Transcript excerpt from a Cameron Herold talk about leadership and systems thinking for scaling businesses. Herold emphasizes asking '10x' leadership questions (e.g., what would need to change if clients increased tenfold), creating no-blame cultures, and designing systems to prevent failures — illustrated with anecdotes about Starbucks and his company 1-800-GET-JUNK’s rapid growth after media exposure.
Chapters
One of my favorite questions was, what systems would we have to change if next month we had 10 times the amount of clients we do this month? What would we have to change if next month our business was 10 times bigger than it is today? Those are leadership questions. And you don't have to be the smartest person in the room to know that when something goes wrong, remember that people don't fail, systems fail. So create a no blame environment in your company that nobody's going to get in trouble for something going wrong. It's a system that's broken or a system that's missing. So when something happens that doesn't deliver something break, just say to the person, what system is broken that allowed that to happen? What system can we fix that allowed that to happen? I learned this 20 years ago from my mentor who is being groomed as the CEO at Starbucks. We did a monthly call every month for two years. We did in person meetings for a full day every quarter. And Greg said to me one day, he was telling me a story about he was driving through Seattle and he got a phone call from Howard Behar, who is the current CEO at Starbucks. Starbucks. And Howard said to Greg, why is the letter B on this sign at 50th and Wallingford in Seattle not working? And Greg said, I don't care why the letter B is not working. And Howard, like, what do you mean? Greg said, the question you need to be asking me is what system do we have in place to ensure that every letter on every sign at all of our locations are always working? That's a question that I'll answer, but I'm not going to answer why that letter B on that sign isn't working. So as a leader, we need to ask those questions. What's the system that we can have in place to ensure that every member who signs up and fills out their onboarding form gets actually onboarded quickly, even while Meredith is away on vacation for two weeks? That's a question I need to understand. Not, why didn't Meredith not get back them? I know why, because she was on vacation for two weeks. But what's a system that we can do, right? One of my other favorite questions was, what systems would we have to change if next month we had 10 times the amount of clients we do this month? What would we have to change if next month our business was 10 times bigger than it is today and we can't hire more people? What would we have to change? Those are leadership questions. And you don't have to be the smartest person in the room to know that. You just have to ask those questions to get your team to know that. And then you can think about how to help unstick them, how to introduce them, how to find the resources for them. But those are leadership questions. That's what will help you scale the company. When I asked 1-800-GETJUNK about it was we were starting to scale and then all of a sudden we were doing this exercise around the 10x and but a week or two later we were on Oprah, Fortune magazine and CNBC Squawk Box all in the same two week period. And all of a sudden we were getting 10x the number of leads. We're like, holy. Something just inflected. It was really fast.
