Susan

"Gary Klein, in his seminal work, Sources of Power (another book, which along with his next, Intuition at Work, should be in every manager’s and strategist’s desk drawer), illustrates the intuitive / implicit nature of a business contract (drawing on Karl Weick’s version of a conversation between a boss and a team member): •   Here’s what I think we face •   Here’s what I think we should do, and why •   Here’s what we should keep our eye on •   Now, talk to me132   The only thing needed to make this into a mission order is to look your subordinate right in the eyes and say, •   Here’s what I want you and your team to accomplish. Will you do it? Bill Lind, who played a key role in introducing maneuver warfare into the Marine Corps, and whom we met in chapter III, suggests that every mission order actually contains an explicit or implied “in order to.” In a business setting, this might look like: Susan, I need you to go down and take charge of sales in the Northeast and increase revenue by at least 25% in order to avoid factory shut downs that could start as early as July."

"Do not prescribe how to accomplish the job. The less said about the how, the better. If you don’t have a strong belief, grounded in past experience, that Susan can think of ways to accomplish this mission (whether she realizes it yet or not), you should not be assigning it to her: Mutual trust / cohesion / unity yet one more time."

"Returning to our example of Susan and the 25% goal in order to save the factory, if the immediate circumstances were different, I might frame the mission differently: Sales in the Northeast have been falling the last three quarters. Our top two competitors are gaining market share at our expense. From my experience, and from what I’m seeing in other regions, it isn’t the fault of the product. I want you to go down there, get this turned around, and put our sales effort back on track in order to ensure a growth rate that the board will find acceptable, if not impressive. Notice that I didn’t say by how much to improve sales. The more the better, but in this example, her focus is “getting the sales effort back on track,” which implies that I know what a well-oiled sales machine feels like, regardless of a specific month’s numbers."

"Discuss it for a few minutes (or whatever it takes) to convince yourself that you and Susan both have the same mental concept of what needs to be done. Then give her a little time to think about the matter. A top caliber subordinate can get quite blunt: She may question whether your idea makes sense and whether you have offered her enough time or resources to do the job. This questioning is key to transferring ownership of the job, and your answering these serves the same purpose that answering objections does in any selling job, what salespersons call “closing on objections.”"

"Susan: Aspirational goals can prompt a reset for the entire organization. In our case, it inspired infrastructure initiatives throughout YouTube. People started saying, “If we’re going to be that big, maybe we need to redesign our architecture. Maybe we need to redesign our storage.” It became a prod for the whole company to better prepare for the future. Everybody started thinking bigger."

"Our landmark OKR had some unanticipated consequences. Through the four-year push to reach the billion hours of daily watch time, our daily views soared in parallel. Stretch OKRs tend to set powerful forces into motion, and you can never be sure where they’ll lead. Another big lesson, for me, was the importance of support from the top—from Susan, of course, but also from Larry and Sergey."