Bazaarvoice: How to Be Efficient in Your Communication to Get Things Done Quickly
By Brett Hurt, CEO
The following is from Brett Hurt’s e-book series, “The Entrepreneur's Essentials.”
So here we go with this lesson from The Entrepreneur’s Essentials. It was first shared at Lucky7 (by original blog) on Jan. 31, 2013. I made very few edits to the original post below, mostly in the area of readability and grammar (not in substance of content). After this lesson, I’ll relate it to our world of modern communication at data.world, including the use of Slack, Google Meet, etc.:
In startups, you have no time to waste. Every day counts. The opportunity cost of lost time is huge. Startup life can be short and fragile. So, one way to get things done quickly is to communicate in an effective manner. I was thinking about this today while I was at The Wharton School serving as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence and talking about a lot of lessons learned at Bazaarvoice and Coremetrics. As I wrote about in this Lucky7 post, Bazaarvoice was one of the most capital efficient companies leading up to the IPO as compared to many companies that reach this milestone. Certainly one of the reasons this was the case is we wasted less time than most companies in how we choose to communicate with each other in order to get things done quickly.Here is an email I sent to our team at Bazaarvoice when the company was only six-months old. Looking back at this email with today’s communication modes, I would need to consider the use of Salesforce.com Chatter in addition to this list below. I would probably rank it right before or after email because it is more passive than the first three modes. It would depend on the type of message. And IM (Instant Messenger) has now been replaced with texting as well as software like Microsoft Lync, which are more secure and have built-in video conference features now that virtually all laptops and tablets have cameras built in. That makes IM even better than before and in some situations may make it better than phone (assuming you are using the video conference features, which is closer to face-to-face but still harder to read overall expressions and body language than the real in-person deal). As far as texting, I would rank it right in line with IM but it is nice to not be tethered to a desktop or laptop of old to use it! IM — in the form of texting — is ubiquitous and portable with mobile phones. And you can use mobile apps like Tango now for both free texting and videoconference now, as long as you have a wifi connection.
From: Brett Hurt
Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2005 10:52 AM
To: All Bazaarvoice — Internal
Subject: Instant messenger and preferred modes of communicationTeam,Please make sure to be on IM any time you are working. IM is a better method of communicating than email, especially for short directional messages when there could be a lot of back-and-forth traffic flow. My preferred mode of communication for important 1:1 messages is, in this order:
Face-to-face
Phone
IM
Email
It took me awhile to learn this, especially since I grew up as a BBS nerd. But, trust me, this is how you maintain a very efficient communication flow. As I am out of the office and in a hotel room with limited mobile phone availability, I want to use IM but some of you aren’t on IM and it is frustrating. Email is superior for messages that need to be distributed to many people at the same time (like this one) and are better left archived (such as an important piece of industry news or research). This email is an example of a good message for me to reinforce at our All-Hands meeting on Tuesday when we are all together face-to-face.
Thanks,
Brett A. Hurt
Founder and CEO
Bazaarvoice, Inc.
“Connecting your community of customers”
I was texting with the CEO of a company I recently backed last night. He used to work for us at Bazaarvoice, and knows how important real-time communication is. He says at his company they are using Google Chat as well as their own IRC channel for additional flexibility, when needed. But, most importantly, he said they love the accelerated face-to-face conversations in their new office space. And that is the big point here. Instead of waste time passively going back and forth on email to try to get important things done quickly, don’t use it unless you yourself expect slow results. Especially don’t use it if you know it is important but you are choosing to “hide” behind the email due to your own insecurity or lack of hustle. I’ve seen way too many tasks drag out for days or weeks via email, when they could have been solved with a simple ten-minute, face-to-face conversation. It is way too easy for anyone to fall into this groove — and even email back and forth when they sit fifty feet away from each other! That is exactly how I was feeling when I wrote the email above so early in Bazaarvoice’s history. I saw some slowness creeping in because of the inevitable dependency on email, and I never wanted us to lose the hustle.Shortly after sending this email, I introduced Bazaarvoice to a life-changing book, Fierce Conversations. The statement this book made was profound. It taught even the most communication challenged people how important it was to have face-to-face conversations — and how to have them — because “life changes one fierce conversation at a time” (think about how true this is — whether it was your conversation to decide to get married, have children, start a company, etc.). This is the book I wished I had read when I was a younger programmer and more communication challenged myself. Life is too short not to be fierce. New Yorkers get this — they live in an environment of constant hustle and it breeds fierce conversations. Don’t get me wrong — fierce does not mean rude. It means direct, honest, and action-oriented. It is actually more compassionate in that we do not want to waste each other’s time and we want to win faster. Shortly after, Fierce Conversations became a mandatory part of ramping for new team members at Bazaarvoice. And then the People Operations team found a better book, Crucial Conversations, which had a training program built into it that we began to use. Same point — but with a better training wrapper.
The bottom line: don’t waste time — nothing beats face-to-face or a communication mode where you can read each other’s tone to be more clear and action-oriented. If you can’t read each other’s tone, then go for a mode that is real-time, whether that is something like Microsoft Lync, texting, ghat, IRC, or whatever. And make sure everyone uses it. You’ll win more, and you’ll all have more fun too.So that is the end of the lesson as I wrote it five years ago on Lucky7, and wow how much has changed on the tools front but also how little has changed on the lesson-learned front. At data.world, we’ve used Slack since the beginning. I guess that makes us a fairly early adopter of the juggernaut that Slack has become today, valued at over $7 billion as a private company. Replace IM and Salesforce.com Chatter in the lesson with Slack and then integrate Google Apps with it (Docs, Sheets, Drive, etc.) and you have your intranet (replacing Microsoft Lync in the lesson). Of course, we also integrate data.world with Slack, and we use our own platform obsessively when it comes to accessing our data and the resulting analyses of it. We’ve also had regular stand-up meetings since the beginning of data.world, which was inspired by my co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Jon Loyens. This includes the executive team — we meet every day. And we use Google Meet constantly to communicate with our clients, prospects, and each other. So we get both plenty of in-person, video-driven, and instant-messenger type communication at data.world. Our top core value is determination and we are clearly driven to succeed.
However, I made a mistake at data.world. We became too dependent on Slack because of just how easy it was. It is like we are always in a meeting and the noise-to-signal ratio can be quite high. And the mistake I made was not having in-person quarterly All-Hands meetings like we did at Bazaarvoice. I thought, “Well, we are having Standups all of the time and we are constantly on Slack”. But there is nothing like a good quarterly All-Hands meeting — to get outside of the office and have some more long-form communication to rally around the beginning of a quarter and reflect on achievements and lessons learned of the past quarter. Working with our Culture Club, we’ve since rectified that and just started to have them at the Alamo Drafthouse (that is a repeat of what we did at Bazaarvoice but we couldn’t think of anything better and who doesn’t love the Alamo, really?). Our first was a few weeks ago and it felt really good. One of our newest team members sent me a private DM (in Slack, of course) afterwards that said, “That was a fantastic day. Like nothing at any place I’ve ever worked. Thank you.”Reflecting more on this, this lesson is harder to live today than it was when I originally wrote this — my inboxes today include Slack (multiple groups), email, texts, data.world, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more. I’m gotten rid of voicemail, at least, and have a mobile message asking people to please text me instead so I can call them back if it is urgent and get the high fidelity of a live conversation. Nevertheless, the lesson learned here remains the same — be action-oriented in your communication practices and never forget the value of in-person communication, no matter how Slack or Google Meet (or Zoom, BlueJeans, etc.) addicted you become. It’s easy, but that doesn’t mean it is the most effective way to drive action. This is true in all cultures, whether you are primarily engineering-driven or sales-driven. And I’m glad we are back at the Alamo!