Matt Blumberg‘s amazing new book Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business is out and shipping. The early reviews are great, including this detailed one from Tech Cocktail.
Matt’s book is already having an impact in my world. At Cheezburger, we just added Scott Moore to the leadership team. Ben Huh, the founder/CEO who I adore and love working with, send out a powerful email about how he’s approaching Cheezburger’s next stage of growth, and how he’s thinking about building the business operating system. He builds off many of the concepts in Matt’s book and told me I was free to blog this for the world to see.
Following is Ben’s email.
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Hey Cheezburgers,
After recruiting our new COO & President Scoot Moore, I am shifting one of my major projects to on boarding Scott. I’m kicking off the process of building the business Operating System for Cheezburger. This is a super important item that I am thrilled to get started on.
It’s perfect timing for us. As COO & President, Scott has management responsibility for a huge area of Cheezburger. By building the metrics, communication rhythms, reports, etc. I can really help Scott get a feel for our business and where we stand as we plan for 2014. It’s one part communication, one part feedback process, and one part creating clarity.
A business Operating System is a simple idea:
- Using the company’s values (of Truth, Excellence, and Happiness)…
- create a set of consistent rhythm for communications, meetings, procedures and decision-making…
- which helps align everyone’s goals with the ultimate objectives of the company.
Put in other words: A business OS is how we consistently and clearly communicate, hire, make decisions, etc. that help us do more faster.
In practice, this comes down to some answers to questions like this: (examples)
- When do we plan for the next year? And who owns the process?
- How do I measure my performance against my, or my team’s goals?
- I need another person on my team to help better reach my team’s goals. How do I go about doing that?
- I’d like to send out a company-wide update on something my team did. How do I do that?
- How do I know what I am working on aligns with the company’s goals?
- What metrics do we report company-wide? And why?
- etc. etc. etc.
It’s an idea I first heard from another Foundry Group CEO, Matt Blumberg. In fact, he’s written a book based on those ideas.
One of the key improvements you should see as a result of this should be more consistency and clarity in communications and processes. This is one of the reasons why I push for a single IT system like Google Drive vs having two, and why I want you to post content for dissemination in our intranet. I hope that the OS will help you see the bigger picture. The opposite of having an effective business OS is a company that is confused due to lack of clarity and unable to move in the same direction together, therefore missing goals and opportunities.
There are 6 key areas that I want to structure the OS around (this will evolve as I work with Scott and the exec team):
- Company-wide communications and meetings
- Creating, aligning, and sharing goals
- Measuring performance against goals and metrics
- Establishing cadence, rhythm, and deadlines
- Clarity in decision-making process, transparency, and openness
- Well-functioning systems and operational processes
For you, the impact will be that I will be talking about almost everything in the context of our Culture/Values, Goals/KPIs/Metrics, and Systems/Processes.