Talk to Us About Your Problems
Before lean startups there was lean manufacturing. And Toyota was the laboratory where many of these lean principles were tested for the first time at scale.
So, I’ve been reading up on some of the first hand experiences that came from that formative time that these lean principles were being implemented. In doing so, I came across an exchange between a Toyota manager, James Wiseman, and his then supervisor, and now Toyota Worldwide chairman, Fujio Cho.
Mr. Wiseman was a seasoned factory manager who had gained tremendous experience outside of Toyota. But when he flexed the muscles he’d developed elsewhere, he found his strengths lacking. Toyota management muscle was developed through an entirely different set of exercises. This contrast was brought home one Friday in his weekly staff meeting:
Every Friday, there was a senior staff meeting. “I started out going in there and reporting some of my little successes,” says Wiseman. “One Friday, I gave a report of an activity we’d been doing”–planning the announcement of a plant expansion–“and I spoke very positively about it, I bragged a little. After two or three minutes, I sat down.
“And Mr. Cho kind of looked at me. I could see he was puzzled. He said, ‘Jim-san. We all know you are a good manager, otherwise we would not have hired you. But please talk to us about your problems so we can all work on them together.’”
This exchange speaks to me on a few levels.
First, it calls to mind how many board meetings I’ve sat through where we spend so much time high 5'ing over all the wonderful things the team has accomplished we never get to the real meat of the meeting. We review hockey stick graphs, we talk about the great partners we have lined up, we oogle over screenshots for upcoming releases.
Startup life is difficult and occasionally we need a little praise just to muster the strength to get out of bed in the morning. But, focusing solely on the positive, while problems build, means we’ll be tackling REALLY big problems together at some point instead of tackling lots of little ones all along the way.
Second, it stresses the importance of trust between a founder and their board (or advisors, investors, friends, significant other). Often, startup founders have never been CEOs before. Many have never even managed people before. Which often leads to the feeling of being in over their heads.
Admitting you’re out of your depth and need help demands a high degree of self awareness and trust from those you’ve surrounded yourself with. As new board members or investors, perhaps we should all echo the words of Mr. Cho to the founders we fund in saying “we all know you’re a good entrepreneur otherwise we wouldn’t have backed you”.
Explicitly establishing and amplifying this baseline of trust between a founder and their funders is a deeply critical component for any highly functional relationship that’s success is predicated on problem solving.
At Toyota the objective was never perfection, it was improvement. By discovering and discussing these problems openly many minds were able to break them down into small, incremental, finely tuned improvements. Which ultimately yielded massively impactful results.
Your startup isn’t Toyota, but the same principles of trust and problem solving apply. And similarly impactful results await those who talk about, and go to work solving, their problems.
