I love my co-founders… well ok, I usually like at least one of them each day 😉 and we have 4 so there’s enough to go around!
Of course, like every startup, we go through a barrage of difficult decision making, often about things we don’t know enough of (the bliss of trying to carve out a new market!). Which means it’s not always fully logical but guided by gut feelings and ego fueled wars often take over our discussions. We all know how detrimental it is for us and we try to put in fixes (different people have veto for different things, vote for things we deem need majority etc.) but alas, sometime we don’t let go of our “honour”!
And then, on the same day, I came across these two amazing blogs, “Give it Five Minutes” and “I Get It”. Woahhh – the first thing I thought was… who has five minutes.. we need it finalized NOW so we can begin building and shipping it. But wait.. is that a push back the moment I read something new? Irony.
We want more creativity, support, understanding, faith. We’ve gotto take 5. Or, 10. Send out an outline of the ideas or agenda before any meeting so everyone has time to marinate them, and if new ideas come up and unless there is an absolute obvious reason to junk it, we’ll take an hour before we decide to go for it or against. It’s OK if we don’t take the decision RIGHT NOW. It’s better if we take a decision a day late if it happens to be the right one, the next best thing, the silver bullet instead of us having missed it because we were undercover douches or egomaniacs.
Tl,Dr; Remember to be nice, respectful. Remember, our hearts beat for the same thing!
I am going to try and implement this strategy in our meetings moving forward – unless of course, I receive pushback 😉