Execution speed isn’t just a tactic — it’s the ultimate competitive advantage. In this episode, Laurence Haughton, author of It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small…It’s the Fast That Eat the Slow, shares how his relentless drive for speed transformed his career — from an engineering tech to a best-selling author. We dive into why moving fast crushes inertia, ignites momentum, and pushes organizations forward, while slow, cautious decision-making keeps teams stuck. If you’ve ever felt frustrated by “admiring the problem” instead of solving it, this one’s for you. Let’s break the speed barrier!
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The Fast Eat The Slow: How Execution Speed Drives Entrepreneurial And Private Equity Wins With Laurence Haughton
A Journey Of Curiosity And Speed Expertise
We are sitting down with Laurence Haughton. I have an interesting perspective on his story. His book It’s Not the Big that Eat the Small…It’s the Fast that Eat the Slow has been very impactful to me and in my career personally. I read this book when I was 21 and still in the military. It’s good to sit down with. He has written six other books, two on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s super nice to meet you, Laurence. Why don’t you tell us a little about yourself and your story, and then we’ll dive right in?
Myself and my story are a series of happy accidents, stumbling into things, being curious, but a lot of luck along the way and making plenty of mistakes, recognizing them as early as I could. I wasn’t the first but I have never been the last to recognize a mistake.
What’s your overall career progression? Walk me through your LinkedIn. What different jobs have you had?
I stumbled by accident into being an engineering technician at a small company in Mountain View. The way they were running the place astounded me. I was so involved in everything that they do. Remember, I’m the lowest of the low. I’m an engineering technician and the next step down is a janitor, which is where I started.
This was an incredible thing for an under twenty-year-old kid to get involved in because I was looking at this incredible management style. I was told in my next job, which is a producer for ABC, that, because they are a small company, they are nobody. That’s not the way businesses are done. The thing that was interesting about it in Mountain View is the intel. I still have the picture and I still have one of my W-2s.
You were in a unique position, a frontline worker, to figure out how the gears turned and what was through the sawdust. A quick anecdote, I have heard a lot of senior executives who think it’s the boardroom where stuff goes on. A friend of mine was on the board. He has this plaque that he gives to all the managers, and it goes on everybody’s desk. It says, “A desk is a terrible place from which to view the world.” Please continue. I’d love to hear more about the journey, and then how you turn it into a research and an author for speed.
I was so turned on by that and the bosses there were so nice to me, including inviting me into their houses on the weekend to do things like help them shovel manure in their horse stables, but I didn’t care. From there, I went to college and university, and then they said, “If you are going to be in the media, you better start in the hinterlands.” I didn’t like that idea. I started at ABC in San Francisco.
I went from there into a development company that was creating training programs way back when it was an audio cassette. I was writing and I was producing, and then they said, “If you are going to write and produce, remember that the next part we have to do is sell. Why don’t you jump in and sell stuff? It’s easy.” They threw me into the sales. I was the only person there doing that. I was developed from there to going out into the field with the company and doing some of their work in the field, which is where at the first junction that I was at, they said the following, “He’s listened to the workshop now, but he doesn’t need to be here today for all of the numbers work that we are going to do. What should we do with this guy?”
The boss of the client company said, “Why doesn’t he go tag along with the salespeople on some calls and kill his time there?” I did, and as the guy was working on the call, he stumbled and looked at me like, “I don’t know what to do now,” so I jumped in. That became the catalyst for a career of figuring out how to get things done when other people are stumbling.
Did you have it distilled down to speed then? Was it like, “I’m the trash man and I will do anything for people. If you need something, I’m the guy you count on.”
It’s the latter.
Recognizing The Importance Of Speed In Organizations
When did you figure out that the speed of execution of a whole org is what it takes to move things forward?
I have always been impatient. That’s me. My mom would tell you I’m too impatient for my own good. It was a natural thing. I have also been competitive and I was looking for a way on how somebody from a third-rate university who’s gotten out there and done a lot of things on the streets was always with the underdog. How does somebody take on these big titans of industry and business and beat them in their own marketplace? I got attracted to the concept that if you take speed, it’s the ultimate competitive advantage. Once that happened, I kept furthering, how I do it fast and how I get other people to be doing it fast themselves, and how to be fearless about it.
It’s an absolute force multiplier. We have some people working with parts distributors at an asset now. The lag time of launching a new product is insane. I had a similar company I was working with. We got them up to 80 new products a year. These are very boilerplate nuts and bolts products. Nothing innovative.
This other organization launched three in the last five years. When you are unpacking that with this team, the lack of responsiveness to emails, or like, “We could do that next week,” and then they will have a meeting three months later and nothing gets decided. I have personally found that speed gets rid of lack of organizational cohesion and creates a little bit of momentum. Would you say that’s true and how have you thought about that?
In terms of momentum, let’s take a look at this. I start with marketing all the time when I’m looking at things. It’s the most attractive thing you can have because everybody thinks that you know what you are doing. You are moving fast and you are able to get things done. Who do you want to hand the ball to in a company, the manager who has a reputation for worrying about a thing to death or the guy who’s cranking it out and getting things done?
It’s an automatic instinct. What is this guy all about? How is she moving so fast? It’s working. How are they doing that? Before I worry about how they are doing it, here’s a promotion, here’s money, here’s everything. It’s a human condition that we look at those things and say, when somebody is mind-numbingly tedious and slow, we wonder are they an academic or are they a dumbbell?
Two thoughts. We are at this industrial service asset, and one of my guys says, “I’m so tired of these guys admiring the problem.” I had never heard it framed that way before. That slow pace is exhausting, and the second thing you go into marketing too, the marketing people, that’s what I call the white glove of sales. The white glove of a function. It’s like, “We have to think strategically about this.” Launch 30 products, 5 of them will suck and fail. I’m talking about a distribution company for industrial parts. Jobs ain’t going back and saying, “Redo the iPhone again. Start over. This is like nuts and bolts figuratively, but almost literally. It’s like, “Get 30 more to market as fast as possible.”
I got started in industrial distribution, hydraulic, and pneumatic components.
Very similar things to that.
I brought speed to that because they were so impatient and they were stalled.
Barriers To Speed In Organizations: What Holds Teams Back
What do you think drives an org to not have speed? Why don’t people put a premium on that?
We start to head towards the psychology of dysfunction. You start to look at the things as you are talking to people and admiring them, because I admire business people. The real ones, not the stuff you read in social media. I’m talking about people who are working on getting it done. I admire them. Once you start doing that and you get a heart at all, you start saying, “What did your mother do to you that made you this way?”
I know what my mother did and what my father did. What did your parents do? What they did was they made you risk-averse. I don’t mean risk-averse in the smart way, but risk-averse in the way that has hamstrung leaders for centuries. People have looked back in history and found this back in the Crimean War. It’s that long ago. It’s that and we do something in business that makes it the worst. It makes everybody risk-averse. It’s one thing we do which we could cure, but we say, “I don’t know that that’s such a problem,” and it is the one thing that’s crippling them.
Say more on that. What is driving the lack of risk taking in bigger corporations?
Second guessing.
The people were worried about somebody taking potshots out and making a mistake.
Speed is the ultimate competitive advantage. Share on XThey are worried about it. The stakes are out there. The research has already been done, but Captain Hindsight is murdering your speed. Do we have to do postmortems? Absolutely. Do we have to do an after action? Absolutely, but there’s that smarty pants edge to it where they say, “If you would have done this and this, it would have turned out better. That makes everybody go, I have been spoken to and I’m not going to put myself in that position again. Why do we let that be done? Why would a CEO let somebody waltz around the room taking away everyone’s urgency by hindsight bias, which is fully known and fully revealed to be nothing but a logical fallacy.
I have never heard the term hindsight bias before. That’s very interesting. You’ve given me something to unpack over the weekend. I have always found that if you have a private company and the company is smashing it, nobody cares. The CEO is doing his thing. Nobody bothers him. If everything is behind the eight ball like a 30% to 40% plan, you got a debt issue, you can go sign up for that. I will take ownership and accountability. You can get into that. The toughest thing is when something is stuck in neutral like they are supposed to be growing 7%, 8%, or 10% a year, and they are growing 1% or losing 1%. Nobody wants to make a decision because they don’t want to make it worse. It’s almost like they are playing not to lose, not playing to win. I’m guessing that goes in there.
It’s going to be valuable to you guys. The one thing you should remember about that is that 95% of all companies go into that mode of stall where you say, “Grow one, go backwards one.” Ninety-five percent of companies experience a stall. What is interesting about it is that 66% of them never get out and get back to growth. When you say, “Why do they not get back to growth?” Everybody has a hindsight view that doesn’t include the fact that they made everyone second-guess themselves, slow down, not make decisions, and not move forward. Make it happen, do something, see what works, and continue to grow. That’s the bias that a CEO is going to have. They have to protect all those green shoots who are doing it. Protect them.
My new CEO man crush has gone now. The T-Mobile CEO and his deputy took over. He went in there and did a bunch of stuff. He took away the carrier, the two-year contract. He took away the perception that his network was worse. He was like, “Why would you pay for 1% network reduction 2 times the price? Give them what they want, just execute it.” It’s almost like you have to have a nanny, for lack of a better word, protecting people and allowing them to fail. It’s super interesting now that you are saying. Is that the only catalyst that will get them out of the mud? Is it a new leader coming in? How can you cultivate speed in your org if you are a mid-level vice president or director?
How can you cultivate speed if you are a mid-level?
You are mid-level buried in the org. You are not going to see the CEO come in and do it pretty easy, or moderately easy.
They make it or break it as far as making it happen throughout the company. As far as a leader is concerned, a leader has tasks and responsibilities. The simple math of a leader is to make the team reporting to them more valuable, to make them perform better, and that’s pretty easy because whatever they are doing now, better is better.
Now you go to that and you say, “Is there anything that I can do? Is there any reason for me to learn how to utilize speed in order to create a catalyst for the organization to say, ‘What’s this pal or this gal doing over here?’” I have talked to a lot of leaders mid-level in terms of getting their story and how they do things because so much of what goes on in business happens at their level.
The ultimate leaders to follow through or the people who knew execution were strongly female. Why were they strongly female? Who do you give the ball to when you go, “We have done the strategy, now all you have to do is follow through.” You give it to her because it’s not that big a deal, and then we know it’s the biggest deal of all. What are you nuts? That’s the hardest thing in the world.
It’s so funny you say that. I was talking to a gentleman. He’s like, “The dopamine is gone once you are over the idea and then you have to bang out the work. I have met a lot of people that have had a lot of mileage in their career going into the boardroom with big ideas. One of the things I asked during an interview when they have something impactful is, “What did you do personally on this day in, day out for a week?” They are like, “My team.” I go, “Not your team. What did you do?” Sometimes I have been five times and they won’t go to “I did this.” We are trained a lot, particularly as the military, to never say we. I want to know what this guy did because it’s the closest proxy I can get to for how fast somebody moves.
I got stories of women who were in those circumstances that gave me enormous insights, which I then backtracked and did all of my research in terms of business research, psychological research, historical research, all of those kinds of things. Not so much to mention that to people, but rather that half a million pages of research were there to say, “Is there something in this story worth telling other people? Can I tell it with confidence?” The story matters more than the statistics, but if the statistics support that story and they say that’s a good story, then I feel very strongly about it.
At the Wall Street Journal at American Airlines and other places, I found people who made it happen, and they were all middle. There was a leap of faith on the part of the publisher. They only want those golden boy stories of CEOs and a man on a white horse nonsense. I said, “They don’t execute. If you want a book on execution, I can do that, but I have to talk to people who do it. I can’t talk to people who take credit for what they did. I got to talk to the actual people.”
Task-Driven Culture And The Future Of Remote Work
It’s interesting you say that. I spend a little bit of time at Amazon. Everybody takes things away from different places. They had this thing where they would give somebody a singular task. They would take an MBA student and they had this circus tent thing concept. They would set up a circus tent, and they gave this to one guy who was 30. They go, “You are going to commercialize our circus tent at a flexible capacity for the holiday season.”
If you give somebody one task and tie their entire compensation to it, 95% of the time, it will get done. You’ve already made the decision. There will be no hindsight. Your job is to do this. If you say do the circus tent in your day job, at your evening job, and you are working in the warehouse for the rest of the time, they are going to push that to the right at all times. I haven’t thought about that in fifteen years.
I have strong opinions on work from home culture. My reason is that the best vice president I had when I was at the big shop was in the area with the people at their desk. He would almost do a route every day. He had 4 or 5 people on his team and he would check in with this person for an hour or fifteen minutes every hour. He’d check in with this person for 30 more minutes, then he’d go on to read an article and he’d do some typing. He’d send some emails.
He would then go check in with person number 4 and then check person number 5. That doesn’t happen on Zoom. Nobody does those rotations. You don’t leave the Zoom line open with your little pod. Do you see work from home here to stay? Are they going to lag behind if you use that model? People say I’m biased. I have had people even call me like, “You are a Boomer.” I could throw this thing from a Boomer. I’m an older Millennial. What are your thoughts on that and the connectivity? I’d love to hear it if you did any research on any non co-located employees?
I have been hearing the rumblings and the complaints of people about the whole work from home demand, the whole work from home “I’m not coming back,” and the whole work from home “This is the new thing.” I leaf through a lot of the articles to simply make sure that I’m still on track with how much absolute crap there is being published and printed and talked about.
I don’t want to be the guy who discovered that in the ‘80s and now it’s 2025, and you say, “We have let go of all that nonsense.” Work from home has been an important thing, quiet quitting, and all of those things. They have been talked about, and they have been studied and researched since the dawn of the management sciences.
There were people doing things in 1920 that you’d say, “What? It’s 1920. I thought you guys were still cave people when it came to business. We know everything now, but you know nothing.” You would sit there and say, “I’m marveling at the way they do stuff.” The base of it is this. When it comes to the work from home, that is a symptom. It is not the disease. What is a symptom of?
It’s a happening story. I had somebody say to me, “I need your help. We need to figure out how to stop hiring the wrong people. Hire more of the right people because our whole business is built on reliability. The second thing we want you to do is help us find the way to follow through more flawlessly. We follow through, but it’s not good enough.” Here’s the thing.
They said to me, “You live 90 minutes away from us and we want you to do this with our main office,” because they have people around the world. “We want you to do this in our main office. You live 90 minutes away. You can do it by Zoom if you want,” and I said, “I don’t want to.” Why don’t I want to, because if I can see you, I can talk to you. I will see little movements in your face. I will watch your eyes change their focus. I will watch myself saying something and boring you. I will get a connection that will let you tell me stuff that I can make a difference fast by knowing it.
I’m there because I need to be, not because Jamie said, “You have to be in the office.” I don’t care. What I care about is what’s the result. If you have people working for you who don’t care about the result, your problem isn’t work from home. Your problem is who the hell is working in HR and not being scored for hiring the wrong people.
As a leader, you need to make your team more valuable and perform better, and that’s easy because whatever they're doing now, better is better. Share on XI could do ten hours of conference calls back to back for twelve hours on the phone. Four hours of Zoom exhausts me. It is the connectivity. The other thing too is when you have a couple of business units. We had a healthcare team in my old firm and we had an industrial team. The healthcare guy and the industrial guy don’t talk that much, but if they go get a cup of coffee, they will start briefing each other on what’s happening in the business. There’s this de facto informal communication channel.
One of the things I do when I underwrite an asset is I’m a big fan of the Hawthorne effect. You know what this is. They go, “What’s the plan?” I’m like, “We are going to show up for the first 100 days and we are going to listen. The results will go up by us showing up.” Very few people can make that logical leap, and then if you don’t change anything, you take all their ideas and then, from where the gears are at. One more on the work from home kit. What people say is that the best talent will want to work from home. I want you to beat that up because I disagree, but I’d like to hear your take. My take is less interestingly academic, I’m sure.
Can I first tell everybody and make a note of the Hawthorne effect, please? The worst sin of our social media is the no homework zone. The Hawthorne effect happened at a company. It was something that they realized. There are other studies and other things that back it up, then there are the critics who started, “It’s not this, it’s not that.” You should know what the Hawthorne effect is.
There are things you should know if you are going to hang out in the sports bar or you are going to get kicked out, and there are things you should know if you are going to talk with business people or they are going to roll their eyes and say, “Who’s this wanker?” I’m not saying everything, but you have a responsibility to do your homework. You don’t get that when you read social media. That’s me, but it’s why I dropped out of a lot of things because of these people. Your question was about people not wanting to waste their time commuting.
That’s what they say. A lot of recruiters do. You are not going to get top-tier talent if you don’t have some hybrid flexible working model. I reject that, but I’d love to hear your take on it.
What’s necessary? What would get me the most? If you say it’s best for everyone that they never meet me, okay. I now know something about you. It’s not an attribute, but I know something about you. I know you need a charisma transplant. I got to find someone to give you a charismactomy. Why is it that you are so distasteful to be around?
The second thing is I don’t read people and I can’t read between the lines when I have a chat with somebody. I can’t learn their story. I can’t get that going. If you can’t do that, you ought to learn to do that because there’s no way you can be in leadership without it. At that level, if somebody says to me, “I’m not going to use the tools or the learning that comes with why you get together in person,” I have friends all over the world. There’s a reason that all this technology is a wonderful thing. It lets me touch them now even though they are in Melbourne, Australia.
Have I met them in person? Yes. Do they know me crazy? Yes. Have we connected them many times and chewed a lot of the same dirt? You bet, but this gives me a chance to stay connected as does a PDF that I send them that’s good. As does an email that I send them that isn’t a trial to read. As do my little notes sometimes on their social media that they are doing. These things all let me stay connected, but we made our bond in person.
I can maintain a relationship after I forge it over Zoom and calls. I can’t open a relationship and I prefer to open a relationship over dinner. It’s a little spiritual.
We will have one someday.
Cultivating Speed In Teams: Advice For Entrepreneurs
I go out to the bay to meet you. Let’s pivot over to action because I’d say 35% of our audience are entrepreneurs. If you are a founder and you have a good product idea, what can you do to cultivate speed in your team in executing in the early stages?
You want to hire fast people. That’s one of the things. What does that mean? This is not social media where you say hire fast people. Bullet point number two, do this. No. What does it take to hire fast people? You have to draw a profile of fast people. You have to determine what the characteristics are that tell you that they are fast. What are the characteristics that tell you that they are slow? What are the characteristics that you can measure without having to tear your hair out trying to deal with Minnesota Multiphasic Personality dynamics?
The big five, you can do a lot of stuff intuitively. You can also come up with questions and answers, and you can begin to build that profile. You can profile the fast people, and you can get a gut feeling for what it is. First of all, you have to hire fast people. You have to bring them in. Not every role in your company has to be as fast as the others.
Take an example. If somebody is extremely conscientious, I’m talking about a 10 or a 9 on a scale of 1 to 10, they are not going to be the fastest person in the room. I need that in some activities, and so I bless that in those activities, and I don’t let any of my fast people make them feel bad because this is their deal. I use them for their strengths, which is what I have been talking to a person about in business recently. The idea in business is to use people for their strengths and make their weaknesses irrelevant. Not this thing that moms and dads grew up with, which was whatever your faults are, I have to cure those. I don’t care that you get straight As. You should get straight As. I expect you to get straight As.
Does low agreeableness or low conscientiousness lead to speed? Is that the formula?
There are aspects of agreeableness that slow you down. Extroversion is something typically that brings up speed, but they also are less careful, so they need somebody that’s taking a look at it and saying, “This is a fine thing to be fast with. This is a place where you need to go and have a break. You need to go over here and go do this because I don’t want you in the room for this part. This is the part where we are going to do a pre-mortem.”
That means that somebody that went through a post-mortem and knows all the problems is comfortable in those discussions. There are pieces of agreeableness. Conscientiousness isn’t going to be as high in the fast person, and if they have emotional stability. Not neurotic. I’m neurotic but I’m not crazy neurotic. Obsessive compulsive. I have got my things that you got to go along with.
It’s looking at the person and saying, “I can do this,” and then getting the person with enough emotional stability and to a degree of agreeableness that they can be part of a team. Team tennis, you stand behind the person and you say, “Don’t worry about that partner. I got it.” You don’t yell at them. Where this came from, and I know some of the people that brought it up, was one of the blights on management, this finger pointing and blaming. It’s not bad because it’s bad ethically. It’s bad because it hurts my profitability.
The Role Of Feedback: How Much Is Too Much?
The other thing I have noticed, and it’s a theme now, is everybody has a right to give feedback on every single thing at all times. Some take it to the extreme of, “All of it must be actioned.” How did we get there? I’m not saying we need to be totally in command and control. It’s one of the reasons I like to stress things because if you are in the bathroom and your kid’s choking on something, I don’t have to ask your permission to do the Heimlich. You would expect me to, and we fit in and you are not going to go, “You broke a rib. We are mad at you. That’s my feedback. Try not to break a rib next time.” Do you know what I mean?
I blamed Weber.
Which Weber?
Max Weber.
I don’t know Max Weber.
If you can't read between the lines when you talk to someone, you can’t be in leadership. Share on XMax Weber invented the concept of the bureaucracy. Max Weber invented the four pillars of bureaucracy. Max Weber was trying to do us a favor, and he did. It was a great idea until it wasn’t. It was a wonderful solution until it stopped being it. When he created it, and he processed it, the police came into it. I looked it up because I was going to bring it up to you. I was disturbed greatly by only the thought because they didn’t read the book I’m OK–You’re OK.
It was the whole thing of every opinion that equal lived experiences take the place of Newton and Einstein. It was the whole thing and I believe in openness. I believe in listening. I get tremendous insights from that, but I also believe, and I bite my lip, that when something is nonsense, it’s nonsense. When it’s crap, it’s crap. I don’t know if it’s gotten worse or I’m noticing it more, but you put posts up, you said something was jackass thinking. Not suffering fools gladly. Where did he come from?
Those are two things. I can’t believe 50-year-olds now are telling kids to go into the trades when there are investment banks. A business degree was $6,000 or $7,000, which the facts have changed. It’s more viable. I hear you. We then went to this whole thing where any degree mattered. Gender studies is as valid as engineering, just as important, and just as good. Any college degree is fine. The funny thing you said about the patience, I always assumed I was going to get more patience as I got older. I have gotten less patient.
I’m going to look forward to when you are my age then. I won’t be here.
I’m going to be insufferable then.
You are going to be insufferable. You will be so much more patient with your grandchildren. I can tell you that from my experience. You’ll go nuts with how you’d say, “This is my chance, God. I promised you. I saw my mistake with my son and I promised you I would learn from it, and by God I’m going to follow that through. I am going to take these little kids and I am going to cure everything I did that was wrong.”
Balancing Influence And Respect Within Organizations
That’s probably where that crept into my head. You’ve seen the whole story personally and you know it matters as much. It’s the big rocks that matter, not the little pebbles. I did my thing with my ChatGPT. I do remember Max Weber now. What happens is you have this situation where you want to give equal credence to a mid-level manager as you give to the CEO because it’s respectful.
When I was at McKinsey, we used to do this thing called a social network analysis where we would scrape everybody’s emails and we’d have them vote on this list like, “Who do you get your information from? Write down a name.” We do this diagram where it shows the 65-year-old union steward has more influence in the organization. His bubble was bigger than the ops director. It was a cool analysis because if you could wrangle those people, you get them on the page for what needed to happen. That said, the bureaucracy doesn’t work. Could this be engineered? Could you engineer how to create an org key influencers and workers that can help me speed it up? I’m probably not asking the right question, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.
The absolute excitement when some of the first people that were involved with Kaizen Breakthrough Technology inside of businesses talked to me. As they were explaining the process, and these are some of the people that were noted as the most brilliant ever, who were sat at the feet of Taiichi Ohno, learning the fundamentals that he thought of, and they were pulling those in. As they would go through and tell me their stories and tell me what had happened and all the rest of it, I sat there marveling at the concepts that would erase dysfunction in businesses that would make them faster and that would get those things done.
What did they do when they were doing a Kaizen event? They pulled together a team. The team had to be from multiple disciplines. I had one guy explain it to me, a CEO of a big company. He said, “I like dumb questions because they make me reconsider my assumptions.” He would have people with no concept whatsoever on all the little things, the acronyms, and the jargon, and they would go, “What’s that word mean?” He would bring them into these things simply to make his fast-moving jargon-built executives answer the question, and look for root causes and answers. How do you do that?
One person told me that they show respect. If they are on the team, they get respect. If they don’t deserve respect, why are they there? Who’s in charge of this? I’m not going to be mad at them. I’m going to be mad at who hired them, who leads them, who manages them. We deliver respect, we respect everybody. Big companies of $8 billion and $10 billion have guiding principles that they work very hard to follow, that talk about how you have to thank people for a job well done, how you have to listen with your full attention, and they take it seriously.
You’ll not progress if you don’t do those kinds of things, and then yet other companies where a senior vice president said to someone, and I heard it secondhand, she’s legit. The senior vice president said, “I have been trying to explain myself to other people and get them to explain themselves to me for my entire career. That’s over now. It’s time for other people to put in the effort.” She couldn’t believe how stupid he was, and she couldn’t believe how much trouble it was going to cause her as someone who was trying to get more and more follow through for a very big semiconductor company. She couldn’t believe it, and yet that person was right near the top suite.
I launched a lead transformation at one of the sites that I was at. It was the first Kaizen event. I was prepping it up. We are like, “We were to do the first Kaizen event.” It was a chemicals business, and I had the guys picking out the Kaizen team. I don’t want to hyperbole. We were there for 2 or 3 hours, picking out a team and evaluating every person at the site and how they would be impactful. It was my logistics member being so frustrated like, “Why do these six people matter so much?” I loop back, not mindfully influencers in the org, extroverted, disagreeable, cross-functional team across the site, and it went very well.
A funny anecdote from that is I got these patches that said Kaizen Participant and Kaizen Leader. It took about two months. It was right out of the GFC. Money was slow. It would cost $5,000. Money was tight then and we were in the construction chemicals business. Suddenly these guys show, put their uniforms on. You would not believe what 40-year-old men wanted to patch on the side of their uniform. We are talking about all this org theory and control, but if you distill it down, it’s respect. It’s respect for the management. It’s respect that you did something.
I feel like we are losing that in orgs a little bit. I’m not hearing the stories these days of the Toyotas. Who’s the next Toyota coming up that executes flawlessly? Who’s the next Danaher? Facebook is an incredible company. Nobody comes that I have met that’s worked at Facebook has been like, “It’s like a cult there. I’m so happy to go in.” I have heard that about people that worked at Danaher. They come out of Danaher, and they are like, “I loved working there. It was the best.” I have never heard that from a Facebook person. Now that it’s a scale company, what do you think we need to do more broadly?
Remember when it was Disney or you are not that old?
I bet it was.
I will be working for Disney.
That’s super interesting.
That’s all it shows you. You could kill it. Did you want to kill it? You did it. Was that intentional? I’d like to write your notes down so that we can know what not to do.
McKinsey did a partnership with the Disney Institute. Are you familiar with this?
I’m not. Go ahead.
Business is about using people for their strengths and making their weaknesses irrelevant. Share on XDisney had this consulting firm. I don’t know if they still do. It’s called the Disney Institute where they would go teach customer experience to people. That’s legitimate. I met the consulting team there. They were very Disney. They had a Disney cut. This was 2012, when I met these people. I remember the McKinsey guys going there like, “The Disney line said, ‘We needed these prerequisites if you guys are ready for change. If you are about this.’” It was a little not touchy feely, but it was like a company had to be ready to go on this journey. I hope Disney can find it back again because what an incredible company.
It was a McKinsey consultant that said this to me. The fact is they have a big problem and that problem has existed in businesses since organizations have first been developed. This guy at McKinsey was known as the human white flag. It means that when everybody else says we surrender, they sent him in. I said, “I have to hang with you all day. Tell me anything.” He had a big desk and he would pound his hand over and over. I have the recording. I said, “What’s that noise?” That was him banging his fist. He was a sweet, wonderful guy. He turned around a big insurance company, but he said to me, “The problem in these businesses is you have to admit your baby is ugly. That’s the problem that I got.” If you want to go back through the line by line re-engineering of Circuit City, because that was a big thing in Good to Great.
I was going to say that. It was a Good to Great company.
What a failure, what a monumental train wreck they turned it into, and yet you want to go through that. If you get deep in it and you know a little bit about it like I do from hanging around with it, you find out that they couldn’t admit their baby was ugly. For the people that are tuning in to this who aren’t hardcore, nobody means your child. In business, they have stuff and they say, “That’s my baby.” At Blockbuster, what was their baby? “We love rewind fees.” Don’t you understand how much that gets under people’s skin? “I don’t care. Move on.” What’s the real problem we have here because that ain’t it? That’s my baby.
It’s so funny you say that. I can’t stand when somebody charges me $0.50 for a cup of sauce on a takeout order. I would rather build it into the price. If they have to do that, I can’t deal with it. I forgot about the rewind fees. Blockbuster has an interesting problem. The nature of a new movie release is that they create this weird skew proliferation issue. Every year, you are getting pounded with more movies. At first, you have 100 copies, then it goes down. You never have fewer movies. You always have more variety. I try to think of the Good to Great companies. Kroger is probably still very good. The expansion is bigger. They may be a little slower. Fannie Mae is not doing well. Wells Fargo is not doing well. Walgreens is not doing well. It’s very interesting.
This is the tough part. If you are studying business, and you are studying it through the junk that you get on social media, you have to stop yourself because you have to think about things you already know, like sports. Nobody says, “The Green Bay Packers don’t know anything about winning Super Bowls,” because what’s the trophy called? The Lombardi Trophy.
They have stumbled and it wasn’t just Lombardi’s absence that made them stumble. Yes, they have stumbled, but you have to look deeper into the success. You have to look at the success that they had and the things that drove these companies forward. People ask me, “What are some of the companies that have a lot of speed?” Intel had speed until they didn’t. Ideal had speed till they didn’t. Disney had speed till they didn’t. Do people have it, lose it and get it back? I present Apple. Google had speed until they didn’t.
The thing is you have to be a real head coach where you are saying, “He lost the Super Bowl, but that’s a hell of a defensive line coach. He did this in the game. I saw it fabulous.” If you are sitting there studying success and then letting some nimrod tell you because the success stopped, therefore it is an illegitimate success. I’m telling you, you are going to get a wedgie in the sports bar with that thinking. You are going to get marched right out because that’s crazy to not know how those things come together. You have to assemble the successes into your playbook so that you can make things happen.
When Speed Isn’t The Right Strategy For An Organization
Do you remember the HBR article, the dinosaur diagnostic, where it’s like startup, scale, high growth, and then mature organization? It’s different people for different kinds of those organizations. I have probably said this five times. There are very few Zuckerbergs and very few Jobs who can take the small up and big, and manage a big company and execute well. Zuckerberg still needed Sheryl Sandberg, your pretty woman example, to go out there, get stuff done, and monetize this.
When does an org not need speed? When do you not want them to have speed? Do we want Pfizer to be slower and more deliberate? Johnson and Johnson got into a bind with the marketing of Risperidol and stuff, and like settlements and stuff. Maybe those orgs need to be slower. I don’t know.
It boils down to the way you want to define speed. For example, do you want to define speed as having fewer do-overs? Is that one of the things? Secondly, responsiveness to clients. As soon as your clients say, “Take your time. I don’t care if you don’t get back to me.” When that happens, you can slow down. You can stand still. You can do whatever you want. If and when that happens, please let me know because it will be the first time it has happened as hell has developed snowballs. It’s not going to happen. Are there things we have to slow down on? When you do something the first time, this is where people drive me crazy.
I developed a brand new presentation for somebody on a tough concept of change leadership. I put all the pieces together. I said, “This is the first time that I have talked about it.” They gave me notes halfway through it when they were having their people stand up and take all the energy and air out of the room because their people were miserable.
They gave me notes during that and told me I should do this and I should do that. I have been doing this for a while. I put some pretty good pieces together. I got a lot of thumbs up from various people. The secret ones that you get in the room. I thought to myself, “Do you understand what I should do to do this better? I should do it a second time, dummy.” I don’t need you telling me this because I have watched you in front of a room and you have no business telling anybody anything other than, “Thank you, sir, for letting me sit and listen to you.” You are terrible. When it comes to speed, there are things we need to slow down. We don’t want haste.
By getting rid of do-overs, we have sped up our company. We are not going to totally get rid of them. There’s iteration, but we can get rid of the ones that are not do-overs, but 4 or 5 times. How many times do you make the same mistake before you say, “You are not learning, sir?” Somewhere in there it comes in. I’m not sure where, but you can analyze that. Don’t get hindsight in it. Captain Hindsight, they don’t belong.
It’s interesting. The company that hasn’t commercialized a lot of products gets one new product to market. It’s like you have to balance logistics. They tried eleven times because they knew and they saw the market need. They were right about it, but they prided themselves on being flexible. Literally, zero structure. They were entrepreneurial. You could have made some better decisions. Laurence, I could talk to you all day.
Can I tell you one thing then?
Go ahead.
From Fiery Trainwreck To Writing Success: The Book Journey
Here it is. What led you to write, It’s Not the Big that Eat the Small…It’s the Fast that Eat the Slow? It wasn’t lead. Let’s not use the accurate word more like stumbled out of a fiery train wreck, bruised, battered, but not broken, and that’s what led to the book. Stumbling out of a fiery train wreck.
Was it just a bad org?
No. A terrible way of going about how do you get published? It was every bit of conventional wisdom followed to the T because we were in a new area, and to reduce risk, bright entrepreneurs who do wild things and are very innovative, they get to an area that they don’t know and they become the meekest. I can only do the conventional wisdom. They are the sorriest excuse of someone who should know better because everything else in their career told them, “Be radical, be different. Go out there.” We followed every bit of conventional wisdom, and I’m telling you, it was a fiery train wreck.
You could hear the industrial shredders all the way in California from New York City as the publishers took everything that we sent them, the outline, the sample chapters, all that stuff, everything conventional wisdom and shredded it. I had one conversation with a guy who said, “I did shred that because it was awful, but if you can come up with a title that would stop people walking through an airport bookstore, I will give you a second meeting. Not a deal. No, I will give you a little FaceTime.”
This buddy of mine was going to write this book on some business rules. I remember telling him, “Your title is terrible.” I forget what it was. I was like, “This is objectively terrible.” I forget what he ended up landing. I don’t know if you even know if you ever wrote it. That was my lens passing by. Before I ask you my final question, is there anything new you are researching now?
You have to assemble the successes into your playbook so that you can make things happen. Share on XYes, I am. Everything that I have picked up to the point that I am right now, does it work? I have taken an assignment to simply immerse myself on the street, at the front row, right there at the coalface to try and get more follow through right now. I’m telling you, it’s like you would imagine. It is frontline work. It is explaining yourself in a different way so that it makes sense.
It’s watching people not get it. It’s hearing their stories and then figuring out how to use their story to propel them into a new bit of learning, and it’s also rewriting everything I thought to make it more relevant, more impactful, and more right. There’s only one way you do that. The way that I did it at the beginning. They threw me out on the street and said, “Just tag along,” and the guy looked at me like, “I’m dying here. Can you help?” I said, “Okay.” I tried some stuff and it worked, and the next thing you know, I had a reputation.
We have to do this again. We have to get a beer or a sparkly beverage together.
I have a lot of questions about private equity.
The Most Impactful Book To Laurence Haughton: A Life-Changing Read
I will follow up. I won’t drop after we stop. I will tell you something, but what book did you read that was most impactful on your life?
I had a magician say to me, “Let me tell you a trick.” Let me tell you something that magicians know if they ever get any good. I learned a new trick. He said to me, “Read an old book.” I have a lot of old books around, and I do look at them to get new ideas. If you talk in any discipline, I can tell you something specific, like decision making, dysfunctions, and those kinds of things.
Best book on people skills, relating to people.
The best book on people skills is not this one, although this is a good one. It’s by Peters Drucker.
I need to read Managing for Results. I got to put that on my list.
You can open it to any page, get something, close it, and stare out the window on an airplane. It’s a very cool book. Very inspirational to me. You can see I have marked it up. I have given it to people and begged people to talk to me about it. That’s what somebody did for me. They gave it to me, and then we talked for a year about it. That’s the one, but if you want to talk about people, Harry Levinson, The Great Jackass Fallacy. If you look at that and you don’t say to me, “I will eat your hat,” he did more than that, but that one is seminal and it’s so easy to read.
It is getting added to my Amazon pure title alone and your recommendation. It’s getting added to my Amazon cart. I’m still a hard copy person. I like highlighting, marking, and the margin. Laurence, it’s been a pleasure. I still think it’s odd in a good way to meet somebody that you read their book 25 years ago. I was in a dorky sailor suit. It was super good to meet you. Where can everybody get in touch with you?
Does anybody want to get in touch with me? Look at the things I say. I’m not housebroken. You have to put a sandbox out when I come over. I have an email. Anybody can reach that. I have got text and other stuff. If somebody needs to reach me, I’m easy to find. I’m glad to talk to anyone because every conversation teaches me something new, but other than that, I stopped with all of the websites and social media, personal branding.
All the conventional wisdom that’s going on.
Talk to Paul. You can ask him how you get in touch with me. He has all the information. You can share it. I understand. You listened to me. I probably said ten things that torqued you off. Maybe only five, and so now you are saying to yourself, “I don’t want to listen to that guy. I don’t want to hang around with him either,” and I understand. It makes perfect sense.
I think that’s farther from the truth. It’s good to talk to you, Laurence. I’m looking forward to meeting you live at some point. If I can do a plug, read his book. Speed matters in business.
It’s Not the Big that Eat the Small…It’s the Fast that Eat the Slow. I had somebody buy a bunch of them after he read it, be it for a speech that he was doing or something along that line. I was so surprised that something from 2001 would still speak to him, so I asked him, “What?”, and he told me. That was a useful conversation.
It’s almost the only thing that matters. If you are in a distressed situation, it is critical. I can argue with it. Quick story real quick. We have to be a little careful. We are looking at a manufacturer of desserts that you would find in your freezer section. If you look outside in, you would say there’s nothing you could do to make this better. It might grow. I am testing that hypothesis. Could you add speed as a competitive advantage to this? What would it do? We’ll see. We are putting a bid out. I think there’s a lot of upside but it would require the entire culture of the org to change.
That’s a big one. You start by talking about how you are going to change the culture of an organization. That’s worth a pause and some thinking. Can it be done? No one has done it, they gave away clues. It can be done.
The good thing about this is there are only 125 people in it. It’s a couple of million in EBITDA. I could personally wrap my arms around 125 people. I forgot the number, 140 or whatever the number is, like the guy that says your network, but you can manage that quickly.
A McKinsey guy certainly was doing that thing and changing an organization. It’s called the Turnaround. Some people have done the reinvention. The second book that was on the bestseller list is The Reinventors.
We’ll have to put a pin in this one. I’m looking forward to connecting again. It’s been great getting to know you. Guys, read his book. I promise you are going to enjoy it. Good to see you, Laurence. Bye.
Bye now.
Important Links
- It’s Not the Big that Eat the Small…It’s the Fast that Eat the Slow
- Laurence Haughton on LinkedIn
- I’m OK–You’re OK
- Good to Great
- Managing for Results
- The Great Jackass Fallacy
- The Reinventors
About Laurence Haughton
“He tells great stories that make it easy to get the point.”
Laurence Haughton is a New York Times bestselling author, who partnered with Jason Jennings for twenty years.
Haughton and Jennings wrote bestsellers on leading faster growing, more successful organizations. Harper Collins, Random House/Doubleday and Penguin Putnam have published their work in the US and around the world.
Haughton and Jennings:
- Analyzed over 220,000 companies, both public and private (to offer you a more comprehensive picture crossing all borders and categories.)
- Interviewed 14,000 CEO’s, executives and entrepreneurs to learn their biggest challenges and innovative recipes for success. (We got a front row seat for all the significant incidents and challenges so you could see what really happened.)
- Reviewed 500,000 pages from experts in anthropology, medicine, organizational psychology, sociology, history, cognitive biology and behavioral economics for relevant insights. (So we could provide wisdom and discoveries far beyond business stuff of the 20th and 21st century.)
But what makes LH unique?
He tells great stories so it’s easy for everyone to get the point.
It’s as simple as that.