The Weekly: Edition #22 - December 6, 2019
The secret to a great planning process - lessons from Airbnb and Eventbrite (First Round Review)
+ As we near the end of 2019, thinking about how you will position your company going into 2020 will be key to its future success. The authors of this piece break down a useful model for conducting company-wide strategic planning based on experience at Airbnb and Eventbrite. The four step process consists of the following:
1. Leadership sets context for the various company teams. The executive team sets the tone, the direction, and the high-level goals of the company going into the next quarter or fiscal year. This serves as a guide to all team plans going forward.
2. Teams produce plans for their group. Based on leadership's guidance and context, teams must produce executable plans that are aligned with leadership's overall company direction.
3. Leadership integrates group plans into a cohesive company-wide strategy. The executives must at times make tough decisions on what to keep and what to cut from the top priorities in a company-wide strategy plan. It is especially important that executives explain why some teams' plans and goals were eliminated from the final plan to ensure buy-in and minimize damaged egos.
4. Leadership seeks buy-in from all teams. Captains can set the course of the ship, but their crew must sail the vessel. At this stage, ensuring employee buy-in on the approved strategic vision is paramount to success.
In closing, "If there’s one thing you take away from this article, it should be that good planning requires top-down guidance."
Survivorship bias: the tail of forgotten failures (Farnam Street)
+ "Examining the lives of successful entrepreneurs teaches us very little. We would do far better to analyze the causes of failure, then act accordingly. Even better would be learning from both failures and successes."
Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz is rewriting a toy story (Fortune)
+ "“Before I joined, there was a three-inch-thick strategy document,” says Kreiz, sitting in what he dryly calls his “ocean view” office, across the street from a runway at Los Angeles International Airport. “I brought it down to one page.” That page divided Mattel’s to-do list into three categories, ranked in order of urgency: cut costs, fix broken brands, and capture value from Mattel’s intellectual property."
Merck's $1.3B cyberattack (Bloomberg $)
+ "A pink font glowed with a warning: “Ooops, your important files are encrypted. … We guarantee that you can recover all your files safely and easily. All you need to do is submit the payment …” The cost was $300 in Bitcoin per computer."
The man who cleans 8 foot tall, $250,000 IMAX screens (The Hustle)
+ Opportunities for service businesses abound in creativity: "In 2004, he and Brown came up with a patented process for cleaning large movie screens. Then, the duo launched 1570 Cinema Services, a company geared toward IMAX screens."
Peloton’s ad crisis highlights problems emblematic of a new class of companies (Modern Retail)
+ The Peloton ad campaign misstep illustrates how important brand marketing is to a company's image but also how difficult building a welcoming brand image can be.
Cyber Monday broke more than one record (Retail Brew)
+ "The National Retail Federation said that 66 million U.S. consumers shopped only online over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, while 48 million only shopped IRL. $3 billion of sales came from purchases made on smartphones."
How to scale as a startup CEO from seed to Series A and beyond (Founder Collective)
+ Founder Collective's piece for early stage founders is valuable not only for startup executives, but also small business owners scaling their operations.
Morning commutes from around the world (Insider)
+ What does your morning commute look like?
The one traffic light town with some of the fastest internet speeds in the U.S. (The New Yorker)
+ "McKee, an Appalachian town of about twelve hundred tucked into the Pigeon Roost Creek valley, is the seat of Jackson County, one of the poorest counties in the country. There’s a sit-down restaurant, Opal’s, that serves the weekday breakfast-and-lunch crowd, one traffic light, a library, a few health clinics, eight churches, a Dairy Queen, a pair of dollar stores, and some of the fastest Internet in the United States."
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