody that everybody knows. But like, we could probably all agree that Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye are top half of a percent of scientists as far as like, public facing interacting. So they have to play nice with others, right?
If we had if we brought Neil deGrasse Tyson into our business and we had somebody talking to him disrespectfully or kind of a jerk, he'll just leave. He's too good. He's like, I don't need to deal with this. I'm like, the best of the best. And so you have to play nice with others, or else you're going to drive all the other best of the best away. And if you don't play well with others, you're not the best of the best because you drive other people away.
That's not a great trait, and you won't attract great people either. In fact, you will attract people that are just like you because that's what you value. And so you have to kind of naturally be okay with people and be open and honest, but not confrontational and, and kingdom building. You have to be world class at what you do. So you still have to deliver. It's not enough to just be nice. The third is you have to be accountable.
You have to do what you said you would do because, you know, if you take I don't want to go to too far of an extreme, but you take something like a Navy Seals team or some special ops team, and they're going in to do something that's really complex and dynamic and high stakes.
And the guy who's supposed to be the guy that blows the door doesn't bring the explosive, or we have to trust that the guy behind us who's responsible to make sure that nobody sneaks up on us, is doing that, and then we can focus entirely on what we're supposed to be doing. So because of the team and the dynamics of these things often are complicated. The stakes aren't as high necessarily. Certainly not in life and death. You have to be able to trust on those other people.
If you're breaking any of those things, you're not putting out really great work for what it is that you're supposed to be doing. You're not doing it in a way that you're likable and people like being around you, and they can trust and be be comfortable around you, and you're not doing what you said you would do when you would do it. That creates all sorts of problems. So really everything kind of comes down to one of those three things.
And so if you know that that's what you need on a world class team when you're hiring and somebody shows up late or they're kind of a little snarky in the interview or, you know, they don't have a great answer to, something's very easy to be like, okay, that's not the right person for that group. You have to understand what you value. You have to be relentless with that. And, you know, at some point if you're not and it's like, okay, well then, then what are you actually building?
Because there's one thing it's even worse to like talk about it and then not do it, because then it's just like, yeah, that guy's kind of full of it. So anyways, it's it's easier said than done at the time. Thank you so much for the time you're willing to offer to come on today and to to talk and to share some of these valuable lessons that you've learned over a career. And knowing you, you're always developing, growing and doing new stuff
and learning new things. So that kind of you come on again. Yeah. And share some more. Thank you so much for for being willing to come on. Yeah. Happy to do it. Always a pleasure meeting with you. And we'll come back anytime. Is there anything on your mind where like if I put this in everyone's mind, this is what I would want in everyone's mind. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good one, I would say. I mean, if you're talking to a roomful of leaders, it's do what you said you would do.
I mean, it's it's very easy to be overwhelmed. I still fail at this, right? Nobody's perfect at it. I don't have any tattoos. I like looking at them, but I just don't have anything that I'm like, that's. That's what I want. I'm on myself. If I did do anything, it would probably be do what you said you would do, because it's so easy to compromise on that.
And if you were forcing yourself to do what you said you would do, it also forces you to prioritize because you can't do everything all the time. One thing that you'll find if you start really using time boxing literally up to the minute on your calendar, you'll start to realize you're terrible at predicting how long it's going to take you to do something. Like you think it's a 15 minute problem, you spend two hours on it. I'm sure every executive listening to this has done that at some point.
And so you start to get better at being like, that's not a 15 minute problem. That's a two hour problem. I can't do that this week. And now I'm not committing to something I can't do. So part of it is really understanding your schedule and how long it's going to take you to mentally do something, preparing for that, committing to that and having that marked on your calendar. So I can just tell you, yeah, I'm going to do that.
It's Thursday at four from 4 to 5 and actually doing it so that in that same example, if somebody's expecting you to have that drill charge or to be looking, you know, at people coming up from behind you that you can be counted on to do what you said you would do. Stay tuned for our next podcast that will be taking some of this key valuable points that we took from Matt and giving you daily practice tips to go with it. And we'll see you next time. Great. Thanks for having me.