Published on 20th November, 2024

Reflections on Execution and Delivery

I sent a message to my friend on WhatsApp. In it I mentioned that I am getting to understand a friend and mentor better, Let's call this friend Jim. I say that in relation to moments he gets angry and blasts you. One thing that at least I thought was that he would act different based on who was part of the receiving end, let's say a friend, an age mate. But with a recent experience I was convinced that he can't help himself with that. To be fair to him, he tries, because at moments when someone he respects - a friend/age mate is at the receiving end, he would say something like, "I am not in a good mood right now, let's talk about this - what is causing the bad mood - later"

My friend replied:

And I sent a qouted reply:

Well, I intended to send a short reply but I kept on writing and writing and thought, oh, this is a nice idea. Let me put it in a blog post and here we are.

He gets pissed when you don't deliver. When you deliver, he praises you and awards you.

I doubt you can build any good company with people who don't deliver, are not accountable for anything. See our government institutions, see the negligence from our health professionals and institutions, and several other professionals and institutions, heck even artisans, maybe Ghanaians? I am not sure.

For me it is an easy choice to make, if you can't deliver, quit and enjoy life in your mediocrity but if you say you want to do this and sign up, you might naturally not be someone who delivers, so you take up the challenge and deliver. You Do, Fail - get blasted - and Learn.

And I think if you are somebody hungry for growth, not delivering should pain you enough so blasting isn't necessary, your superior might lose it or not realise yet and blast you anyway but if they are good in leading/mentoring, I would expect them to realise your past performance and take this as a one time thing and encourage you to perform not blast you. Worse case scenario you get blasted, take it any way. I would expect them to not lean into their availability bias so thay can make an objective decision and how to deal with the issues. They might be an asshole and Tony Fadell in Build Chapter 2.3 tells us to determine what kind of assholes they are - by asking why -, and take it from their frame of reference and learn how to deal with them.

Nothing great comes from cozying and and doing the bare minimum. I don't know, but I believe to build a significant company that is worth its weight, you need people pushing above their weight or at least, at the bare minimum delivering on the tasks assigned to them and a bonus, helping their team members, again if they can't they should quit the job there is no shame in that. In fact it is honourable to accept defeat early and not waste everyone's time and the company's resources.

The work can always be too much and too less time to execute - there are so many variables here that I won't dive into that now - remember when you drew my attention to hybeecodes? (a question to my friend) video on why he left Paystack? Because he was doing two jobs and didn't want his delivery and executiom to suffer.

That's the kind of people you need. Execute and Deliver, if they sense they are failing, they should be able to take an unsupervised initiative to improve he situation and themselves or quit if they think it is too much, and I mentioned why I didn't get too much disturbed with my termination with Stac.ai because deep down I knew I could do better. And for the people quitting, Tony Fadell talks about that in Build Chapter 2.4 (I Quit).

When he(Jim) lost it and was angry I came out with a mental model to deal with people like that, and I thought if you are working with Jim, there are only 4 things that matters

1.⁠ ⁠Make a commitment to yourself to never get blasted in standup and let that be important to you as oxygen or water.

2.⁠ ⁠Identify your wildly important goals (See The 4 Disciplines of Execution [pdf p.28 ↗] )

3.⁠ ⁠Execute on time, deliver on time. Job Done. Repeat.

4.⁠ ⁠This is more like a slogan and should help with you with sticking to the 3 points earlier. You see how when a baby wants something and you don't give them and they start crying and throwing tantrums? Good, So you frame the situation as,

I am just realising that with this framing in puts you top of your issues rather that Jim been on top dictating on what you should do / micromanaging you.

Rise up to the task, improve to execute, execute and deliver, Jim doesn't blast you. The company progresses. Everybody wins.