Scaling coach Bill Gallagher uses a sailing story to show why leaders who work harder often slow their companies down. When he reefed his sails in San Francisco Bay, the boat became faster and more balanced. His upcoming book Busy Is Broken argues that a leader's own effort becomes the bottleneck, and offers a daily experiment: find an hour to delegate or cut.
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So what is— what if your own effort is the thing that's keeping your company slow? What if it's your work that's actually getting in the way? That's what we're talking about today. Everybody, I'm Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of this Scaling Up podcast. Our show comes to you every week. If you want to know more about the show or the upcoming book or that kind of thing, go to scalingcoach.com, and that's our website and got all the good stuff about it. So let's get into it just a moment. So I learned one of the more important lessons about sustained speed in a small sailboat in the San Francisco Bay years ago. And I suppose I knew it before, but it got real and concrete for me. So we're sailing across the bay with a group of friends and, uh, myself and another old sailor on the boat. And We're beating upwind in the bay. Now, San Francisco Bay is, it's a very heavy wind bay, especially in the summertime. We get very strong winds that build all afternoon. So we're heading upwind out from the East Bay towards the Golden Gate Bridge, and the winds are building and building and building. It started off pretty light as we headed out just before lunchtime, but now just after, as we're getting kind of into the slot, The winds are intense. And as the winds build, we're definitely overpowered and I'm working really hard. So the situation increases. Now I'm working really hard and I'm fighting the helm of the boat. And, uh, people are calling out helpful things. There's a few other sailors on the boat, including this one old guy. Um, and you know, like I'm just trying to deal with the situation. I'm not thinking about it clearly in that moment for whatever reason. Long time ago. I definitely do it different today. But so they're calling each other like, hey, get more high side weight and sheet in and, and grab that tiller, Bill, and hang on and pull tighter. And you know, that kind of thing. So people are calling for more effort and more struggle. And then the, the old skipper, he's actually still a friend to this day. Sort of leans in and he goes, "Just put a reef in." And so, put a reef in. He's essentially telling me to find a path with less effort, to find a less effortful path. So, put a reef in is a little bit of an oxymoron. Put a reef in is where we actually reduce the sail. So, reefing points on a sail on a big boat are these things, these little things at the front and the back of the sail at the bottom where you could pull the sail down and reduce the total sail area. So what does that do? So you put a reef in, you put generally 2 reefing points in sails of this kind. So we would put the first or second reef in, and that means to reduce the sail area by a significant amount. You're dropping the widest part of the sail, the bottom along the boom from the mast, the tall stick along the boom, the horizontal stick that holds the sail. Right, to break it down into non-sailing language, that biggest area of the sail, you're reducing that. You're— it essentially folds or rolls into itself and you strap it down, and then the rest of the sail then is pulled tight. So what happens on that? So when you do that, you reduce the total force that you're operating on. The boat becomes more balanced. It doesn't take as much struggle. We don't need quite as much high side weight. We don't need as much force on the tiller. It becomes more naturally balanced. The boat doesn't want to round up and do things like that. And it just sails better, smoother, more like we're less of a zigzag, more of a straight course, and less effort, less and less strain on the rigging, right? The whole thing actually got faster. So he says put a reef in. So we have to do this thing called heaving to. So we, we, we pull over for a minute, we lay the sail out, then we, we settle down, and then we, we drop some sail and we tighten it up, and then we turn back into the wind and, and we We move on, but now we move on actually at slightly higher speed and with lots less effort. And I think that's the thing that I keep seeing companies do is very much like that, like trying to operate at a maximum peak level and put more and more effort in becomes a problem. As leaders, we're looking for this more and more. And I've, I've started to write this book. This is the first in a series of things intentionally focused on the upcoming launch of the book. The book is Busy Is Broken. And it's about how our own efforts start to get in the way at some point. So, in this conversation, less force equals more flow. We want to read the wind, the customers, the market, that kind of thing. We want to adjust our efforts. So, we're just putting in the right effort at the right point. They say in sailing, reef early, keep the boat light, and that would be the equivalent of like Find the right people at the right time. Get the right people in and stop putting in so much effort. Now I see this again and again as the company grows. Leaders think, well, if I slow down, you know, everything stops working. But what if the opposite is true? What if you're chilling out a little bit lets the others rise up, lets you bring in and develop the right kinds of people? If everything has to run through you, then your calendar, your capacity becomes kind of the boundaries, the map or the limits of the business. And that map is always a little smaller, that business, that capacity is smaller than it needs to be. But time and again, we as leaders, we do this thing where we try to grab more control. We lean in harder. We sacrifice sleep, relationship, family, hobbies, things like that, instead of learning to let go, to get balanced as a leader. Right. And so I'm going to tell you over the next coming things and in the book and so on about a bunch of leaders, right? I want to tell you about Rocky. Who took his company from a massive, like, multi-billion-dollar valuation to a dramatic sell-off and losing the vast majority of the value, who worked all kinds of hours, flew all over the world, and tried to be Superman. He truly was an exceptional, extraordinary human being, but he just was one human being, and it got into a problem. I want to talk to you about Eddie, a guy who actually lived in his office. He slept many nights in the office until it tanked not only the company, but also his family in his relationship. I'll tell you about Lee, who micromanaged everybody's jobs every day, all day for many, many hours, that kind of thing, until people were frustrated, until there was turnover and griping, and people started putting in— either leaving or putting in minimal efforts because they were so tweaked about it. Lee even tried to coach me on how to be the coach. Couldn't just leave anything alone. Or Thomas, who built a company and then wanted to leave, but it took him another 7 years till he was able to exit the company because he hadn't taught the company to operate without him. In the book and, and in the upcoming episodes, I'll also talk about Michael Eisner picking out lamps in the middle of the night. Excuse me, sneezing while recording live. Can't help that. Um, uh, pardon me. Maybe we'll get that cleaned up. Can't promise it. Uh, Michael Eisner picking out lamps at Disney while Disney started to calcify, ossify on the other side, right? Another leader came in, Bob Iger, and made 3 big bets and started going home for dinner, making— spending time with his family. Or we'll talk also, and I'll share with you about Gwynne Shotwell, who runs SpaceX under Elon Musk, who actually does the bulk of the running of the business there, who builds a team that launches rockets with less heroics, more consistent, repeatable kinds of things. I'll also tell you about some friends and some clients. Michel, who completely redesigned his life after working 360 days a year for several, for many years, actually. I'll talk to you about Larry doing 5 boring things better than anybody else. I'll talk to you about Tony climbing, growing a business twice, the second time with better effects on both the business and his marriage. So, all of these coming at you, but hopefully, you're beginning to get the idea. Less effort, more balance, better flow, better focus on your unique skills and abilities, that kind of thing. We're going to look at a few key things as we go, but you could start to think about it right now. So where are you micromanaging and how could you start to shift to empowering other people? Where are you being superhero, right? Like trying to be the hero of things. And where could you just bring more self-awareness, like catch yourself in the middle of like, here I am to save the day, you know, and rein that Mighty Mouse in. Right? Uh, where are you always on and where could you bring some rest and recovery to your thing? This hustle mindset is what gets us off the ground. What's what gets us started that like, I could do it. I'll jump in. Let's not wait for things. It gets us off the ground. It doesn't necessarily get us into orbit. It gets the boat out of the harbor. It doesn't carry us around the world. So we're looking for that point at which your individual effort starts to actually get in the way. Holds the team back from doing their thing, where that effort is only scaling linearly. And until you work with and empower more people, you don't start to scale exponentially. And it's not just about having that key person, it's about you letting that key person show up, because you could hire the best person in the world and then the way you operate with them could hold them back, right? We want to get that math working in your favor, not against you. In this case, you don't need so much of a personal upgrade. Like, you don't need to develop more skills or chops, that kind of thing. You already probably have. It's more about organizational and seeing your role in it. So, I have an invitation for you. If you like the ideas here, look at your calendar for tomorrow and each day for the next week or so. Look at your calendar. Find one thing you could cancel, move, or give away. Find 1 hour, and if you can't find 1 hour, find 15 minutes, but find some time that you could carve up, give something away every day for the next day, and see how long you keep that going. Run that as like a trend and see how far you could get it. Use it for something important and not urgent. So, take that hour of 5 minutes. Firefighting and overworking, that kind of thing, and then go on to something that's really important that could advance you, but that isn't like a fire in your business. In the next solo episode, I'll talk to you about how we got here. Like, what is the cultural framing and what's the history that brought us to this place? You know, you and I who do this thing, who overwork too much, who don't do our best work, who hold our companies back, that kind of thing, that's actually 300 years of cultural programming that made busywork feel like a virtue. It's a machine that we're born into, but it is a machine that can be redesigned. I'll tell you more about it. Listen in, keep coming back. We'll talk to you again in a couple of weeks. Thanks again to my friend and mentor Vern Harnish, who created the whole Scaling Up Framework that is the core of our work. And thanks to Anna and, um, and Wanda, who get our show out every week. Thanks again for watching, for listening. Until next time, keep scaling.
