This past weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving. I’m incredibly thankful for so much in my life. My wife, my beautiful kids, my parents, my team at Hölmetrics: Christy, Nuran, Matt, Lex, Devin, Misael, Karli, Dan, Dwayne. They all work tirelessly to bring a vision I had over six years ago to life and they’re doing an incredible job. We know our team is going to grow. It’s probably going to double in the next six months. We’ve been talking about how healthy organizations reproduce themselves, their leadership and their products. So, what do I mean when I say products?
When I think about reproducing products I get a picture in my head of square boxes coming off the end of an automated assembly line. Reproducing our products. What image comes into your head? The image of the assembly line is actually not at all what I’m talking about.
What I mean by reproducing products is that the result of our working together as a team needs to be a product, a result of multiplication, not a sum (the result of addition). In other words, the results of our teamwork must be exponential, not linear, if we are going to succeed. It’s the heartbeat behind our third core value ‘Work Together’. We intentionally focus on our swim lanes, refuse to reinvent the wheel, and collaborate with like-minded companies and organizations to produce products, and more accurately, to avoid producing sums.
At our summer retreat in August, one of our senior leaders, Nuran, was leading us through a product vision session. We were talking about the best way to deliver a service. It was one of the greatest examples of brainstorming I’ve ever seen. (One of the things I love most about our team is that they don’t wait to jump in, even at eight o’clock in the morning.) Someone would say something, and then someone would add to it, and someone else would ask a clarifying question. There were eight of us in the room, but the end result was not 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1. It was exponential. 1x2x4x8x16x32x64x128. The result wasn’t 8, it was 268,435,456. What I’m worried about is not knowing how to keep this going once our team grows.
How to we get to 1,329,228,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 instead of 16?
– Chad Verity, CEO
