HOWARD
TULLMAN
CEO
1871
1871
How did your early life inform your leadership development?
When I
was 10 years old, I was a magician at children’s parties. The job was not about
doing the magic or handling the kids. It was about managing the parents,
because they all wanted to stand behind me and see how the trick was done.
Dealing with adults at that early age was a confidence builder for me. My
parents were also a very big influence. They were the most unconditionally
loving parents you could imagine. But my mother and father were also very
demanding—they wanted their kids to excel.
Tell us about the best leadership advice you've received.
When I
was a trial lawyer, I interviewed with the most successful lawyer in the
country at that time. I decided not to work for him, but he shared something
interesting with me. He said that life is generally divided into three buckets:
work, recreation, and family. He said that if you enjoy and love your work, if
you are doing things that are important not only to you but to other people
that you are creating jobs and futures for, then you can focus on work and
family. Your recreation is already covered in your work.
A
corollary to that observation is that you’ll always have more work but you only
have one family. Your work is what you do but it’s not who you are. It’s very
easy for an entrepreneur to get completely consumed with the idea that the
business is everything. Startups have a lot of hills and valleys. Having family
as a solid base makes it easier to take risks in other areas of your life.
Describe your leadership style.
I want
people to learn and get better. I believe in modeling the behavior that we
expect of our people and our companies. Talent and creativity are great but
ultimately what trumps both of those is pure hard work.
There
are two key leadership skills that everyone needs to learn: triage and
iteration. You spend every single day prioritizing your time. As Steve Jobs
used to say, “It’s what you say no to that’s most important.” Sometimes you
need a competent tyrant rather than a committee. I think that the truth only
hurts when it ought to. Good leaders are strong editors. [At 1871,] we don’t
think anything is ever perfect, but we are constantly trying to get closer and
closer to that point across all the vectors that affect our business.
What advice would you offer to emerging leaders?
A startup is very much
akin to a family in a lot of ways. You must make room for all kinds of people.
Entrepreneurs often fail because they think they’re going to hire people just
like them to build a business. You have to make room for different personalities, talents, and interests.
After work, some people want to just go home, some people want to go out
together and have a beer, and some people are halfway in-between. You can’t
have effective innovation without inclusion.
What leadership skills are essential in shepherding organizations
through significant transitions?
The
co-working space isn’t merely real estate, and I think a lot of places that
come to see us and try to steal the secret sauce don’t understand that. Our
structure creates an opportunity for everybody to smash into each other all the
time. When you’re building an ecosystem, these collisions make 1871 successful.
People get the definite feeling that they’re not alone; there’s a lot of
lateral learning happening in our space. Part one is to give people the tools
and the resources they need to increase their likelihood of success. Part two
is to only let the right people in. If you pick your inputs right, you are more
likely to have successful outputs.
Fast
Facts
Location
Chicago,
IL
Number of years in
current role
4
Number of employees
29
employees; supports 1,500 member entrepreneurs, representing 500 digital
startups in 145,000 square feet of space; leverages 80 public and private
partnerships to create an estimated 7,000 jobs
First job
Magician
at the age of 10 for neighborhood children’s parties
Most admired leaders
Jeff
Bezos of Amazon, Steve Jobs of Apple, Steve Case of AOL, former President Bill
Clinton
