00:43:07 · Luca Ferrari
[00:43:07] S1: done this. Yeah. Everybody at the company, certainly the people who have shown promise, they should have way more on their plate than feels even remotely comfortable. The reason why you should do that is many fold. The first reason is every time you choose what to work on, whether you do it consciously or unconsciously, you're prioritizing a set of work items, each with its own return attached. Again, you may be unaware of potential returns or very deliberate, but either way, that's what's happening. The bigger the universe of, let's say, work items that you can prioritize from mathematically, the higher the returns on your time you'll deliver. Let's say you have 10 possible tasks. If I add an each with a certain, let's say ROI attached. If I add the eleventh, it's impossible, assuming that you select well, it's impossible that adding an eleventh task will lower the ROI of what you choose to do because still have the other 10. So if this is lower ROI than the others, you're still going to do the others. But it's possible that it happens to be the highest ROI of all, and so you end up doing something more valuable. So the more work you give people, the better the opportunity for them create value. Now that's especially true if they choose well, and therefore it's very important to work with people who are smart. And it's very important for managers, for leads, probably the number one thing they can do, or certainly one of the most important things they can do, and we try to coach them in this regard, is to help the reports select well. So that's the most important thing. The other very important thing that you accomplish when you give people a lot more work than feels comfortable is you're really forcing them to come to terms with the immensity of possible. We find that sometimes people as they grow and the aperture for them professionally expands, they get overwhelmed or there's too much to do. We need more people, for example, on the team. I think that's generally a terrible way of looking at life or the world. Generally speaking, there's always a lot more you could be doing than you can do in terms of your capacity. It's just that some people don't realize it. It's not that if you're a student and you're done studying for an exam, there's nothing else you can do. There's plenty you could do.
00:45:32 · Luca Ferrari
You could launch a startup, you could take a second degree on the side. It's just that you may not be sufficiently proactive and imaginative to figure it out. And so as people jump in a job and if you give them just a relatively short task list so that they'll be done within their eight hours and there's nothing in their mind, that initially feels easy and comfortable, but you're failing to train them at a massively important skill, which is handling that immensity of the possible. And once you become really good at being comfortable with having a 100 times more things you could be doing than you can actually do, that's an insane superpower to have, because it enables you again to handle a vast array of possibilities and surgically select those with insanely high returns. And it's something you can only do if you're not thoroughly overwhelmed. So is it better to have someone become overwhelmed by that immensity once they're ten years in and they're running a 100% organization and a billion dollars in revenue? Or is it better to test them at that and coach them at that? I wouldn't say on day one, but maybe day seven and for the first year so that, first of all, you only promote to that higher level of responsibility, people who have proven that they can do that. And if they actually can do that, they begin benefiting from it much earlier, even if their scope is more limited. But you need to completely eradicate the concept of I'm only good at my job if I exhaust my checklist, my task list. There's no such thing. You're always going to have at least a Bending Spoons. But I think, again, life, if you look through the veil, is like that anyway. You're just unconscious about this sometimes. You really want to be able to handle that enormous amount of possibilities and surgically identify those that have insanely attractive returns and then be laser focused on those and disregard everything else. Is this related to
00:47:33 · David Senra
[00:47:33] S0: what you're saying earlier, you're like, listen, they're not going to be AOLs. If it was a standalone brand, they're not going to get the talent that we are going to get at Bending Spoons. We can have a massive impact because they have a huge customer base, but then we can treat it like a startup. But then you said something about, like, if they can work on this for ten to... Or twelve to eighteen months. So then you rotate teams throughout the different companies. Is that part of saturating their capacity? Was like, okay, this opportunity on this business, this person is really talented, but there's no other ways to utilize that talent to a higher degree here, so let's move them to another team. Am I understanding that correctly?
00:48:02 · Luca Ferrari
[00:48:02] S1: Another company? No. No. That... You you do... There there... There are... Yes. We do rotate people all the time. There are very reasons for that. Part is, I think at some point when you've looked at the same thing for a long time, you stop having good ideas. So it's good to get new people in to maybe take a fresh look. Part of it is we just find that if people keep working with the same people, you risk developing subcultures. And we are highly opinionated on what the optimal culture looks like. We want it to be uniform across the company. And if someone comes up with a better idea, that's awesome, but that has to be spread across the company. We don't want to have subcultures. And so you want to move people, you know, mix and match and so so that they they they don't get used to a different way of working, at least in one important aspects. Another one is that they get to learn more. So that that goes back to what you were discussing. It's slightly different from having, you know, know, an immense set of possible tasks. There's an element of of of diversity. You need new challenges and diverse challenges to keep honing your craft and and finding new ways of growing. That helps too, and it keeps also enthusiasm levels higher because humans tend to get bored, and so we want to try new things to stay motivated. Last but not least, as we keep acquiring new things, as an organization, the universe of the things we could be doing expands with new acquisitions and often working on those new things yields the highest expected returns. So we Regrettably, we have to remove resources from businesses that would still have plenty of opportunity in them. But relatively speaking, it's better to work on a new business. For all these reasons, we do rotate people all the time. And I think it's been quite successful for us to do it that way.
00:49:50 · David Senra, Luca Ferrari
[00:49:50] S0: You just said you're high... You have very strong and you're highly opinionated on the culture you should have. Do wanna share some of those opinions? [00:49:56] S1: The main quality we look for in people, we call it extreme ownership. We try to work with people who care tremendously about being the best in the world, about what they do, about bringing value to the team. [00:50:08] S0: Hold on. Did you get that from Jocko's book? [00:50:10] S1: Actually, name, yes. The concept is not exactly the same. There are similarities. But I thought the terminology extreme ownership was so immediately evocative of what you look for that I said, okay, we need to use that for [00:50:25] S0: Obviously, you know, only read biographies and history, but I don't read business books. But I I always tell people, was like, that's one of the few business books I'd actually recommend reading. Can read it on a weekend. And, yeah, it's very direct. It's just like Jocko is in... I've met him in real life. He's the exact same person. [00:50:39] S1: Yes. [00:50:40] S0: So extreme ownership? [00:50:41] S1: Yeah. Extreme ownership. Again, we... I think we define it a little bit differently, but the So [00:50:44] S0: how do you define it then?
00:50:44 · David Senra, Luca Ferrari
[00:50:44] S0: how do you define it then? [00:50:45] S1: Extreme ownership is is caring in your belly tremendously about being the best at what you do, about helping the team and the company succeed. It's a matter of priority and intensity priority. And we wanna work with people who feel that way about their work advantage points. We'd rather not work with someone who's really, really smart, very competent, but for whom doing well here would only be priority number three or four. You know, like... We have seen it time and again, we've had people who were probably close to genius level IQ fail here because ultimately, they saw their job as a way to make... You know, to earn a living, to to make ends meet rather than actually transcending apparent limitations and and winning and be amazing at work. [00:51:29] S0: Okay, hold on. You just got done saying, Hey, we're going to centralize hiring. We have a bunch of engineers. You need to have brilliant people in HR. We went through this very unique way that you think about this, right? But how do you screen for that? How do you screen for being successful here and helping this company be successful? Is that their top... One of their top priorities, you know, maybe the top priority in their life? [00:51:49] S1: I mean, it's never gonna be a movement. We understand, obviously, if you have a family, that will be number one. But if you start telling me, after my family, then there's, you know, being a great gamer at night plus one of bar.