A founder argues that blunt, direct communication beats finesse with your core team. He says roughly half his 30 key people consume most of his time, and with them he prefers honest disagreement over sugar-coating. Leaders who chase likability don't advance far; those who inspire respect through candid confrontation do.
In business, yes, I do have some finesse. But we talked about the main key people you work with. Do you think I have any finesse with the main key people I work with on a daily basis? Less depending on how close you are. The closer you are, the less you have. Yeah. Yeah. So I would say out of the 30 people, 15 of them probably soak up 80 to 90% of the time. With those 15 people, there's no finesse. Yeah. I don't want to operate my business with my best people if I have to dance around, right? I'd rather be direct. And then sometimes they blow up and will be direct with me and pissed off at something I did, and they have a right to be. And I like it that way. Yeah. And I apologize. Like yesterday, we're like debating and arguing things, right? I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Because to me, an argument is just you're making points, right? And sometimes I'll be wrong. No, no, no. Argument is progression. That's how you look at it. I look at it. Yeah. And argument is progression. But when you, when you sugarcoat things, you're actually stopping progression, right? So even if you call me a fruit fly for a good reason, I love it. I started laughing. Like, if you imagine you start working for someone as an executive, you call your boss a fruit fly, like— I like that person. Yeah, I think our point of all this goes all the way back to wanting to be liked. And if you want to go far in business, you should care less and less about. Because as I've progressed in my career, I've worked for a couple of people, a couple of startups, right? But I've seen the progression. The ones that want to be liked, they don't go very far. The CEOs that I've actually feared a little more, they went very far. That's what I would say.
