I love the idea of A User Manual To Working With Me. A number of the CEOs we work with have written them and Seth sends out a letter to all new founders about working with us.
While I occasionally think about writing an @bfeld User Manual, I never manage to get around to it. On our Q4 vacation, Amy and I talked a lot about dinners out, especially my own struggle with dinners with large groups of people, which caused me to reflect on how I approach dinners out in general.
Business dinners have become increasingly challenging for me for a number of reasons. I’m an introvert, so when the dinner is more than four people, it’s extremely draining for me. I no longer drink, so every dinner lasts at least 33% too long. I’m a vegetarian and am now eating very lightly at dinner, so the experience of dinner is much less important to me. I’ve been to all the restaurants in Boulder many times, so there’s no novelty in the experience. I’ve got a 30-minute drive home from downtown Boulder to my house, so getting home is dinner_end_time + 30 minutes.
I go to bed early (usually before 10 pm) so dinners often are the only thing I do in the evening before going to bed. I love to lay on the couch with Amy and read in the evening before I go to sleep, so this decompression from the day is almost always lost when I have a business dinner. I also love evenings at home with just Amy, business dinners out take time away from this for us.
That said, business dinners are part of my work. I’ve been to at least 1,351 board dinners in the last 25 years. I typically have business dinners three or four times each week, every week. I almost always have at least four major dinner-related events (with greater than 25 people) each month. Simply deciding not to do business dinners isn’t an option as long as I do the work I’m doing.
To solve for this, and make business dinners more enjoyable and productive from my frame of reference, following is the best way to have a business dinner with me.
I’m sure I’ll end up at some dinners, and events, that don’t fit this profile. By default, I’m no longer going to board dinners, although I’ll make exceptions when necessary. Amy occasionally likes to go to galas and big public events, so I’ll tag along for those. And, of course, I can comfortably do these periodically. But, if you want to get the most out of me, and have me enjoy the experience, the bullet points above are a good guideline.
Jon Hallett, a prolific angel investor and successful entrepreneur who I’ve gotten to know over the past few years, dropped a major knowledge bomb on me yesterday afternoon when he sent me a post from David Politis titled This is How You Revolutionize the Way Your Team Works Together… And All It Takes is 15 Minutes.
I remember having a meal in December 2011 with David at the Plaza Food Hall in New York and talking about BetterCloud which we foolishly passed on investing in. So I wasn’t surprised to have the reaction I had after reading the post, which I said out loud to myself.
“Fucking brilliant!”
The simple idea is to write a user manual about how to work with you. My partner Seth has an email he sends out to companies he joins the board of titled Welcome to Foundry which is a roadmap for working with him, but also reflects how to work with all of us. It’s similar and touches on some of the questions that David addresses in his article, which he based on a presentation from Adam Bryant, a columnist for The New York Times, titled “The CEO’s User Manual.”
In this presentation Adam gave there were two sets of questions to answer to sketch out the User Manual. The first set, focused on the individual person, were:
The second set are focused on how the individual acts with others.
I’m going to do this exercise over the weekend and share with my partners and all of the CEOs I work with to get their feedback on whether (a) it’s helpful and (b) it’s truthful. I’m going to let them give me feedback (which will help me learn myself better). As I iterate through it, I’ll eventually publish it on this blog. And, if the exercise works, I’m going to encourage every leader I work with to consider doing it.