thompsa6

The rhythms of a start-up

I have three points:

• Start-up rhythms “as seen on TV”…the ideal.
• Rhythms in real life…via my high school football experience.
• How do we get there in our own start-up…”what’s next?”

Aaron Sorkin nailed the ideal for start-up rhythms in one of his creations: 1) hire the rockstars 2) iterate big ideas for the future in parallel to executing the tasks of today 3) have a common passion and feed off of that. But it wasn’t in The Social Network where he nailed it; he nailed it in The West Wing.

In The West Wing everyone is on top of their game; they are the “rockstars”. The rhythms of these people are fast and impassioned. I’m sure these characters have meetings regarding status checks, sync ups, project plans, etc. But these things are not what consumes their day. They execute on theses tasks while walking through the halls and in between the brainstorms and iterations for tomorrows next big idea. Executing what is needed for today just happens. Pushing things forward by thinking about the next big idea for tomorrow is their common passion. As the president likes to say in the show, “What’s next?”.

The closest thing I’ve seen to this level of excellence in the real world was with the 1994 and 1995 Celina Senior High School football team. The guys on those teams were “rockstars”. Excellent athletes obviously, but there was more to it than that. As I joined the 1994 team in camp, I was amazed at how the execution of the daily tasks just seemed so easy for these guys. It was as if they weren’t even trying that hard on the daily stuff and were able to think big about what is needed to take them to the next level. It wasn’t until later, as I worked with these guys in the off season, that I realized that they were able to do that because they were so passionate about what they were doing and they worked their asses off to get good enough to make the tasks of the day seem trivial. You have to put in the effort to get good enough on the day to day execution to earn the right to think big; otherwise you’re just an ideas man with no history of being able to execute.

So how do we get there? You don’t get there by applying tools or processes. Those things are necessary of course; and they often lift a team up to a point of “we’re doing great”. But to get from the plateau of “we’re doing great in day to day execution” to the point of “excellent day to day execution is the norm and the larger part of our day is pushing the bigger picture forward” takes something else. It comes from a common passion about what pushing that bigger picture forward means. A common understanding of “this is why I work my ass off; and I love it.”. Once you have that across a team, then the team will optimize the tools and processes they are already using in a way that makes being excellent on day to day tasks trivial. And their passion will also power the big picture forward in ways that are unexpected and wonderful.