π Why Steve Jobs was king of reframing, Shopify took a knife to meetings, ...
I listen to 10 hours of podcasts a week, so you donβt have to.
This is the 42nd edition ofΒ Best 3 Podcasts of the Week π₯π₯π₯,Β featuring Nudge, This Week In Startups, and Rework.
What you need to know
π Why Steve Jobs was king of reframing
πͺ Shopify took a knife to meetings
π Make everyone a graduate for the day
π Why Steve Jobs was king of reframing
π₯ Third place (3 min read vs 40 mins listening)
Impossible is Nothing.Β There was no room for error when Adidas launched this campaign in 2004. It had to be perfect to compete with Nikeβs Just Do It ads. And perfect it was. It conveyed that with hard work and determination, anything is possible. Itβs still vital to the brand today.
The ads featured stories of athletes and everyday people who overcame challenges to achieve success in their respective field. Adidas used reframing by presenting challenges and obstacles as opportunities for personal growth and achievement.
The best brands and CEOs use reframing to inspire people to solve seemingly impossible problems. Phill Agnew shared stories of Steve Jobs using reframing to bend the world to his will. Note, this special edition of Nudge is a must listen.
What they say
Part I - Elon Musk
Elon Musk reframes sending satellites into space for commercial gain as a way to save humanity by building a future settlement on Mars.
He reframes expensive electric cars as a chance to save the environment and signal your commitment to stopping climate change.
Elon doesn't come close to Steve Jobs when it comes to reframing. Jobs was the master of reframing.
Phill Agnew
Part II - Steve JobsΒ
There's one brilliant example of this when Steve was overseeing the creation of the Mac.
The engineer, Larry Kenyon, had done everything he could to make the Mac boot up as quickly as possible. He finally presented the boot up sequence to Steve, but Steve wasn't happy.
Steve wanted it to boot up even faster. He was not an engineer. He didn't know how to make the Mac turn on faster. He just believed it could. So Steve described the problem in a different way that persuaded Larry to dig even deeper and find a better solution.
He asked Larry 'If you could save a person's life, would you find a way to shave 10 seconds off the boot?'
Larry said 'Wow. Yes. I would if it actually saved someone's life. I could probably find a way.'
Steve pulled over a whiteboard and did some calculations. He showed that if 5 million people use the Mac and it takes 10 seconds longer to boot up, that adds 300 million hours of waiting time per year. That equals a hundred lifetimes each year.
This is classic reframing. Increasing the boot up time doesn't remove a tiny, unimportant wait. It saves a hundred lifetimes worth of waiting each year.
A few weeks later, Larry Kenyon presented the new boot up sequence to Steve and it was 28 seconds faster than before.
Phill Agnew
What I say
Why it matters:Β Reframing is a powerful tool because it allows you to break free from limiting beliefs and negative thought patterns. It helps you to see that there is more than one way to look at a problem. There is always the possibility to find a creative solution that you may have previously overlooked.
Between the lines:Β Reframing can also be a powerful tool for motivating teams and driving innovation. As demonstrated by Steve Jobs, reframing a problem in a way that emphasizes the potential impact and importance of finding a solution can help to inspire and guide team members towards better and more creative outcomes.
πͺ Shopify took a knife to meetings
π₯ Second place (4 min read vs 1 hour 11 mins listening)
Meetings are a necessary evil.Β Many people dread meetings despite the theoretical benefits of improved collaboration and communication. In fact, 50% of peopleΒ believe that meetings are the biggest waste of time in the work day.
Shopify made headlines with its new policy around meetings which aims to increase efficiency and productivity. Their position is clear: in todays market, you need to be willing to roll up your sleeves and do the work rather than just talk about it.
What they say
The big headline from last week
Shopify is looking for ways to get more efficient in 2023 and one of the ways that they're going to do that is no freaking meetings. Friend of the pod and Shopify CEO Tobi LΓΌtke sent a company-wide email detailing its new policy around meetings.
All calendar meetings with more than two people have been eliminated. No meetings can be held on Wednesdays. Meetings with 50+ employees will get shoehorned into a six hour window on Thursdays with a limit of one a week. Employees are encouraged to decline meetings and remove themselves from large group chats.
According to Forbes, Shopify expects to eliminate 10,000 calendar events company-wide.
This is addition by subtraction in the best possible way. Everybody knows that they have too many meetings, especially at a big company.
You have to make room for work. Time boxing does that. Time boxing says these three hours are just for me to do the work. This is great management. These kinds of efficiencies are key.
Molly Wood
It's roll up your sleeves time
If you want to be a sales manager who doesn't sell, a developer who doesn't write code, or a product manager who doesn't make mock-ups, all of that's going to go away.
I think in a market like this people are going to say 'You know what? Fire those two layers of management. Who's the top sales person? Have the top sales person sell 80% of the time and manage 20% of the time.'
Jason Calacanis
What I say
Why it matters:Β None of this is new. We all know meetings are a drain on productivity. However, I donβt agree with Shopifyβs overkill approach to eliminate all meetings with more than 2 people. The sentiment is right in so far as meetings are costly and should be run 10X more efficiently. Rather than putting limits on your staff, train them on what a great meeting looks like and trust them to implement this.
Between the lines:Β In Tobiβs own words, identify the root cause of your meetings:
Are there too many cooks when it comes to decision making?
Are teams effectively documenting and sharing updates asynchronously?
Are people empowered to own and manage projects independently?
Are people aware of the salary costs needed to run a meeting?
Fix the above and you wonβt need to adopt a strict, overbearing policy like Shopify. Your meetings will die on their own.
π Make everyone a graduate for the day
π₯ First place (5 min read vs 23 mins listening)
Rotational graduate programs can change a personβs entire career.Β By getting exposure to different functions within a company, a finance graduate may find theyβre passionate about marketing or a HR graduate may fall in love with operations.
This broad understanding helps people to make more informed decisions, improve cross-functional collaboration, and perform better in their role - particularly if theyβve carried out a customer facing role.
DHH and Jason Fried dig into exactly this - the importance of exposing your teams to the front lines. Talking to customers. Understand their pain points. Resolving their needs. They argue everyone should do this as a rite of passage. Letβs hear why.
What they say
The benefits of βeveryone on supportβ
We realized itβs great if everyone has a moment to hear directly from customers, pick up their frustrations, and understand that how we think things work might not be so easy.
Thereβs nothing quite like running into customer language. Youβre like βOh my God, is that how they describe things? Thatβs tripping people up? I had no idea. I assumed that was clear.β
Itβs also nice to feel responsible for what you build. You often build things but let other people deal with it. Itβs nice to hear from the people who use the things that youβre making. Thereβs nothing quite like being on the front lines from that perspective.
Jason Fried
Youβve got to walk the walk yourself
When we say everyone in support, we mean everyone. Including Jason and I. Including executives.
Itβs easier to ask someone to do something they might be a little hesitant to do if youβre going first. Setting an example is really important.Β
Jason did all of the customer support for 3 years until we hired our first customer support person. I think at the end Jason answered 170 emails a day.
It was amazing for that unfiltered flow of opinions and sentiment to go directly into the product making process. This is why startups are so responsive.
You obviously canβt sustain that forever. But you can simulate this with the notion of everyone on support.
You can distribute it to programmers, designers, operators, and marketing people, to give them a taste.
David Heinemeier Hansson
Weβre better people for it
This is not a cost centre. Itβs a productivity and insight enhancement process that youβre applying to your team.
Itβs absolutely crucial to not forget that youβre selling to individuals not a persona. Humans are sometimes frustrated and they want weird things. You need to know that.
Itβs also rewarding. Youβre giving your team the motivational boost that comes from speaking to customers. Thatβs often very much overlooked.
The main thing governing how quickly your team can work is often motivation. If your weeks are full of meetings, talking to a customer is a bright spot in the day in comparison. That direct injection in the motivational engine will pay for itself several times over.
David Heinemeier Hansson
What I say
Why it matters:Β We tell ourselves weβre customer first. We use buzzwords like customer centric and client focused. But this is the biggest false narrative in the world. Very few people pick up the phone and talk to a customer. By making customer interaction a priority for your team, you can create a culture that is focused on meeting the needs of your customers.
This right here is evidence that being on the front line gives you an added dimension. If youβve overcome adversity - constant rejection as a door to door sales person - you become better for it.
The same applies to everyone on support. If you talk to customers, embrace their frustrations, and use that to shape your product and marketing strategies, your company will be far better off for it.
Between the lines:Β I love this concept because I have fond memories of it in the early days of Medicspot. When the team was less than a handful of people, we all shared responsibility answering customer calls. Even our two co-founders. By taking this job on ourselves, we were able to:
Hire the best customer service reps when the time was right because we had done the role ourselves
Build a highly performant booking flow based on insights that customers wanted to see appointment times as soon as they landed on our site
Improve the usability and accuracy of our product (a telemedicine platform with remote diagnostics)
Build a tight knit team where 4 out of 5 of the earliest employees remain 5 years after starting the company
It doesnβt take much to do this well. Perhaps, half a day onboarding for new employees and half a day annual refresher for the existing team. I agree with David that those 4 hours would arguably be the best 4 hours the team spends all year.
Shoutouts
When I find newsletters, podcasts, or books worth sharing, Iβll feature them here:
Hereβs a reminder to all of us to get creative and find new ways of engaging our customers. Being unsexy isnβt an excuse anymore - just look at Hoover:
Note, these quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Some sentences were left out to make the narrative clearer and more concise.Β Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast (unless otherwise stated). All roundups are independently written and do not imply any sponsorship or endorsement by the podcast.