Rob shares a quirky family tradition, reveals his new platform project, and explains his love of technology and trees. Join us for another “flexible but opinionated” show.
Rob notices the hidden symbolism of “Independence Day” the movie, and soaks in the shame of having never watch “Apocalypse Now” while Marc reveals the one bad scene in possibly the greatest movie ever made.
Rob and his team at Adjective strike lean product gold on a new platform. Across all both private and public sector engagements, it’s incredibly hard to generate and communicate a shared vision of success. With a tagline of “Understanding Us”, it will help anyone who appreciates understanding the people they’re working with, the people they’re managing, and the people they’re selling to. This brings objectivity and fidelity to strategic opportunities across sales and talent teams, as well as product development teams. The platform powers three separate verticals, all connected by understanding people and their attributes. This will help centralize insights and build internal trust and discipline, fostering open conversations to avoid significant pain and costs plaguing so many human interactions in business and communities.
While there is plenty of product experimentation in startup culture, there isn’t nearly enough sales experimentation in most organizations. How do you tell the right story? How do you package it in a way to get people to adopt new models of transparency? Even when people disagree, when they are focused on solving the same problem combined with a centralized platform with objective and documented truth, teams can stay passionate about their opinions and rally around a common cause with historical decisions and reasoning.
Often people think they understand each other in a meeting, and then later discover they did. Having a clear objective records avoids emotional arguments of who thinks who said what and helps focus energy on moving forward rather than convincing others what they did or did not say. If the CEO is the one who has forgotten a critical piece of data and recommends a doomed strategy, even the weakest and least influential employee can carry the day when there is a well-documented strategic record.
We are reminded how not only are quote attributions almost always wrong, but more importantly, all quotes can be traced back to ancient Greeks and Romans, or other places in the world long, long ago. It’s been done before, don’t try and claim the credit. Although when in doubt, it’s Mark Twain.
On teams made up of shifting and flexible staffing, how can people come and go and quickly gain common and shared understandings? “The hardest thing about communication is the illusion that is has occurred.” You’re going to get it wrong. The more things are externalized and visible, the better the outcomes and stronger and ego-free the teams will be. It’s a method for externalizing conclusions. The ultimate goal is to help people communicate with each other and build real empathy in service of the mission. Things change and decisions should be revisited regularly, but this only works well if changes are made consciously and not because folks forgot what was said earlier. It also doesn’t require someone who remembers why a decision was originally made to take a turd on the table to get folks to pay attention and not make a huge mistake. You can see who should own the risk of decisions. If you want to override the group and change the current path, then you should own the risk. This prevents scapegoating while still allowing a leader to change the collective strategy. Risk ownership is huge. Ideally it’s shared by the team, but if someone takes control, then they own it. Rob is impressed by the airmen coders of BESPIN, an Air Force software factory, as well as the “high tech farmland” near Montgomery, Alabama with drones, StarLink hubs, and peach trees. Research Triangle in NC feels similar to him. Marc questions where the living neighborhoods are in these scenarios. Where can you walk? Where is the fun? Rob mentions the construction company DPR, a construction company wrapped in Silicon Valley vibes. Seems like the type of company that would have a “joy metric” incorporated in their designs.
Regulations are good for ensuring safety, but only to a point. The recent shift to many cities dropping strict parking requirements for all developments is creating more flexibility driven by market demand. Everything should be treated like a product, even industrial projects, driven my market fundamentals. Perhaps if there were a platform to help people work together…
Rob is impressed by Rhumbix, especially COO Drew DeWalt who is disrupting construction project management. Focus on delivering a flexible but opinionated experience – words to live by.