The Great CEO Within

Background

• aka from Founder to CEO
• Google Doc book
• Written by Matt Mochary, executive coach to Clearbit, Coinbase and others

Notes

• Schedule two hours each day to work on your top goal. Do this every single work day. Call is “most important” in your calendar.
• Let others know you will be late as soon as you realize it
• Use positive reinforcement with yourself and others. Metaphor of children and sports.
• Rapid decision making
• Impeccable agreements - precisely defined, fully agreed to. Write down in shared location. Eg “it is 1204 now. We will start the meeting again at 100. We all agree to be in our seats and present prior to 100”
• issue identification: ask each person to imagine they are the CEO. What are the most important issues for me to solve in the next 90 days?
• Group exercise: write down source of Joy, Excitement, Sadness, Anger, Fear at the company.
• Revisit company values
• Infrastructure
  • Company folder system in Google Drive
  • Wiki (notion.so). Sheet to track all processes. Ask each department to list their processes, assign a writer and due date to each process. As part of onboarding, everyone should read the processes they will be asked to do.
  • Areas of responsibility (AORs). List of functions and DRIs.
  • List of KPIs for each department.
  • Publish meeting notes transparently.
• Collaboration
  • Calendar: 1 day of internal meetings, 1 day of external meeting, 3 days of no meetings
• Fundraising + Recruiting
  • Sell oneself, not company
  • Suggested structure: credit, hard work, vulnerability, duty, gratitude
• Departments
  • Chief of Staff
  • Training - full information, eg, emails
• Board members
  • give the Board members homework. Give each one a very specific assignment.
• Books
  • 15 commitments of conscious leadership
  • Never split the difference: negotiate as if your life depended on it. Space out dates do that each writer only needs one document.
  • 7 habits of highly effective people
• Group habits
  • some decisioons are consequenial and irreversaible - one-way doors
  • Wheneverr you use method 3, get full buy-in
  • common cause of innefficiency in a startup are sloppy aggrements
    • Dont show up on to meetings on time
    • Dont complete goals
  • Have impecable agreements
    • precisely defined (written and accessible)
    • Fully agreed to by all relevant parties
• Culture
  • Unspoken set of rules that poeople in a group follow when interacting with each other
  • Once your team has a referenceable shared set of values, they can make decisions without you
  • Agreeing on values needs maximum buy-in
  • Use those values to guide your hiring/firing
    • bring people who want to live by those principles
  • If people are having fun, they spend more time, energy.
    • Leads to better problem solving and collaboration
    • Leads to stronger company
• Output
  • Key metric is output, not hours, not location
  • Make sure team is there during core period of the day
• Meetings
  • set a regular short stand-up at the begining of core hours
• Meals
  • Offering meals allows team members to bond organically and with a wide range of people. It’s also tax efficient as you can claim it as a expense
• Policits
  • The only way to prevent politics is to never allow lobbying to be successful.
    • The only way to do this is to have written policies describing many situations. Around comp, raises, promotions, etc. Apply this policy to all teams, all members, all the time.
• Conflict
  • Inevitably conflict arises in any org. It’s up to you to teach how to give and receive non-violent feedback and ensure they do.