120: Morten Hansen on Individual High Performance

So we talk a lot about company performance and leadership. Today we want to talk about individual performance. And the guest that we have to talk about that is Morton Hanson. He's a Stanford PhD. He was a Harvard professor. He teaches at Cal today. He co wrote a book with Jim Collins. He worked at the BCG at the Boston Consulting Group. And he did this terrific study on the parameters of high performance. And he's distilled it down into seven principles today that you're going to learn for yourself and for your team, teammates, team members and so on to learn to develop individual performance, to raise it. What is it that you need to do to make everyone a star performer? So that's the subject of today's show. Listen in. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and growth coach, Bill Gallagher. So on the show with me today, I'm super excited to have Morton Hanson, who's in San Francisco today. Morton, if you haven't know, co wrote a book Great by Choice with Jim Collins. He we're talking today about Great at Work, More in the world of personal individual performance and his latest work. So this is a guy who did a PhD at Stanford, was a Harvard professor, now teaches at Cal. He's originally from Oslo. He's a father, a couple kids grown similar to my kid's age. And this is a subject I think that's really great. So let's just get right into it. Welcome to the show. Hello, Morten.

Thank you for having me.

In the beginning of your book, you tell a little bit of story where the personal the idea and I think it'd be great if you kind of take us through the evolution of the ideas behind this great work.

Yeah. There are two reasons why I wrote this book and did the study Great at Work. So one was a personal story. I started out after college working at Boston Consulting Group in London. And when I started, I had no experience, but I had a great strategy for success and that was to work crazy hours. And when I say crazy, I mean 80, 90 hours per week on average. And you know, it worked out pretty well. Then I was working on a demanding merger and acquisition project and I came across a person I called Natalie in the book. She was on the project with me and I noticed her work was better than mine. It was incredibly good work. So one evening I was looking for her because I was working every evening. Of course she wasn't there. And then inquired, you know, why she's not there. And her officemate said, well, you know, she never Works late. She works from 8 to 6pm and not weekends. And that put a kind of thought in my mind, a question. How is it possible to do that great work and working fewer hours? I mean, she was working hard, right? That's, you know, 50 hours a week or something like that. But I was working 80 or 90 and we both had the same background, the same talent, capable for the job. But I kind of wondered why could she do so well in less time? So that was really prompted me to say, well, why do some people do great at work and others do not? And that was the origin question for this book.

Yeah, but you didn't do it like a lot of folks do and add a few personal anecdotes and make great proclamations about the way of humanity in the world. You actually spent some time to study and dig into this in a variety of ways. Tell us about the study and the work that went into developing the seven ideas.

Yeah, I'm an academic, so I use data. And when Jim Collins and I finished Great by Choice, which was also based upon a study of companies and why some do better in disruptive environments than others, and it was a follow up to Jim's Good to Great, then I thought after that book Great by Choice, I should do another study and I should really answer what I call the Natalie question at an individual level or at the team level, which is why do some teams individuals do great at work and others do not? So I set in motion a study that took me five years. We studied 5,000 people. We did 120 in depth case studies. And so we put some real data and statistics behind this. And what we found was really interesting, which is that about seven factors explain two thirds of the variance in performance among those 5,000 people. So it's not like you had to be good at hundred things. If you can be good at seven things, it goes a long way of really performing exceptionally well in your role. Mm mm.

Let's talk about the seven, because I think it's really interesting. It's not do more. Right. Which was the fundamental Natalie question.

Exactly. That's what I did when I started out at bcg, you know, do more. And she had this incredible focus on what matters.

Yeah.

And that's what we found too. I'm not the first one to say focus is important, but there are some very important nuances to that idea. So the essential argument in the book is that we need to work smarter, not harder. And working smarter means deploying these seven factors that has become a cliche to Say work smarter. I mean, who wants to do the opposite? Right? Work dumb.

Let me work dumb.

Yeah, exactly. But we need to answer the question, what does it mean to work smarter in a practical sense? What do you actually do Monday morning? And that's what this book is about, is these practical tips derived from these seven factors.

I think it's really good to just underscore this point because you may listen to folks out there who scream and yell obscenities at us to hustle more and get up. And certainly hard work is good. I pour myself and I see people pouring themselves into their work. But then you also see people who work in very unproductive fashions, who lead completely screwed up lives, whose work performs performances at the cost of everything else and who drive their teams crazy. Right. I was coaching up a public company for a While and the CEO would be fond of emailing people at 3 in the morning and asking them to do things by the 9am meeting. And it was chaotic and unpredictable and he was trying to be Superman at things and failing at everything and ultimately he had to leave and they had to sell out to someone else. Right. So there's a cost to that.

I mean, that's a great story. That's what we found. The great performers are not the ones who are doing exactly what you mentioned, that they're up in the middle of the night sending out emails and writing memos at 4am in the morning, like I did at BCG. They are not. They're more organized, they're more planned, they're more focused, they're incredibly good at prioritizing. So they are not sitting there and doing too many things late at night.

Yeah.

So we already found very specifically in terms of that, how many hours should you work per week on average? That of course, depends on your job, your situation. But what we found is that if you're working 30 hours in a full time job, you're working too little. That's kind of obvious. So from 30 to 50 hours, there's a real benefit of improving your hours, but about 50 hours forward on average per week. What we found is that the curve flattens out. You're still getting a little sort of upside, but not by much.

Diminishing return.

Exactly. And at 65 hours and beyond, it actually goes down a little bit. You're actually doing worse because exactly what you mentioned, your CEO stories, a great story. He's probably being counterproductive with that email at 3am in the morning. So what this suggests to me is try to find sort of the, the golden hours, basically 50 hours or whatever it is for you. And it's not more, it's better. It is that. And then the question is, what are you doing with those hours? That's the seven factors that matters far more than just working crazy hours. Okay, so first factor, yeah, do less than obsess. The two part to that strategy, the do less is go all prioritize on a few things, right? I saw an interview with Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook here the other day, and she called this ruthless prioritization, with emphasis on ruthless. Meaning if you have a list of 10 things to do, you're not prioritizing. Maybe it's three things for you. It may not be just one, but it's that ruthlessness or prioritization, it's a matter of choice. You're choosing what to focus on. That's the first part. But the second is obsessed with, and I use the word obsession deliberately because it's not enough to choosing to work on, say two or three things. You also got to obsess in order to excel in those two or three things. Because if you don't obsess, if you just apply average effort to do two or three things, you're doing them pretty well. But there's somebody out there doing five, six, seven things. So you need to do better than them to be the best. So the obsession gives you that. And so what we see in the very best people, they're obsessing to excel over a few things. What does that mean? It means that you're paying fanatic attention to vital details. It means you're going the extra mile. Here's a great example from the restaurant business. Jiro is considered the best sous choosu chef in the world. He runs a small restaurant in the underpass of Tokyo Underground Station.

You may have seen the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

Yeah, exactly. It's a fantastic movie. It's a great movie, highly recommended. But he only serves 15 pieces of sushi. There are no extra stuff. And this is what he serves. And for example, the octopus piece of sushi, he has decided that he needs to hand massage it for 50 minutes, 5, 0. In order to give it that tenderness. So here's a person who's obsessing, right? I'm hand massaging the octopus sushi for 50 minutes so that it's tender enough for you to eat it. That's obsession. And that's what we see in some of the great performers.

Of course, once he figures that out, he gives it away to an assistant, right?

Yeah. So he organizes exactly, he organizes how to work this thing. Right.

You know, I think this obsession is also pretty consistent with the ideas that we think about in company strategy that we hear from like Francis Fry and Uncommon Advantage on Common Service where she talks about if you want to be truly extraordinary at some things, you need to be willing to suck at some other things in order to put the focus and make any profit at that. You can't be great at everything.

Exactly. Many people try to be good at everything and it doesn't work. You've got to make those trade offs in terms of scaling and growing a company. Kind of Two great examples of this. One from a large company, one for a small company, on the large company, I didn't put it in the book, but we wrote a case on a company called Reckitt, Ben Keyser that is based in the uk. They're basically a consumer goods company and they are one of the top 1% performing companies in the world. And I was curious, how can you be that top 1% performer? I contacted the CEO, Bart Becht is his name, and we went and did a business school case study on them. When he took over the company, they had 50 or 100 kind of consumer brands. And he said, we're going to focus on 12 to 13, what they call power brands. And the rest we're just not going to focus on. We're going to sell them off or we're not going to put investments into them. When he announced that strategy, the stock market, some investors just fled the company. So the stock price went down. So this is a courage. But he said the following. We're doing 12 power brands, we're going all in with those. We know we can grow the share in those. We have great position, we can be winners in those categories, but we can't win in hundred categories. But if we put all our money into 12 and we choose the right 12 ones, then we can do that. In other words, he was doing less than obsessing in the product portfolio. And here's a counterintuitive thought. In order to grow his company, because he was after scaling, growing, I had to do fewer things. Most CEOs and most leaders go the other way. In order to grow, I should introduce more products, I should have more services, I should have more market coverage, more geographies, more of everything. And that's how I grow. But you become mediocre in all the things you do, whereas he went the other way. And that was the formula for becoming a top one. Percenter in the world in terms of stock market performance and to shrink the portfolio and to do it really well. So that's a great story from a kind of a larger company, a story from a smaller company. Susan Bishop, who was starting out her own firm in executive search business in New York, came out of the media industry. That was her specialty. She started the firm, it was doing pretty well. Then he got clients requests from consumer goods, from Coca Cola, from financial services, from outside of New York, not the senior positions, but junior positions, requests that were under market value in terms of salary being paid for the job candidate. She got all these other requests because she was quite good at this. So the company grew and she took on all this business and she expanded in terms of geography and in terms of industry. And then she became mediocre in all these things. She said, we were stressed, we were spread too thin and the work wasn't good and the profit margins were half of what they should be. And then she has an epiphany and she said, this is going the wrong way. We are growing, but we're not growing profitably and we're straining our resources where we're not going to grow really fast either. So she said, I'm going to cut this out. I'm going to set a set of rules for my team, for my small team. Number one, media only say no to the rest. Only senior searches. Only the searches that pay full market value stay away from difficult clients. So she really focused the enterprise, this small business, a team of 10. And when she did that, which was tough, she talked about how tough it was to say no to Coca Cola that came and said, we got a deal for you for $500,000, which is a lot for a small business. And then she said, it was tough for a period of time, but then we did excellent work in our Focus segment now and we started getting clients and clients and clients, and we grew that segment and we had a much better growth rate and we had better margins. Again, another story. Find out what to focus on. Do it well, do it the best, and then you grow and scale.

So do less and obsess over it. Right. That extreme focus is the leading thing. And I. That's true. I think we're seeing. We preach about that for the company itself, but we're talking about the individual as well. What is your role? What are you trying to do? And I think if you've been that, you've probably felt at times where you felt like you're running all over the place. I talked to CEOs all the time who were like, God, I'm losing my mind. I'm working harder than ever. I don't know what my team's doing. We want to get you to focus more and then in turn, the whole team. The second thing was about redesigning your work. Yeah.

So they go hand in hand, really. Because the question becomes, what should I focus on? Redesign work is the second principle that gives you that guidance. Here we found something really interesting and this I did not anticipate. It turns out a lot of people and a lot of teams and businesses had the wrong objectives and the wrong metrics for success. Give me a quick example. Came across this company out here in Silicon Valley, a high tech company. They have a warehouse where they ship out their industrial products for their corporate customers. And a guy running the warehouse, he had a schedule that he has made. Internal schedule. Okay. I got to get it out according to my schedule. And on that metric, which was his objective, he achieved 99% success. So great job. Right. But then they started the customers, the corporate customers, and they found that only in two thirds of the cases did a customer get these products when they needed them for their own business. In other words, they were late a third of the time because he had focused on an internal metric, our schedule in the warehouse, not the customer metric. And that's what I call value metric, which is defined as what are the benefits you're giving to others who are the beneficiaries of your output of work and not your internal productivity or volumetric. And so many people get this wrong. Another quick example. Take a physician's office. Medical doctors in an office, they look at number of patients that they are seeing in a day. That's the productivity measure. But the real value metric should be the percentage of patients with accurate diagnosis and accurate treatment. That's a value metric. These are different metrics altogether. And so many people do that internal volumetric, not the value metric.

So the guiding principle here, productivity versus.

Exactly. And a lot of our data revolution these days make this even worse because there's so many volume metrics that we can measure number of clicks on the website. It's not a value metric. Me watching YouTube videos for three hours a day, that's not a value metric. If anything, it's an addiction metric. But you know, that is YouTube. That is their key internal metric.

Yeah. And it's worked especially well on our young kids.

It does. And that's how they optimize the site. Yeah, but it's not value. So this is something the guiding principle here for any person who's running an organization or leading a business is what is the value metrics that you need to optimize for? And they may be harder to measure. It doesn't mean you shouldn't try. And then you have to redesign your work in order to deliver the value metric. So that warehouse, we got to change everything in the warehouse so that we make sure we deliver when the customer needs it and not according to our own internal schedule. So when you do value innovation, you can call it that. Value innovation. How do we actually create more value for our customers and beneficiaries of our work? Then you start seeing great innovations. People think differently about problems, and you're.

Actually looking at this. I mean, it's clearly both the company, but also the individual. How do I work differently? Is the same kind of a question.

Exactly. So that warehouse person is an individual saying, how do I work differently? We found that from senior level to junior level. Let me give you a good example of a junior person who was actually in the factory floor, and he was sort of the supervisor for one of the machines. It was a packaging machine that packaged things into boxes to give them to the next station, which is the shipment, put them on to trucks. And his processing was doing okay. He's fine. The number of boxes coming out of his machine, that was his metric. But then one day he went over to the other department, the one with the trucks, and said, is there anything I can do better for you? Now, that's the value question. You are the beneficiary of my output. What can I do better? And I said, yeah, actually, there is one thing. When you deliver those boxes, they don't come on the conveyor belt straight. They come a little tilted many times, which means we have to go in and manually correct them. Therefore, we spend a lot of time correcting your boxes that are coming out of this machine and down the conveyor belt. And he said, oh, okay, let me go and take a look at that. Because he would never measure on that himself. So he went and tinkered with his machine to make sure they came out more straight. And that created a much better performance. Because now the other department didn't have to think about this so much because they were coming straight into the truck. Really? Again, it's a simple example, but, you know, but thinking about, how can I do it better for others when I'm.

Talking to people about coaching their team? So individual coaching performance within the company, there's a lot of focus on missed targets. So as they get better and better and there's more accountability and they're clear about their targets. And then they get to a conversation about something that was missed, failed, forgotten something. But it came up short. And mostly I noticed the conversation is kind of immoral response, like, I'll do better, I'll try harder, it'll never happen again, you can count on me, that kind of thing. And yet no real look at the redesign of the work. So we resolve to work harder, be a better human, but we don't actually deal with what the breakdown was or what change in approach would show up. And so, I mean, one of the simplest thing that I notice between folks is we make promises in meetings and then we forget all about it the moment we walk out. There's no capturing of that. And then even if there is, is it doesn't live in any place. So I don't know when I'm going to do it or how I'm going to do it. Just as a good idea that I'm willing to do. And then we completely forget about it. And then the other one would be like, I remembered, but then I couldn't remember why. And so it just seemed like some busy work and so I ignored it. Right. So all of this is needing redesign. So a kind of curious forensic conversation versus resolve to be better.

Right. And instead of saying, let's not try harder because we broke those promises, let's try different, let's think different, let's think about what is it we can change and redesign. And you see that when people ask those questions, they start questioning conventions, status quo. Two great techniques for doing this. One is, one is to ask stupid questions. Why are we doing it this way? A principal in high school in our study said, why are we sending kids home with homework? You say, what do you mean?

Love this story.

Who's done that? Everybody has done that. 300 year old model. Tell me again, why are we doing this? The other one is to check pain points. There's something that is painful for people, either internally or for a customer. And you say, okay, if I can fix your pain point, I'm clearly adding value to you. So looking for pain points is another one.

Yeah, I love the story. And it seems to flow into the next principle, which is about learning and looping. So you learn something, you apply it, you get some experience from it, and you tweak it further. Right. Is this really about iteration or am I?

Yeah, it is. It's getting a little better every day. And you know, it's interesting what we Found is a very few people in the business world or in the work life is doing this. The ones who do this best are athletes. This is what they do. If you look at a golfer, they out there practicing, they, they hit the ball, they measure where it lands, they get feedback from a coach or they get some feedback, maybe you should, you know, tweak your stand by 2cm, then they do it again. It's intense qualitative learning. It's called deliberate practice. It's not just out there hitting the ball. Yeah, right. It's that reflection, is that loop. Right. I do something, I measure the outcome, I get feedback, I tweak it, I reflect on it, and then I would do it again. In the workplace, very few people do this. Take a manager who's running meetings. Most managers are running 10, 20 meetings a week. That's a lot of repetition. How many of those people actually go in saying, well, today I'm going to tweak the way around the meeting a little bit, see the outcome, get some feedback on it and tweak it tomorrow or next week. Then I'm getting a little better. We're spending so much of our time in meetings. Why we're not making them a little better every day.

This is a really good point because we come in with the scaling up framework and we want to implement a whole bunch of meetings in a company. We're like, you need to do all these different meetings, but they need to be really, really well run. Then what happens, at least in the early stages, if somebody doesn't have experience or a close friend who did? Well, what they do is they do a meeting and then you talk about it in say, a quarterly session with the team and then they drop it and then you hear about it the next quarter and they're like, yeah, that weekly meeting or that daily huddle didn' out for us. I'm like, oh, why didn't you call me and tell me? So they'll say, yeah, it was kind of a drag and people didn't like coming to it. I'm like, okay, well, we need to redesign it, so let's look at what had happened. Let me see what it felt like. And you'll find any number of things like people aren't showing up prepared or you don't follow an agenda or it's all bad news, or any number of things will be off with the meeting that need to get tweaked. And then you've got to look at it and tweak it again. So that regular review of and tweaking, you can do it yourself, you can use a coach. But that rather than saying, well, that just didn't work out, we're not going to do that. That's not for us and our kind of company. No, it works for thousands of companies. Figure out what you're missing, the little tweak that makes it work.

Right, Absolutely. And I talk about in another principle called fight and unite is basically, how do you run better meetings? So many people are fed up with meetings because they're poorly run. But as you know, as you know, a really, a good meeting can be extremely effective way of getting work done. Really draw upon the, the collective wisdom of the group, of the people in the room.

Yeah. But with real rigor. Right.

Need to be better. Exactly.

Following a time, following a thoughtful agenda, using a timeline, using a parking.

It's extraordinary.

Yeah.

How bad people are at meetings. And here's the worst thing. So what we found, we have several interviewees who told us this. You know what happens to our company? They say we have one bad meeting, we didn't resolve the issue. And what is the outcome of that? A follow up meeting to continue to discuss what should have been resolved in the first meeting. And some people have a rule of three. We need three meetings to resolve an issue that have been done in the first meeting. And that meeting should have been half an hour, not an hour, by the way.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean you're getting that inefficiency. Yeah, of course then you have to work 80 hours to get stuff done if you work like that. So the better people, they, I mean, the better performers, they are really good at running these meetings. But they also apply this learning loop to all kinds of things. My sales pitch, how I motivate employees, how I write emails, how I communicate to staff, on and on. Right. You're deciding to be a little bit.

Better every day, tweaking all of it. And then talk about this P squared. Passion and purpose. We spent a lot of time on that. How are those two things different in your mind and what's the focus?

Yeah, so first of all, what we found is that the better performance, they're getting that source of motivation not just from extrinsic rewards like salaries, compensation and so on. They're getting it from their inner motivation, which is the passion and purpose. And those are two very different things. So passion is what excites you, it's what the world can give you. And it's almost like a hedonistic quality. Purpose is the opposite purpose of what you can Give the world. What are your contributions that you uniquely can give to others, to your company, to your clients, to the society? And one is about what the world can give you, and the one is what you can give the world. Two very different things. The best performers, they have both. I call it square, right? There's a synergy of the two and what we found in our data. It's very clear. If you look at performance, the people who perform the worst are the ones who have neither. Then work is drudgery, basically, neither passion nor purpose. That is looking at the watch and want to go home at 5 o'. Clock. Then people who have either passion or purpose, but not both. And there are some people who have one of them, but not both. They perform sort of average, a little bit of an average, perhaps. And then there are people who are both and they are the top performers. In other words, this gives them the drive and this. And here's the. What we found is that this gives them higher energy per hour worked. They're just more intense in each hour that they work. They don't work more hours. And you can call it flow, you can call it intense application or intense focus. They are just committed to those hours. And that's the difference.

Well, let me make it personal for a second. So there's a lot of things I love. I love sailing, I love flying, I love, you know, these are passions. These are things that I enjoy doing. They involve play, they involve outdoors and adventure and that kind of thing. I love gadgets. So these are things I derive a great deal of personal pleasure from. When I think about my purpose, right? My purpose on this planet is to make a difference. My purpose and my work is to help leaders build a better world. I'm very clear about my purpose. I'm clear about these passions. One of the passions that I have is speaking, leading a workshop, working with a team, I just, I really enjoy it. Like, I'm having so much fun. I'm at play when I'm doing that kind of work. And I'm also fulfilling purpose of helping leaders build a better world. Right? Which is tied clearly to my life purpose on those moments where I feel like I made a difference for a team and I was having fun, I feel almost guilty about the quality of the work in that day. Like they paid me for that.

Right. Those are great examples because, okay, so your P squared there is leading a workshop and making those leaders better so they create a better world. That intersection of those two intersections, that might give you purpose, but they wouldn't Give you the passion. Sounds like you really enjoy being with people, with these teams and helping them in sort of those interactions. There might be other things that you may not enjoy as much. And then sailing, it's passion, but it's not purpose. So it wouldn't work here.

But there are times when I've taken, like, a group of CEOs on a retreat, I've taken them out sailing, and then we go play on the bay. And it's an extreme experience. And while we're doing it, we talk about their growth challenges and their leadership issues and that kind of thing. And that's another one of those days where I'm like, wow, I got to go do something I love. And I'm fulfilled in that as well.

And that's wonderful. Now you have expanded your possibilities, but it's again, the P square. Right?

Yeah.

You take them sailing, you might want to take them something else that you basically hate. Right. I mean, I don't know what that would be, but they could be, you know, take them cooking. Right. So here's one for me. I also love leading workshops. Yeah. But sometimes people say, you know, what about cooking class? We all get together and we cook at night, and everybody does a little bit. I hate cooking. I don't want to be with 20 executives where I have to cut food and do some cooking. But ceiling is a perfect sample. Right. You're combining. You're looking for the P square all the time. And we can do so much better if we can find that P square world.

Yeah. So passion and purpose. You talked a little bit about fight and unite.

Right.

And some of the issues. So keep talking about then in the team environment, working with teams, collaboration and so on.

Yeah. So the four first principle of this book, our findings are about mastering your own work. The last three years, about mastering work with others. And that's reality of 99% of work today. You work with others in some capacity.

Yeah.

The first one I call forceful champions. So when we work with others, very often we don't have formal authority over people. We do have people in our team, but we work peers. We work with clients. We work with partners. You know, influence people. We command. We got to have being forceful champions, which means having the ability to excite those people and influence those people so that they will support what we're trying to get done. And that is about informal influence being a little bit political, perhaps, you know, understanding their agendas, maybe to compromise or do something that we make sure that they are in the fold. And then secondly, excite people, inspire people. People want to be inspired. And that means kind of stirring emotions in people in a good way. So that's a. Forceful champions are those who are very good at those two things. They're sort of good at influencing and they're good at inspiring. So that's the first thing. Second, we talked about, you know, being in groups and teams and leading meetings. Fight and unite. Basically. Fight means having a hell of a good discussion. Like this is great, Everybody gets to talk. The best ideas came out, we discussed, we dissented, we had a real rigorous discussion. That is so important. Once we've done that, we need to set aside our differences and unite so we actually execute. Without execution, you don't get results.

This is very complementary to Pat Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team where he talks about having real trust so that we have the real conversation, having productive, healthy conflict. And. And then the third is that we actually. We may still disagree, but we'll commit and then come together and work on the solution.

Absolutely. These are reinforcing those principles. And what we're seeing is that. And here's my finding, you know, having talked to lots of executives, studied them in this book, many teams fail at either or both of those two. It's a big problem for so many people. So that's important. Then the last thing is what I call discipline. Collaboration. There are two sins of collaboration between groups of people. One is under collaboration, we live in silos. But here's the other thing. There's also over collaboration. People collaborate on too many things without the focus. And this has happened in the last five years in particular because collaboration is seen as a good thing. So more of it the better. Again, we're here back to the more is better paradigm. It isn't. People collaborate on too many things. It's unfocused. And so they spend a lot of time and these collaboration projects are under resourced. It's become the night shift in many ways. What we need to do here is to cut back on the less important collaboration activities and focus on the few that are really important and go all in to make those a success. So less collaboration, but better collaboration.

If you've ever served on a committee or whatever, you probably have a sense of what unproductive collaboration looks like.

There you go. Yeah, again, they're not paying attention. They don't have the resources. We are supposed to collaborate on something, developing a product. Product. Well, our engineers don't have time, so we're delayed and it's half baked output anyway. Nobody's held accountable because who's in charge? We're not quite sure because it's a collaboration. So isn't everyone in charge? It just all breaks down. So in this chapter, I kind of outlined the five principles to get good collaboration. I mean, the five sort of techniques you need to put in place and. Yeah, so those are. That's the, you know, that's the seven. Yeah, that's the seven. That's right.

Just to underscore that last one for some of our teams, I often see teams that try to put too many people into the leadership team meetings. And so I've seen people try to put 20 and 30 people in and it just. It's a disaster because everybody is intelligent in even the second tier, but you just don't have time and it's unproductive to have everybody sounding off about everything. I had a team recently quit our process because they couldn't put fewer people around the table. It just doesn't work to have that many people all needing to be heard on every single topic. It becomes really unproductive.

Right. And you don't have really great discussion among 20 people. So I think in terms of meetings, whether they're collaborative meetings or other meetings, here are a few tips. One is cut down the number. Do we really need them? Two, cut on the time. Why should the default be an hour? Maybe that means should be 15 minutes, maybe it should be 30 minutes, maybe it needs to be three hours. But why just default of an hour? Cut down the time in half. Try to. Yeah. And then cut the number of people in half who need to be there.

It's brilliant. And then see what happens.

Yeah, sorry, Try the half. Right. Let's do with half on what we're doing today and see how it goes. And I think in most cases it will actually go really well because we just don't need to. When you have seven people around the table, you can have a real discussion. When you have 14, not so much.

Right. Yeah. It becomes way impractical. So just quick recap. Right. The seven are do less than obsess, Redesign your work. Don't just learn loop P squared. Passion and purpose together. Right. Forceful champions fight and unite. And the two sins of collaboration, those are the areas. And what I think is really cool is that you've got a quiz now. So I want to encourage our folks. If you're just at the summit and you just heard Morton Hanson speak, you know what it's like and you've already got that. But if you're hearing this for the first time you're introduced to the work. You can go find the book and you can find everything@mortonhanson.com but and we'll put the link in the show notes here, but there's a quiz there. So you can go take the quiz and see where do you need to work better, what do you need to do? I find again and again teams are like, oh yeah, our team's healthy. Oh, we're trusting. Are we a productive conflict? And I'm like, yeah, that's not what I see. So it's always hard to tell yourself. And that's why a quiz or assessment tool like this is really helpful to give a look at where could you go to work on what are you already good at and what would it be better to work on next to develop more of the seven in yourself and perhaps for your whole team.

Yeah, yeah. And the quiz is kind of cool because you score yourself on the seven and every benchmark you're against a larger population. See where you're strong and weak relative to others. Then we give you tips where you should focus. So it's a really good self assessment. And also the new thing we're starting, which is coming out right now actually is you could sign up for that first principle do list and obsess. And we will twice a week send you practical tips how you can implement that for like a five week kind of training program if you like. And so if you sign up for any of these on our website, everything is for free. We give you these resources.

That's super cool. So mortonhansen.com we'll put the spelling but it's M O R T E N H A n s e n.com and we'll put that link right there in the show notes and then go there, take the quiz, sign up for the thing, get the tips in and see what difference it makes for you. I'm so glad to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on and making the time to do this today. I'll see you next week in Denver and our folks will hear you, will have heard you yesterday or at the conference with us. And I think this comes out on the day after you speak. So I'm really glad to have you on today to do the recording.

Well, thank you. It's been an honor.

Yeah, thanks. And for everyone. So we bring a guest like this every week and we talk about different aspects of scaling your company, scaling your leadership on the journey to that. You'll find all this stuff@scalingcoach.com or wherever you get your podcasts. If you go to scalingcoach.com, not only can you subscribe and we'll send it out to you so you don't miss one, but we've got loads of free tools there, worksheets and descriptions and agendas on how to do all the stuff we do. We've even got a free book offer if you'd like to get a copy of the Scaling up book. If you just pay the shipping and handling, we'll ship it out to you for free. A real physical book. Scalingcoach.com thanks again everyone. We'll talk to you next week. I want to give special thanks to our original growth guru, Verne Harnish. The show is produced by Nye Obaid with audio production by Podfly Productions. Audio editing is done by Albert Burge and our show notes are compiled by Ein Codena with proofreading by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of today's show, please share it with somebody else and let us know the parts that you loved so we can give you more of them. Thanks again for listening and keep Scaling Up. Sam.