NEW INC. Magazine column from Howard Tullman

Serious Management Advice from Mel Brooks

Dealing with a hybrid office? In his autobiography, the comic genius behind The Producers discusses the benefits of building a team by gathering them in one place for a concentrated period of time. It applies to the workplace, too.

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

I just finished reading Mel Brooks’ autobiography, All About Me!, (now that’s truth in advertising) which charts his remarkable life in show business and his amazing and unbelievably successful career in so many different parts of the entertainment industry. Writer, producer, actor, director, composer, and entrepreneur are roles he has played in a 75-year career, which includes memorable films such as The Producers, Young Frankenstein, and Blazing Saddles. The book is filled with touching and nostalgic reflections and, of course, jokes. Not all the jokes are fabulous. Asked whether he wore briefs or boxer shorts, the now 96-year Brooks answered, “Depends.” That groaner is exactly what you’d expect from a guy who started in the Borscht Belt in the 1940s. But the book is also a thoughtful, instructive, and educational compilation in unexpected ways, which I found to be of great value. 

One part of his Broadway adventures struck me as especially relevant for new business builders, as well as executives at established companies who are all trying to deal with the questions and concerns around creating and maintaining a company culture in a hybrid world. It’s the best and shortest rationale for getting folks back to the office that I’ve heard from anyone. 

While we hear from time to time that it’s the commute that we’ve come to recognize we hate, not the office per se, millions of senior managers – especially white-collar knowledge workers – have decided that there’s simply no good reason to return to the noise, interruptions, irritations, and unproductive meetings that are an unavoidable part of the 9-to-5 office grind. The fact that, by not showing up in person, they’re leaving the younger workers and new hires at their businesses completely in the lurch, with little or no mentoring, story sharing, supervision, or hands-on guidance, doesn’t seem to be of much concern to them.  

Safe to say that no one has figured out an effective solution, and even the best attempts seem entirely one-off and dependent on the special circumstances of a particular business or situation. I’m seeing sales organizations demonstrate convincingly that having the team in a single space works wonders and produces concrete results even if the room’s not ruled by an Alec Baldwin-like character. Competition, camaraderie, commiseration, and shared misery are all important emotional drivers that just don’t translate through a video screen. There’s a reason many of these places are called boiler rooms – it’s about heat – in the moment and here and now. Passion, energy and commitment are all contagious in a good way.

At the same time, it’s highly likely that no one will devise a “one-size fits all” answer any time soon and that trying to force a return solution on your team members without a sound reason is doomed to fail as we’ve already seen in large and small companies nationwide. Bribes and bonuses, spiffs and special incentives, perks and special provisions are all temporary Band-Aids at best. They’re not cures because they’re not really targeted at cultivating and communicating the company’s culture.

Making it about the money is the worst thing you can do. It sends a signal that you can buy your way to a committed workforce, to a community with a shared goal, and to a sustainable culture that binds the business. Even in these tough times, if your happiness depends on money rather than the satisfaction of getting the job done and done well and on being there for your team, you’ll never end up being happy with yourself.

What I learned from Mel Brooks was all about the importance of the out-of-town, pre-Broadway, performances for a new show. Timing is adjusted, songs are added or dropped, blocking and choreography are cleaned up and tightened, and even cast members may be changed. But none of those efforts is what’s most valuable and additive to the ultimate success of the show. What’s most critical about having out-of-town tryouts is that they’re out of town.  Not because the audiences there are less knowledgeable, critical, or even more forgiving, which they probably are. But because it’s not about the audiences at all – it’s about the actors and bringing the team together.

Taking the team on the road separates them from everything familiar, typical, and ordinary and, in such an environment, they quickly learn that whatever support, comfort and appreciation they’re likely to get will come from their team members who they’ll need to count on and rely upon in the “wilderness.”

A great team isn’t simply a bunch of people who work together. It’s a group that has learned to trust each other and nothing in acting or business is more important than trusting the people you work with. These remote retreats are forced bonding environments – they create their own “culture” on the fly - and they turn relative and wary strangers into a family and a unit with shared interests, emotions, and concerns.

The process works almost every time. Eventually the mess becomes a timely vision. The players turn to and learn from each other because they don’t have their family, friends, followers, or functionaries to fall back on. It’s just like your first trip to an overnight camp without the bugs and bad food. You will remember those days forever. It turns out that - even before the pandemic - the office provided a very similar kind of refuge and development space - away from friends and family - in which to cultivate a company's culture. Now it's actually also an increasingly attractive, chore-free and kid-free place to get some work done.  

The trick for business owners and operators now is to figure out how to make all these ongoing WFH conversations less place-based, less financially focused, and more about how their businesses are going to (1) successfully rebuild or replace what they previously had and grow from there; (2) integrate, educate, and indoctrinate new members of the team and immerse them deeply and successfully into the company’s culture; and (3) reactivate and re-engage their more senior managers and executives personally in the entire process.

Just to be clear, mandatory days in the office for junior staff when the folks who should be there acting as mentors are sitting at home makes no sense. Getting the team right and back together is an essential prerequisite to getting the business back on track.

Here again, this is about coming to work because you care about and are enthusiastic about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And because you understand that these things don’t happen by themselves or in the absence of proximity, serendipitous collisions, and constant informal contact. The watercooler conversations and after-hours beers are still the very best source of company communication and connection. The war stories told by the old timers and veterans are still the best vehicles for sharing and reinforcing the company’s culture and values.

Great teams don’t come together in an instant by design; they’re built over time and especially in tough times because the members went through the ringer and the hardships together and survived. They learned that no one does these things successfully by themselves and that they needed to count on their peers and partners to get the hardest jobs done.

Bringing your people back doesn’t necessarily or exclusively mean back to the office because it’s likely that some of the key folks will never sign up for that again. They may have moved far away, they may be without critical childcare or reliable transportation, or they may just have concluded that they have nothing incrementally to add by their in-office presence. But the fact is that they do. You need to bring them to the realization that they’ve all got to pitch in and make the new normal and the new workforce work. Real bonding and business building doesn’t happen remotely and, even if it requires some levels of individual sacrifice, ultimately being in a shared space with your team members for significant periods of time is the only realistic way forward for most businesses.

Mentoring – whether it’s in person, at a small offsite gathering, or on the road to a sales call – is now an even bigger part of everyone’s job. Make sure, before you ask anyone to come into the office, that you’ve got a plan and purpose for the visit, a clear objective, and a solid explanation for the request. Asking people to spend two hours commuting to the office so they can sit at their desks for Zoom calls is criminally stupid. Finally, invest the time and preparation necessary to make the office time educational, valuable, and clearly productive for the attendees. More structure, more content, and more personal interaction at all levels will make all the difference.

Forty years after Peters’ and Waterman’s pronouncements, we’re back to “management by walking around” being one of the best ways to see your business and your people. And if you can’t “see” and direct your business, you won’t have it for much longer.

 

 

 

 

WGN RADIO WITH LISA DENT AND HOWARD TULLMAN

 

(from left to right) Howard Tullman with U.S. ambassador to Japan and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (photo courtesy of Howard Tullman)

Howard Tullman, general managing partner for G2T3V, LLC and for the Chicago High Tech Investors, LLC, joins Lisa Dent to talk about how college commencement speeches have changed over time, why they are meant to inspire graduates entering the workforce, and how some protests sometimes threaten free speech. Also, Tullman talks about a recent trip to Japan he took with former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who is now U.S. ambassador for that region. This conversation with Howard Tullman is sponsored by Career Vision.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

A MAJOR MILESTONE

 A MAJOR MILESTONE FOR 

THE HINDSIGHT BLOG 

Opinion: A Chicago-centric angel investor's message to the new mayor

 Opinion: A Chicago-centric angel investor's message to the new mayor

By Christopher Deutsch

 

May 23, 2023 11:26 AM

Dear Mayor Brandon Johnson:

Congratulations on your recent election. Although I did not vote for you, you have my support as someone who loves our city and is actively investing in its future.

I am a “first-check” angel investor in Chicago-based startups, providing several million dollars of my own capital to companies at their earliest stages. Three-quarters of the 83 companies I have backed are led by underrepresented founders. I choose to focus on our local entrepreneurs because I understand the economic impact of concentrating my capital here, rather than in Silicon Valley or elsewhere.

My goal is to help our founders build successful businesses, while adding thousands of jobs to the local economy.  Many of these homegrown entrepreneurs will become successful enough to create meaningful financial outcomes for their families and employees, who may then reinvest their capital into new local startups, creating a local economic flywheel.

There are already specific examples I can point to, including Cubii, which was sold for $100 million in 2020 and whose founders are now actively investing in Chicago startups led by underrepresented founders. This is a viable long-term strategy that admittedly will take decades. For it to work, we must move quickly to make Chicago competitive once again, so residents choose to stay and others are enticed to move here from elsewhere.

­The pandemic has caused us all to ask ourselves big questions about where and how we work: “Why am I at this job?” “Do I enjoy what I do?” But there is one pervasive question I am hearing again and again from founders that is critical to Chicago’s future: “If I can work from anywhere now, why am I living here?”

This question is actively being asked by other business leaders, too, whether they already live here, such as CME Group CEO Terry Duffy, who just publicly shared his concerns, or those who might consider moving here. 

More people will be asking themselves that question in response to proposals like those contained in “First We Get the Money,” or calls to defund public safety and ignore the fiscal peril facing our city. 

Our entrepreneurs do not have to be here. They choose Chicago because it is an amazing city with award-winning restaurants, vibrant neighborhoods, world-class universities, robust infrastructure, gritty workers and a reasonable cost of living.

But we are at the precipice of a mass exodus of our best and brightest entrepreneurs and their employees. These vital individuals increasingly are looking to set down roots elsewhere as they seek safer streets, lower taxes and better-functioning local government. Unless we become more competitive, our city is going to lose the very entrepreneurs we desperately need here.

They are our next generation of CEOs who eventually will lead Fortune 500 companies and invest their own dollars, as I do, into our future founders.

If we lose them and the jobs they represent, while scaring off the CME Groups and prospective corporate entrants before they even sign leases, will our city be viable five, 10, 20 years from now? Or will we succumb to the same rapid decline and deindustrialization Detroit experienced?

We cannot let that happen. The risk of losing our status as a world-class city is real, so it is urgent that we work together to craft rational and realistic near-term and long-term solutions to these problems because, in this post-pandemic paradigm, it has never been easier or more attractive to move to other cities than it is right now.

Sincerely,

Christopher Deutsch

Christopher Deutsch is founder of Lofty Ventures in Chicago. He is also founder of Lofty Angels, which helps people learn angel investing.

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

My Advice to Graduates: All Bets Are Off

Making graduation speeches used to be fairly conventional. But change is so rapid that the old rules no longer apply. Good luck, kids.

 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

 

We're now in the annual and painful ritual of graduation speeches which - as a parent, entrepreneur, employer, college president, speaker, author, and columnist - have been an essential and challenging part of my springtime for decades. Speechifying is both thrilling and thankless and gets tougher every year because so many of the previous pronouncements, truisms, and tropes that got us safely here simply don't have much to do with where the next generation is headed.

All of the past guidance, along with the sum total of our experience, doesn't help a whole lot when today's graduates are setting out to do what's never been done before. Uncertain times, uncharted waters, and a world in constant crisis that seems to regularly be on the verge of bursting into flames is, at best, a precarious platform for profundity.

The pressure in these instances to proffer astute and forward-looking suggestions and prescriptions in a "suitable" fashion while being bold, brave, and -- above all -- brief is intense and gets worse each year. The unwritten and often unspoken (until after the fact) ground rules, goal posts, and verboten topics for these talks continue to change and move in confusing and contrary directions. Saying things no longer makes them so, even the firmest foundational concepts are now subject to challenge and criticism, and everyone's a newly and self-anointed expert or an easily offended snowflake on virtually every subject. Protests are a prominent part of every graduation ceremony now as the recent blowback against Warner Bros CEO David Zavalav at Boston University made clear. And he's an alum.

And, of course, the accelerating rate of change, the massive shifts in our societal norms, objectives and expectations, and the growing and complex impacts of technology and social media make the whole attempt to suggest any specific directions or career decisions to any group of graduates a fool's errand. In my defense, I can at least solemnly attest to the fact that I've never been sucked into the unrewarding swamp of offering advice to the lovelorn, whether they be friends, family, or foolish strangers.

But, in defense of continuing to make the mid-year effort, I can say that preparing these pithy "words of wisdom" has been a far more productive use of my time and a valuable opportunity for some modest reflection on important matters than any of the traditional December-January nostalgic, regretful, or cathartic compilations and trips down memory lane that regularly appear at year's end. That being said, the real challenge is always coming up with something you're comfortable saying and that is also worth listening to.

In preparing past presentations, I used to pull up a few prior examples and try to decide what content still made sense for a given audience; what needed to be added to or dropped to avoid merely repeating myself; where to remove any outdated references; and finally, how to add some new and hopefully valuable thoughts and information to the text. Some choice old wine in new bottles saves a lot of prep time.

But this year I've concluded that there needs to be a fairly substantial shift in the content of the conversation. I've written before about the frank new messages we need to be giving to our employees and to our kids. Stressing resilience, optionality, and admitted vulnerability turn out to be far more impactful than some of the more typical admonitions about hard work, etc. And it's not too Darwinian to acknowledge that survival in the long term depends more on adaptability and the willingness to change than on simple strength or sheer intelligence. Flexibility and fluidity trumps fierce focus and singlemindedness in times of radical and rapid change.

Another shift in tone relates less to which particular journey is undertaken and more to the pain and perils of any journey. While you should never let anyone talk you out of your future, it's essential to understand and appreciate that parts of everyone's journey will be uphill; that things don't typically improve or get better over time; instead you get better by forging the skill sets critical to success; and that, while both personal and familial sacrifices will be required and crucial, there are practical and philosophical limits and boundaries to the process. You're not required -- regardless of what others may say -- to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm. You can't accomplish great things and end up feeling good about the process if you're ultimately doing it for someone else. Let others worry about making their own dreams into reality.

Finally, for the graduates, there's also the matter of their folks. There's nothing more painful than being a parent and that's on a good day. Whatever hopes mom and dad may harbor in the vain belief that Junior will follow in their career footsteps, it's becoming clearer all the time that the most valuable parental lessons to be learned by their offspring aren't about the job choices they made, but rather about the examples they have set in their behaviors and the values they have shared with their kids.

The work may change, but the importance of empathy, honesty, and authenticity will never diminish. The key contributions are far more qualitative and subjective than specific and quantitative. The jobs parents may have held for decades, even if their descriptions survive mainly in name only, won't be the same in terms of depth, function, and value to their organizations.  And as hard as this may be to acknowledge and discuss, those jobs won't really be worth having much longer.

The daily onslaught of A.I. is aggressively hollowing out millions of jobs and compressing entire tiers of middle management as routine procedures and repetitive activities are eliminated. Many of the new jobs, being created on the fly, will require far more in the way of people skills, creative problem solving, critical inquiry, and knowledge retrieval rather than technical or procedural abilities. Mom and dad have little detailed knowledge to add to the conversation about these new tasks; mastering them will be a matter of hands-on experience and OTJ training rather than traditional parental direction or academic instruction.

The future premiums will be paid to those who learn to master the overwhelming floods of available data (essentially the world's aggregated knowledge) by asking the right questions so they can extract the correct answers. Employers will seek out graduates trained to ask the critical and difficult questions rather than those who think they've been taught all the right answers.

There's no great prize for coming up with even the very best answer to the wrong question.

 

 

KEEPER SECURITY GRAND OPENING IN TOKYO, JAPAN

 

 

 

 

Jared Bin Lyin

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Fraud Protection Is So Easy. Why Won't We Do It?

You can take these very simple steps to protect yourself, or be like lots of tech companies and keep doing the same dumb things that lead to losses.

 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

 

I have come to believe, sadly, that it's impossible to convince the vast majority of digital consumers that they should take the few simple steps, and invest the embarrassingly modest amount of dollars needed, to protect the security and confidentiality of their passwords. You can explain things to people repeatedly, but the simple truth is that you can't understand things for them. If only we could learn what's important before it's too late, we'd be far ahead of the game. Prevention rather than cure. It's so much smarter and cheaper to avoid the pothole entirely than to get a great deal on a tow truck or a new tire.

But instead of preemptive actions, we're lazy, we're sloppy, and far too many of us continue to use the same short, stupid, and easily solvable passwords repeatedly across multiple applications on our phones and PCs. This creates continuing and growing risks of losses, which can be many times the amount of the costs of avoidance through basic preventative actions. When you're dying of thirst, it's too late to start digging your well.

There are simple, cost-effective solutions for password and secrets management available from firms, like Keeper Security, that do a first-class job of password protection. But it's far harder than you'd expect to convince people to invest the one-time effort needed to protect their identity and most valuable assets. We're apparently all willing to invest far more in trying to secure something good or advantageous than we are in trying to keep something bad from happening. And, amazingly, it doesn't get much better or easier to get consumers to make such a move even after they've been hacked -- whether they know it or not.

You'd think, if there was any substantial group of easily targeted and prospective adopters for security solutions like these, that major tech companies, consulting and accounting firms, government agencies, and their employees would be high on the list, but, here again, it's a matter of the shoemaker's kids and large-scale IT departments generally do a horrible job of patrolling and securing their own environments and enforcing consistent security measures on their own teams.

But what's struck me lately is an entirely separate set of exposures that relate -- with apologies to Capitol One -- to exactly "what's in your wallet" and what would happen if it was lost or stolen in a theft or carjacking. Even the best password plans won't really help you much in this situation, but a couple of simple steps and about 15 minutes of your time can make a huge difference.

I know that we see hundreds of ads every week online or on the tube about how quickly and easily we can shut down or replace a lost card, but here's a flash: All the contact numbers and URLs that you need to reach and tell the many issuers that your cards have gone astray are on the cards, which are in your wallet which -- in a case like this -- you no longer have in your possession. It's a lot like trying to use "Find My Phone" app when it's your phone that's missing and that's where the app resides.

Worse yet, if you asked yourself and answered honestly, you'd admit that you really have little or no idea of exactly what credit cards, debit cards, access badges, medical alert info, insurance stuff, licenses, and other stuff are stuffed in your wallet or purse at the moment-- and absolutely no idea of who or how or where you'd go to cut off, cancel, or replace these items.  

So, here's what I would suggest to save yourself a great deal of grief and a lot of running around trying to track down and contact all these various parties when the problem arises. And, by the way, while this is certainly a phygital solution from the age of bricks and mortar, you can use the Keeper Security Vault application on your phone to quickly and easily digitally store all the images I’m talking about below securely on your cellphone and have them instantly available to you there in the event of a lost wallet.

1. Inventory your wallet or purse.

Throw away the four-year-old business card from the guy at the Omaha airport you never called. Dump the hardware store receipt for the touch-up paint you bought and never used. Recycle the expired proof of insurance cards for the cars you sold years ago. Do you really need to carry your voter's registration card anymore? You get the idea.

2. Copy the cards and store the information in a couple of places.

Put all the cards that are still current and in use neatly on the glass of your printer, copier, or whatever (or use your camera) and make copies of the front and back. This shouldn't be more than a page or two. Make a few copies of the pages. Put the date you created the pages on each page as a reminder of how current your backup plan is.

3. Take an extra 5 minutes to write the contact phone numbers on the images of the front of the cards.

A lot of the critical info -- sometimes even the card numbers themselves -- isn't on the front of the cards, which is why you need to copy both sides. But to save time and confusion, I also find the number to call and write that number for each card on the face image of the cards on your compilation pages so it's handy when you need it.

4. Do the same thing for your significant other and make sure you each have copies of both lists stored in a safe place.

This may take a little discussion, but again, it's worth doing and it's a good way for both of you to review, rehearse, and understand what the necessary notification steps are in the case of any lost cards.

Pat yourself on the back(s) and hope you never need these lists. But remember that the frequency of these problems is constantly increasing and the costs of not being prepared and equipped to quickly deal with them are also growing. It's so much easier to anticipate these things than to try to fix them after the fact. And, while the past is past, it's never too late to change the future.