Andy Ellis: How to Lead Without Becoming the Hero, the Villain, or the Bottleneck

0:00Everybody thinks they're the hero in the story, so if you think somebody else is trying to ruin the business, you're probably the one at fault. If you tell yourself you're a sidekick instead of telling yourself you're a hero, then the world is full of heroes. If you tell yourself you're a hero, then the world is full of villains. This was one of the most surprising ideas in your book. Don't replace people on your team immediately. First of all, you just narrowed down your candidate pool massively. But now you're designing for the organization that you hired that person into, which is not your current organization.

0:27You should take the opportunity to say, what is the person we need? Every wants to be irreplaceable. Here is actually the reality. You just make it that it's a painful pill they have to take, but they're going to take it someday. If you can't be replaced, it means you don't get to leave your current job, which means you don't get to move up in the organization. The CFO doesn't have any money. If I convince the CFO to give me money, I make the CFO be the bad guy and go take money away from other people. So the CFO resents me and that all my peers hate me because they know exactly where the money was taken away from them.

1:00Is this thing on? Yesterday's price is not today's price.

1:15I know we're all afraid of commitment, but if you can do me a solid and follow the show on Apple or Spotify, Just send us a screenshot that you followed us. Send it to Ben at mostlymetrics.com. And he's going to swipe my Brexit card and he's going to send you something. I really hope it doesn't go over budget, but he's going to send you a hat, maybe a dog bowl, maybe a sticker, maybe a hat. Do we have hats, Ben? I don't know. That's the hat right there. He'll send you one. Hit follow. Send a screenshot. Ben at mostlymetrics.com. Boom. Welcome back to Run the Numbers, the show where I interviewed the world's top CFOs, finance leaders, and subject matter experts.

1:50Today, I'm talking to my friend Andy Ellis. He is a legendary leadership coach. And some of his rules that we discuss on this podcast, don't replace people immediately. So don't default to backfilling, which I think we all do. Why being indispensable is a bad thing. Why we tell ourselves hero and villain stories and use evil where it wasn't intended to motivate our teams. And how to effectively delegate. We also hit on a few stories from his career as an exec at Akamai. he has the most hilarious email template that he'd send to all the hungry BDRs in his inbox, politely turning them down and giving them a laundry list of hilarious reasons why he will not buy from them.

2:29So come for the leadership insights if you're somebody who's a first-time people manager or even a tenured CFO managing a finance or accounting team, and also stick around for the ways to politely say no. Please subscribe to our show. It helps us with the algorithmic overlords. Let's get into the interview with Andy. Andy Ellis, welcome back to the Run the Numbers podcast. Thanks for having me back, CJ. It's great. So last time you were on, we talked about quantifying risk, the overlap between CFOs, CISOs, the world that you're from. We were going back and forth on all this security-related stuff, but in that convo, you reminded me about your book on leadership, 1 % leadership.

3:07And so I bought the book, I binged it. I took notes, Andy, and I'm like, I got to have this guy back on. It was designed sort of for that, for people to sort of use it as a guide, Although most people don't binge it. They sort of trickle it out for a while. Because I use Claude a lot in work and I'll ask it something, but it takes time to think, right? And so instead of picking up my phone and scrolling on Twitter, what I do is I keep a book next to me now. Oh, that's clever. But your book's perfect for it because each thing is like a three minute vignette. 762 words on average. Yeah. So it was perfect for that.

3:37So I ripped through it in a week. It's one of the things that I learned this a long time ago actually when I was in the Air Force. We were doing briefings for generals and I worked for a major, actually she's captain at the time. And I put together a slide deck and it was a decent slide deck. I'm not going to say it was amazing. Like I'm a 25 year old lieutenant, but we sat there for like 15 hours tweaking every word in the slide deck. Like she would click back and forth and be like, oh wait, that pixel moved. Let's go like adjust this. What are we doing? Like we're literally going to go in. this is a five minute update and we're spending this many hours.

4:14She said five minutes of a general's time is worth more than a week of your time. I've been in those scenarios myself. And then it stuck with me. And then I got to do a keynote at RSA. And like all of a sudden I had this math in my head. I'm like, there's gonna be 3000 people in the room for 28 minutes. That is 1500 hours just of listening, ignoring their time, getting in and getting out, et cetera. Like I have no excuse not to give it my all and spend the time making this 28 minutes perfect. And so when I wrote the book, a lot of what it was was like I agonized over a sentence. I'd be like, is this sentence adding value?

4:47And I'm not going to say I got it perfect everywhere. But it was funny because I got towards the end and I was talking to my agent and my editor. And I'm like, I'm going to come in under the word count that I promised you. Same content, but I have stripped out words that were useless. And they were actually very happy with that. Well, there were writers back in the day, I think newspaper writers, where they're paid, call it like two cents for every 50 words or something. Right. And so they add words when in newspaper where you don't have space. It's like make it as tight as possible. I think it's the Thoreau line.

5:15Like, sorry, I didn't have enough time to write you a shorter letter. Many of our listeners, they're finance professionals, either current or aspiring CFOs. And the remit of the CFO is getting broader and broader. So I think a lot of the lessons around delegation and org design are super helpful. I was hoping I could just pepper you with some of the ideas from your book and we could just riff on them. Sounds great. And we'll remind your listeners or watchers that if any of these are interesting to you, each one of them is just drawn from a separate chapter. I think it's worth pointing out for folks.

5:44I wrote this leadership book because I hate leadership books, because most of them have only one thing to tell you. It could have been a tweet, but you wouldn't have paid 30 bucks for a tweet. And so they hide it in the book. And I wanted to write the exact opposite books. So every chapter is one of those books equivalent, in my opinion. And the title of the chapter is the tweet summary. So the table of contents is a summary of 54 books and you can just go read any chapter. Something else I appreciate is a lot of the books out there say, hey, take this huge single idea and it's going to change your life.

6:16Like just do one thing and everything's going to be a step function change. I think we've been around long enough to know that anything you want to improve, you're not just going to immediately level up. You have to chip away at it. You can't just do one thing. It's like trying to become physically fit, you know, lost 25 pounds, but I did not just do one thing. I'm cycling, I'm rowing, I'm weightlifting, I'm doing yoga. Like I'm doing a whole bunch of different activities because it's the combination of things. And so leadership is a skill set like everything else, like physical fitness, you know, whatever you're going to do, you can't just focus on only one thing.

6:50It'd be like saying you can be the best accountant ever if you just understand T accounting better than anybody else. Right. If you can easily detect when two numbers have been inverted in a hand spreadsheet, not that anybody does a general ledger by hand anymore. Throwback. That was my first job. The assistant bookkeeper to my mom who ran my dad's business as a small consulting company. And so I still remember the skill of like, oh, the books didn't balance. and so if the difference between the two numbers is divisible by nine that means that you flipped two digits somewhere like i can go spot it very quickly like where did you transpose two numbers andy i'm a cfo i didn't even know that trick no if you're off by 180 say that means that you flip the number in the tens place in the hundreds space somewhere and it's digits that are two apart 18 is two times nine by 10 like that's how you do it okay so i'm gonna throw the first one at you here.

7:45It was don't replace people on your team immediately. So this was one of the most surprising ideas in your book that like when someone leaves your org, your instinct shouldn't be to immediately hire their replacement. Why? It's sort of a specialized piece of advice, but it's really a generalized one, which is as you build an organization, you have a set of people and your jobs change over time. Like what's needed out of your organization is always pivoting. And you do not always have the perfect group of people. In fact, I'm going to posit you never have the perfect group of people. And what's often this instinct is when somebody leaves, try to hire the exact same person.

8:20First of all, you just narrowed down your candidate pool massively. But now you're designing for the organization that you hired that person into, which is not your current organization. You should take the opportunity to say, what is the person we need? Imagine that like, okay, I have like three people near them who could each pick up like 30 % of their job. But to do that, I've got to shed work off of those three people. So maybe I get those three people, an assistant or a project manager or somebody that I can offload work on. Is this an opportunity to promote somebody in my team? If I lose somebody senior, well, do I have a mid-grade person who can step up if I let a junior person step up?

8:57And then I can hire somebody fresh out of college. I'm talking to CFOs here and you all know exactly what this is like. You do not have enough promotion budget to keep people happy in your company. So anytime somebody senior leaves, if you can take 40 % of their salary and turn it into a de facto promotion budget by just promoting people up inside your team and then hire a junior person with the 60 % that's left, you have just saved yourself a huge morale problem. I think a lot of finance people are going to love this because we often talk about having budget envelopes and hiring to like theoretical maxes.

9:32What you're pointing out is sometimes you should look to redesign how you spread out those dollars amongst the current people and future people rather than just saying, hey, I got a backfill for the same thing. My assistant was also an accountant who decided she did not want to. So she had her accounting degree and was like, I never want to go work in a finance department. But she and I basically were our own finance partner. We then had another finance partner and we were just playing games in a sense, but we had an overall budget envelope for the team. And so our attitude was, look, when somebody leaves, we're going to take the budget for that backfill and we're just going to move it around.

10:05And we'll make sure that all the I's are dotted, all the T's are crossed, the team budget isn't going to move. We were good about it. And so our finance partner was wonderful and she would let us go into debt. She'd be like, OK, you really do need to hire a senior person here. You're going to owe us 15 grand because you're over budget. But she knew that the next time somebody left, I would basically pay that back to the company. Now that's great business partnering right there. She knew that we weren't trying to cheat the company. We were just trying to get the best possible outcomes. Hey, thanks for listening.

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13:58Head to brax.com slash metrics to join them. That's brax.com slash metrics. I got another one for you. And this was, this one struck me as a bit contrarian. It's don't become indispensable. Everyone wants to be irreplaceable, right? It's like, oh, if I become irreplaceable, then they can't replace me. Here's actually the reality. You just make it that it's a painful pill they have to take, but they're going to take it someday because you're not scalable if you're irreplaceable. If you're the only one who can do a task, it means that they can't do more of the task because you're unwilling to train anybody.

14:32It means they have a single point of failure. Someday you're going to leave, which means they're going to have to figure out how to replace you so they can bite the bullet when they want to rather than when you want to. But here's the real problem with it is you become unpromotable. If you can't be replaced, it means you don't get to leave your current job, which means you don't get to move up in the organization. Not enough people spot that out, that you're actually holding yourself back by making it so no one can backfill you. Your job should be to be unclonable. There should be nobody who is exactly like you.

15:01And so what you should do is look for ways to expand laterally, pick up new things, learn how to do things that nobody else knows how to do in your job. Maybe somebody else knows how to do them near you. There were very few executives on the technical side of the house that understood how our finances worked. But for me, that was really important. That's where my money comes from is I have to understand how the finances work. So I'm going to sit down with everybody in finance I ever can to figure out, OK, how are we doing this? And like I rewrote a plan for how we were going to do software capitalization and deal with the R &D tax credits and everything just because they needed somebody who understood engineering practices and finance.

15:43And we had people who understood both. I was not better than the experts in either of those fields, but I was the only person who could do both of them. And that's where you make yourself truly indispensable to the business is because there will be nobody that they can look at and say, oh, this person can solve a multidisciplinary problem. Andy, I didn't have this on my bingo card to ask you, but your P &L fluency is striking. You were the CISO at Akamai, but you talk the language of business better than most execs that I speak to who did not come up in the finance function. When did it click to you that that was the true way to advance your career?

16:18I don't know. There was a single click. I talked to a lot of peers and they say, oh, you should talk like the CFO and you should talk in ROI and you should do this. And then I watched our CFOs and I'm like, they don't use the language that my peers are telling me they use. And I grew up like I'm not an amazing accountant finance professional, but I can keep a set of books. I know how to do it. I understand the language. And Akamai was actually really amazing and transparent as a early publicly traded company that was having very interesting financial difficulties. First company to survive a 600 to one stock crash and come back from it.

16:53But our executives were transparent. Every quarter, they would get up and walk through the finances with the whole business. We got a master class in public company finance. I listened and I'm like, oh, so when I need more money, I would go and I would talk to the CFO because that's what I got told to do. And then I listened when the CFO was like, well, we have to figure out where to find the money. And I'm like, I thought you had all the money. And I had this realization like the CFO doesn't have any money. If I convince the CFO to give me money, I make the CFO be the bad guy and go take money away from other people.

17:25so the CFO resents me and then all my peers hate me because they know exactly where the money was taken away from them. So I'm just looking at that system and saying, okay, look, I wanna work within that system and exploit it the best way I can. That's why I'm a security professional. I look at systems and I figure out how to break them. And so I look at that system and I'm like, well, if I want more money, what I have to do is inject myself into the planning process of all those organizations and get them to say that more money should come to me. What's their model? And then the CFO loves me because I'm not asking them to break the budget.

17:59Somebody else's. Never give money back, surprisingly. This was one of the earliest things I learned is if the money is allocated to you, you don't get to just not spend it in the quarter it's allocated and surprise everybody with, oh, hey, I just saved the company$100 ,000. Say more about this because some people think that, especially marketing, you're doing them a favor by not spending it all. Oh, God, no. Now, if you don't spend the money you were allocated, it means you stole it from somebody who could have spent it. The company wants to spend this money at this time. First of all, if you try to say, I want to slide it to the next quarter, well, you're making the revenue numbers versus the expenses.

18:35You're making that very bursty in ways that are surprising. The street doesn't like that. If all of a sudden you had a quarter that looked really profitable and the next quarter looks not profitable, but it's all, oh, I just slid money out. The first time I did that, I got yelled at by my finance partner. And then I was like, oh, so we would keep, you became shovel ready. I hate that term because of what it else got used for. We would just keep projects around. And my finance partner would sometimes come to me and be like, hey, if I gave you$150 ,000, can you spend it by the end of next week? I wanted to have good projects.

19:02It's like, OK, if you gave me that money, I know exactly how I'm going to go spend it. And sometimes I would say, no, I literally just can't right now. But the goal is to be the person who could save them so that the budget stayed predictable. That's an amazing lesson for people listening who are not in finance, but are allocated budget from the finance team, because the whole P &L is connected. and we're expecting a risk adjusted return on whatever we're allocating out. If you don't spend it, it's not like saving for like a household where you say, okay, now we can put it towards a vacation. It's no, we were expecting to get something out of that.

19:32Right, we're expecting to get something out of it. We would have spent it somewhere else if we could have. And yes, it's not that it's necessarily a bad thing, but it's an unprofessional thing. And ultimately it makes finance look bad when they had no control over your choice to do this. Don't make the person who's orchestrating the process of getting you money angry at you because while they don't necessarily have any money to give you, they can absolutely put you at the top of the list of people to have money taken away from. Hey, thanks for listening. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

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22:35I'm going to throw another one at you. This was maybe my favorite one from the whole book. It's don't tell yourself hero villain stories. Yes. Don't borrow evil where it wasn't intended. Everybody has been a driver. Hopefully, maybe some folks here have it. And you all have that moment when somebody cuts you off and they just pull in front of you and you get mad. I used to be this driver. I would hate it. I'd be like, oh, especially driving around in Boston. Like you're trying to get somewhere and you're the person who's good and you pull over early for that. It's always the exit on Sturro Drive.

23:07You can't get over it fast enough. Oh yeah, the exit on Storow Drive into downtown. Yeah, that one's brutal. Or even honestly, just getting off of I-93 onto Storow Drive where there's two lanes. Like we could walk through Boston has so many of these places. If you're that person who gets mad, here's an exercise for you. Think about exactly what the person did and pay attention to when you do the exact same thing because you will, you'll cut somebody off. And it's not with malice. You're like, oh, I wasn't paying attention. I had to get over or I came out of a side street So there was no way for me to get the back of the line.

23:40I'm going to the front of the line. I'll admit I'm the guy who comes in late because I can get an extra car through in a way that I don't think all those other people can. So sometimes I'll do that. I'll admit it. I'm very selfish about it. But there's no malice. But we tell ourselves this malice story. And we say this person is doing it because they don't like me. They wanted to screw me. Whatever it is, that's all in your head. We just talked about how the job of finance is not actually to save money once it's been allocated. there's a lot of pieces of finance that are about you know can you find places in the business where we could save money can you help the business find those those are fantastic but at the end of the day like your job is make sure the money gets spent the way it's supposed to get spent and you've got people who have very different responsibilities to the business and they don't even know what you're doing and so what you're doing they're like oh my god i can't believe my finance partner just took away this money well you didn't spend it in q2 you thought you could move it into Q3, but Q3 already has way too many expenses.

24:37So no, sorry, you don't get to move it into Q3. They gave the money to somebody else in Q2 because they're trying to smooth things out. Everybody hates finance because this happens to them and they think it was malice because they don't understand what you're doing, right? You don't understand what the security team's doing sometimes. And they do a thing and you're like, why did they add in this stupid requirement? Now, sometimes they added it in because there's a compliance requirement. They don't want the requirement either, but the auditor specified it. And nobody understands auditors asking you to do stupid things more than finance does.

25:08But rather than oftentimes bonding over this, like security professionals are like, you have to do this for security. Whereas if I walk in and I said, look, the regulator for us requires us to have this stupid security practice, you'd be like, oh my God. And we could bond over Sarbanes-Oxley, right? How many things do we hate because of SOX? So many. So many. I remember when Sox came in and we had to help implement the IT controls. And I was like, these are all stupid controls. Don't blame me for these. Let's go blame Enron if we want. But this is not my fault. But instead of bonding over that, we get we assume that the other person doesn't care about the business.

25:44I have never met a finance professional who does not care about the business. I've met a lot of them who don't understand the business. They don't understand what software engineering is doing and how we're allocating stuff. And then they'll look at people who are gaming the system. New engineer who'd figured out while we were growing, he's like, well, the more I do software cap on all my people, I can grow faster, which is a great use of software capitalization to cheat the system. It's like, oh, I can get my headcount sooner because it's all capitalized. It'll be accounted for later. but it meant that when we needed to shrink and cut people like he walked in and he's like well you want me to cut five people but because they're 80 % capitalized that would really only give us the savings of one person so you should move the five people to somewhere else in the business and that actually worked through two rifts and in the third rift they said well if your people only count for one fifth we need you to cut five times as many oh and he was like you're doing what to me just misalignment two different people looking at different parts of the business I'm not going to say which one was wrong because I think there were elements of both being right and both being wrong.

26:45But if you assume it's malice, you can't find a compromise. So never assume malice. Everybody thinks they're the hero in the story. Nobody thinks they're trying to ruin the business. So if you think somebody else is trying to ruin the business, you're probably the one at fault. There's a corollary to this in the book, and it's painting a picture of like whenever you have a goal that the other side of getting there has this adversary that you're up against. And it's saying you're the good guy and you're going to war against this and you're borrowing these analogs from the outside world where they're not meant to be used and i find myself doing this a lot and i found that i actually don't perform well when i do this i go way too hard in uh like neighborhood local 5k road races i'll try to hype myself up and i'll be like i hate all the other people i'm racing against they're they're bad this is the good versus evil type like uh metaphor here but But then I realized that there's no real conflict.

27:39There's just opportunity in something. That's kind of like a freeing thought. I've got advice for you on the 5K. It's worth what you just paid for it, which is start at the back. Wait until everybody else goes. And then you start running because your time is individual. Like it doesn't matter what time on the clock when you leave. Everything is chipped now. And every time you pass somebody, give them a thumbs up. Right. And you just completely change the dynamic. You are everybody's sidekick. And you're getting that endorphin rush of passing them all. And they're probably cheering for you as you go.

28:07When I was doing 5Ks, this is what I would do. I'd just start at the back. First of all, I hate running in a pack. So let the pack clear out. And then I would just get to pass everybody. And I would get faster and faster because I didn't want to sprint past anyone. So at the beginning, I got to start out with a gentle jog. I'm passing people. And then I have to keep speeding up as I pass everybody. And I'd have a decent time at the end. But I got to feel happy because I got to cheer on like hundreds of people. Such a subtle flip. I love this. If you tell yourself you're a sidekick instead of telling yourself you're a hero, then the world is full of heroes.

28:40If you tell yourself you're a hero, then the world is full of villains. That's deep. And in business, we often borrow these us versus them. Like, we're at war against, I don't know, big AI code or fill in the blanks. Why do we do that? Like, why are we always borrowing, like, Vietnam movie scenes? I mean, first of all, it's easy. There's amazing leaders with great quotes. One of my favorite quotes, which is a military quote, the 70 % plan violently executed will beat 100 % plan every day. And what I like about it, other than the word violent, but that's really important to this, is that it doesn't say us versus them.

29:17But he's just saying, don't get caught in analysis paralysis to try to find the perfect plan. Just go execute. Like once you think you've got a reasonable plan, execute. You can tweak it along the way, but just go do it. People are like, oh, in death ground, fight. Okay, yes, in death ground fight, but most companies are never going to actually experience this. But what happens is if you borrow too much of the combative language, then you're going to try to use that model when 90 % of the time you only interact inside your company. Very few people in your company are actually competing with your competitors.

29:50Like your sales reps are. The rest of your company, they never interact with the competitors. You don't want them thinking compatibly. They're not the tip of the spear. You don't want to carry that energy around with you. I think it constricts you into thinking negatively about whatever goal you're trying to accomplish. Not just about the goal, but about every interaction you have. If you're thinking in this us versus them war mentality, then anybody who gets in the way of that war is sabotaging its treason. Look how dark that is. Whereas if I just say, look, we're a business. Our job is to eliminate inefficiencies to be able to produce more value out of the energy that we're investing.

30:24So if I say, look, we're 60 percent efficient today and I'm trying to get us to 62 percent efficient, that's fine. And there's no there's no tension in there. Like somebody who's who isn't getting us to 62 percent isn't bad. But if I say I am trying to keep us alive against this enemy trying to kill us. Well, now everybody who doesn't agree with me is siding with the enemy. I'm going to get a lot less done. And I think there is a real danger when leaders simplify these very complex situations into a binary good guy versus bad guy scenario. Exactly. Andy, I got another one for you. This was helpful for me as someone who's constantly learning how to delegate more now that he runs his own business.

31:01Don't over-specify delegation. So your advice here was, it almost sounds backwards. You argue for broad directives, but very specific success criteria. Someone says, oh, go do X. And then when someone comes back having done X, you then nitpick and you tell them all the things they did wrong. Or worse, you just said, that's not what I asked for. Go do it again. If you specify the success criteria, this is what I need the output to look like or what it like. We're going to go brief the board. I need the following things. Now, finance honestly almost has that easy of all the board becks. Theirs is the easiest because you just walk in and you're like, oh, I'm going to show you the balance sheet.

31:39Like, I know exactly what that looks like. We're not being creative. It's not like the rest of us who walk in and they're like, oh, CMO, I have no idea what this person is going to present. CFO has it easy. CRO has it easy because all that anybody cares about is like, what's the revenue number look like? And hard because it's never good enough. But at least we know what we're talking about. But when you delegate work, you don't want to tell somebody exactly how to do it unless it's something where how really matters, which in finance, I think it matters more than anywhere else. You're not making up your own accounting principles inside the business.

32:12So it's really important that you understand what GAAP looks like and exactly how we have to have all the correct evidence for what we're going to put up here. You don't just tell someone to go do it. You say, look, when you're done, here's what we're going to be able to look at to validate you did it right. Partly so that they can validate before they come to you. You don't want them to show up with inferior work and you have to tell them what they did wrong. You're going to say, look, I will know your work is good because I'm going to check these seven things. These are the success criteria, right?

32:38But imagine that like somebody's going to go build a new product and you tell them, well, you have to have a financial plan for the new product. And this person doesn't have a finance partner on it at all. they don't know what a financial plan looks like so you want to say look this is what the success criteria for a financial plan looks like you're going to have to you'll lay out the tam talk about how you're going to do market capture you have to have at least a very high level what does your cogs look like you know what's your operating margin etc like it doesn't have to be perfect but these are the numbers we're going to be looking for and now they're like oh i know what success looks like but now they can go do the work and this ties back to the whole idea of don't be irreplaceable.

33:16If you're the only one who knows how to do the work, then you have to do all the work. The biggest piece of delegation is you say, I don't want to do this work and I will accept it being done differently than I would do it. Let's say we're on a podcast here. Like you have other people who are doing production for you. What you care about is I want to have a good podcast. And now that looks like things like it should take no more than this many days until we're able to publish it. I want snippets that look like this. I want audio quality like this. In fact, The best ways to delegate is to ask somebody else, what are the success criteria that I'm going to measure by to know that you did your job well?

33:53Like, let them teach you, but now you can just outsource it. The whole goal of modern business is delegation. Like, we are not artisanally doing anything anymore. This is not one person doing end-to-end every task. What makes business profitable is delegation to specialists. Sometimes you have to develop the specialist by taking somebody who doesn't know how to do it and saying, here's the task I want you to do, and here's what it will look like when it's finished. If I tell you, go dig a hole in the yard, because I'm going to install fence posts, I need to tell you exactly how big the hole has to be.

34:25I don't have to tell you whether you're using a post hole digger or a shovel or a pick or something else. Maybe I will help you with that the first time. But after that, I don't care. Give me a hole. It's the right shape. I don't care how you do it. And get really good at giving me holes. I tend to think that smart leaders over explain instead of empowering their team because they got to the position of being a leader by being very good at a specific craft and being the fingers and the keyboard. And then when you have to manage the other people, you're so obsessed with the way that you did it and how you got ahead that you fail to realize that it's two different jobs.

34:59It very much is two different jobs because when you were doing it, there was only one person doing it. And so you were not building a sustainable system. You just did it your way. And I think the bane of almost every finance department is how many spreadsheets get passed around. And, you know, hopefully some of those have gone away with various SaaS things. How many places do we have to like pass numbers through on spreadsheets? Oh, because this team does one thing and this team does another thing, right? And this is the bane of scalability in a business. Because it started out with one person who just had the data in a handful of spreadsheets.

35:28And then as you increased in size, oh, these spreadsheets went to that team and these spreadsheets went to that team. And now we have to, instead of one person copying and pasting or doing a cell reference, oh, we have to have another spreadsheet to pass data between us. This is our problem is we didn't stop and redesign the system because the person at the top knows what every one of those spreadsheets is and therefore can't let them go away. Andy, this one's somewhat related to the delegation piece and being like a master of your craft. Another contrarian take here is to not obsess over your strengths because we hear play to your strengths all the time, you were pushing back that you actually shouldn't double down on your strengths.

36:07And there's two different ways to look at this. One is as you grow, stop hiring people that look like you. And I don't just mean physically. This isn't just about diversity of appearance. This is about diversity of skills. And here's the reason for that one, which is you hire people so that problems don't get to you. If you're the best person at solving problems that are very technical, if all of your people are good at solving technical problems, then whatever gets to you isn't going to be solvable with your technical skills because they would have taken care of it. It's going to be a people problem.

36:37It's going to be a process problem. And what comes to you are problems you're not good at solving because you didn't hire anybody who was good at solving any of them because you doubled down on your strengths as you built your organization. But the second is the more senior you get, the more you have to be able to take a very holistic view and solve problems that are multidisciplinary. If it's solvable with a technical fix and it gets to you and you, it's like something went wrong because somebody in your organization should have come up with the technical fix. But probably it's also a process and also a people problem.

37:09There was a vulnerability, architectural vulnerability in our system a long, long time ago when I was at Akamai and we finally got everybody behind fixing it. There was a configuration challenge. Let's just put it that way, that customers had to do interesting things to configure it. And so every sales rep was like, do not turn this feature on. But the feature was critical for their safety. So nobody had it on. So we're like, okay, great. We have to fix how it gets configured and then update everybody to the new configuration, right? Which doesn't sound really hard. We left it to the engineers to fix this.

37:40The same engineers who had built the original system that nobody used. They came back a year later with a fix to the system. Our professional service team looked at it and was like, no, we are not going to talk to customers about this. This won't work. I'm not going to just offload it to the engineering team because we were part of it. We saw what they were building. We weren't thrilled with it, but we thought it could work. And then I got a professional services person telling me, I am not putting my reputation on the line with that because it was a process problem. And so we sat down. We're like, why not?

38:10Let's understand this. Let's get better at process. And we came back and we built a thing that worked. But it required us to think about how the people would be involved, how the process would be involved, how the technology would be involved. And those had been weaknesses of our teams and we made them strengths. When does improving a weakness create more leverage than polishing existing strength? Almost always. Here's the way I look at it, and it's going to sound very negative. I don't mean it to be. Most of what leaders do is harm the business. The job of a business is to turn energy into value.

38:38You have great people who are spending their time and energy doing things. Most of the interactions that a leader has with them hurt that production. The people who are doing the work, they're the folks who are producing value. Most of what you're doing is you're trying to line people up in the same direction. but as you do it, you're harming their value. Your weaknesses do the most harm. And so if you think about it, if you say, okay, well, the things I'm good at, I only do 2 % harm. And the things that I'm bad at, I'm doing 70 % harm. If you get better at those bad things, so you're only doing 60 % harm, right?

39:07That's a 33 % improvement in value output. And I like to think of it as six disciplines. This isn't in the book. So this is when I do keynotes. This is often the way I'll frame it. Is there sort of six disciplines you have to have as a manager that everything comes in, there's a leader that comes in, right? The first one is wellness. How do you make sure people show up with as much energy as possible? We had a practice on our team that if somebody was just not producing on a given day for any reason, like they were sick, somebody who just found out like literally his wife called him in the middle of the day and said, we're getting a divorce.

39:36Pulled him in and we said, do you want to be in this building today to process? Because you're not going to get any work done. So there's no reason for you to spend your energy here. The more I have you here, the less energy I get tomorrow. Maybe you can go process this right now and tomorrow you'll be present. but you've got the sniffles go home so think about wellness as the discipline of making sure people have as much energy as possible when they do show up inclusion making sure people's energy isn't spent feeling like they're outside the bubble and almost every woman in technology has run into this where she walks into a room and she's the only woman in a room and she's waiting for somebody to ask her to go get coffee i guarantee you if you're manlessness and you're laughing at me go ask the women you know at least one of them is going to be like oh no absolutely and i've had it happen to me, right?

40:20Like that's energy. They're not spending producing value. You had this really micro example of making people feel included. And it was you go into a conference room, but all the seats are taken. So then you have to go to a different room to bring a chair in. And it's like a different looking chair. Yeah. And everybody's looking at you. And you look like you almost don't belong at the table. And I'm having a visceral reaction to that. I don't know why. Because we've all been that person. It's like, well, it's also like when you're at a conference, you're the last one to lunch and all the tables are full and there's an empty table with nobody at it.

40:50Oh, yeah. I'm the guy who will make sure there's not that empty table because I'll go sit there. I have no problem sitting by myself at lunch. In fact, honestly, sometimes I just prefer it, but I will try never to sit at a table that's mostly occupied because I want to make sure that somebody has, oh, I could go sit there and I'm not alone. They have a landing zone. Think about all the places where you're making people waste energy once they have shown up, but before they get to spend any time. That's inclusion. Get better at that because the more people are wasting their time in their head, the less they're giving you.

41:18Then it's like development. Like, do they have the skills to actually do the work that's asked of them? It's motivation. Do they want to even do the work? Like, you could have two people who are the best person on your team to do these two jobs. But if you flipped the jobs, they might only be 80 % as skilled, but they will be very happy because they're learning and doing new things. And so you get more energy out of them. They'll work later. They'll spend the time developing themselves. They feel like you've invested in them. This is why cross-training matters. You might reduce how much value you get from their skills, although you're increasing it over time, but you're increasing their motivation.

41:51Then it's planning. Like, are you actually making sure that they're doing work that's meaningful? How often have you seen where, like, a manager knows that a project isn't going to finish, but they let people keep working on it anyway? I've seen that. Right? You've just destroyed all of the energy that they put in. Like, they get this, you know, to the five-yard line, and they can't punch it in, and you knew before they picked up the ball. That means all the energy that's wasted is on you. And that energy goes back into demotivation. They're very unhappy. Like lots of places it goes back to because they're like, why did I do this?

42:25And we never rolled it out. And many times they knew that you knew. Right. And now they're like, they're going to question you in the future. Well, are you going to let me know? And then finally, it's just about just the misalignment in the business. Do you make sure that your organization and another organization are aligned? You know, one of the things that I've hated and I've had bosses do this before. They're like, oh, they knew there was a budget cut coming, but they had me doing planning for a new initiative. OK, so I'm doing this work and I'm calling a finance partner and saying, hey, I need numbers for this.

42:52I need to be able to do this. And the finance partner is like, what are you doing, Andy? Like we're running headlong at each other. You're just misaligned. And now you're creating tension between organizations, especially you might look at this. Andy always lost on that one. I once won. Like we actually then invested in my project, but nobody on the other side knew it was going to happen. So they were all humoring me, not realizing this was actually a strategic initiative. The CFO and the CTO were misaligned on whether this project was going to be above the line or not. People are stressed about it.

43:23And the finance numbers in that case had to get rewritten because everybody had written me off. They're like, oh, this project's never going to actually happen. So we'll humor Andy, but we got a separate set of books that are the real numbers, except now those have to go away. My numbers have to come in, but that's got a cascading effect. Like FP &A folks hate when that happens. that's just misalignment that didn't need to be there. I think this is a great spot to switch gears from philosophy to practice because you have a few killer stories, Andy, that I think reveal how you actually think. So if you'll humor me, you have this famous email template that you send to software vendors, all the BDRs hawking their wares.

43:59If you Google vendor rebuff, it'll pop up. Oh, you can find it by Googling it. The best part is I misspelled rebuff when I first wrote this with only one F. But if you put in vendor rebuff spelled correctly with two Fs, it still is the very first hit. So what is it and why did you write it? Because it's hilarious. What it is, is it's a please go away note. It's basically like we all get these, we get these messages from your SDRs, account development execs, whatever, you know, whatever the name is today, where they're like, hey, I want to sell you my product. But they don't say, hey, I want to sell you my product.

44:30They're going to do something else. But they're really obvious. And when you're a practicing CISO, you're getting dozens of these every single day. Oh, yeah. CFOs and CISOs are the two main targets. CMOs, they have it worse. I will tell you all the MarTech that's out there. And everybody knows that CMOs will not follow the procurement process for very good reason, just to be clear. They buy the same product as an individual, and it is one-tenth the cost of buying it as a company. So they don't want it to go through procurement because it costs them 10 times as much. They're totally happy to just expense it because it saves the company money, even though it creates huge issues for both finance and security when we're dealing with these products that are not integrated in any way.

45:10They are saving the company money. And more importantly, it just lets them be like, oh, I'm on a month to month instead of a long term contract. But anyway, so I was getting all of these. And one day I'm talking to a CISO friend of mine. I'm like, this just pisses me off. Everybody on the CISO side, we will just share the best or the worst examples of these in our various Slack channels, etc. And he said to me, he said, you know, you really normally have a lot more empathy for people. Those are the lowest paid folks in the sales department. and you're occasionally rude to them. Because sometimes I would be when they would like keep hammering me with the same message over and over again or a sequence where they're replying to themselves.

45:45And I would just, at some point I was having a bad day and I'd be cranky at them. And he called me out on it. He said, why don't you just say no? Why would I even reply to them? He was like, maybe they would go away. If I say no, they're going to argue with me. Yeah, you open the door to conversation. I open the door to conversation. So if I'm going to say no, it has to be a hard no. But it's got to be a polite no. So it says, you know, good day. I know you have a job to do, which is get a qualified first appointment with me. And I just want to tell you right up front, I am not a lead for you.

46:11But I'm sure that you have questions because you believe this isn't true. So here is my FAQ. And it's like this massively long FAQ that includes, oh, you're going to try to give me Patriots tickets. Sorry, I already have season tickets. They're not going to work on me. Plus my company is not going to let me take them anyway. Like all of these various questions, including like, oh, you want to get my attention? Here's the sorts of things you should think about doing. And I turned it into an email signature. So I could literally just click reply, change the signature to my rebuff signature and hit send.

46:41And I will tell you, I got more replies that were either people just thanking me. Thanks for at least even replying. People who were laughing, they're like, this is the best response I've ever gotten. Once I got a response from somebody who had moved from company to company, he's like, this is the fourth time I have gotten this message from you. And it's even worse now. I don't even do it anymore because then I'm talking to AI and it doesn't even matter. There's something to be said about being considerate. And you're saying no, but you're doing this small kind thing. Look, and here's a complete unintended consequence.

47:13Do you know who my clients are now? Mostly sales and marketing teams. I have a lot of people who are clients who remember getting one of those messages from me. They remember getting turned down. They remember getting turned down in a graceful, considerate way. And so when I say, look, my job is to help you understand how to better interact with your customers. they're like, well, you understood a little bit about my job, so maybe you can help me. And that was never a plan. I did not write this so that it would be later marketing for me. But it turns out it's a good piece of brand marketing. This is a broader topic.

47:42I don't know where this goes. But like as leaders, why are we so uncomfortable saying no clearly? I think some of it comes out of necessary secrecy, which is what if your no is about something material? And I think people develop this habit where they don't want to give hints. And the best one is, like, is there a RIF planned? Which I'm sure that every CFO has to deal with this one. So here's my advice to you. That's one in which it's okay to not give a no. That was my answer. My team would sometimes say, Andy, is there a RIF planning? I said, first of all, let me explain what the word planning means.

48:13Because when you say planned, you think, are we considering one? But to the CFO and general counsel, planned means they have gotten approval from the board. So if they say no, it's a lie because there's a 24 hour window where it is planned and not yet disclosed because we have to tell the street. So we're gonna have to lie to you. But here's the reality is we're always considering the right way to spend our money, which means from time to time, we might think about whether we're gonna do a riff in the future. And if we were in the middle of doing one right now, I couldn't tell you. So I'm not going to answer the question about whether we are or not, because I'm not an oracle for you to pick on.

48:49And I'm just gonna be very upfront and blunt about it. I, as a leader, I'll be really honest. I'm always considering whether we are spending our money the right way. And I don't need a riff to do adjustments inside the team. I can just do it whenever I feel like it's appropriate. If that's what my team's, if that's what my management organization wants to do. You have to learn when you're going to say no to the question rather than answer the question. And once you do that, then it's easier to say no, because you're not giving things away for other things. Like, should we work on this project?

49:18No, we shouldn't. Like, be honest with your team, because sometimes your job is to hide ambiguity and chaos in the business. but sometimes it's to expose it so your team can better function. Sometimes it is to shield other people on your team from it so they can concentrate. Right. You should shield them from a lot of that. But sometimes they need to understand what's going on. I had a conversation with my team because they were like, oh, there's this work we're doing. And like, we don't have enough people to do it the best way. So we're just trying. And I said, does it matter if we do it well?

49:47And they're like, what do you mean? I'm like, we can't do it the right way. But I don't think it matters as long as like we're doing something here. It was a compliance related activity where it's like, as long as we can check the box for the auditor, none of us actually think that this solves the problem. And but we're trying to solve a problem when we don't need to solve the problem. Nobody else wants us to solve the problem. Why are we trying and half-assing it? Let's just do exactly what we need to do. Spend our resources somewhere else. So I'm going to say no to trying to backdoor build the best system possible because nobody in the business wants it.

50:20I don't want it. You don't really want that because you want to go spend monies elsewhere. So let's just say no. Andy, this one I think is going to be a hit with all our Metrix fans out there. It's around expecting what you inspect. So can you tell the story about being a bartender and Guinness promotion? OK, so a long time ago, I worked for the Guinness Corporation. Actually, at the time it was United Distillers. This is before it becomes Diageo. It owned two resorts. One was the I think the Glen Eagles in Scotland. and one was the Equinox Hotel in Manchester, Vermont, where I was a bartender.

50:54And this was right when they started to roll out the classic six, which was Dalwini and Talisker, Oban, Lagavulin, oof, I should remember all of them. But in my defense, it was three decades ago. What they really wanted was when somebody ordered a scotch or a whiskey, we would just point out and say, hey, we have these. Would you be interested in trying one? Whoever sells the most gets dinner for two in the tavern, I think. And if you can sell 90, like what's up? sleepy bar we're in, you will get a bottle of the Royal Lagavulin Reserve. I'm not a whiskey drinker at the time. I will tell you that I was the pushiest, hardest salesman there was.

51:29Like we had a contractor from Scotland who'd come in every day. He would drink one. I would push him to drink a second one. I bought several under the tail. I'm like, well, I'm going to get my number. So I would take my tip money and I would buy them and just pour them down the drain. I'm not going to drink it while I'm on duty, but like I was going to get to the 90 number. And I did. And And my boss came and talked to me at the end of the month and was like, we are disappointed in you. I'm like, what? I hit the number. And she was like, we did not want you being so pushy. You are normally one of our best bartenders.

51:57Everybody loves you. People were complaining about you. They gave me a gift certificate. I still have the damn gift certificate. You never even used it. I never even used it. Because for me, I'm incentivized by let's go win this metric. But that's not what they wanted. Right. They just wanted a positive brand experience for people to be aware. But what they incentivized me to do was to be pushy with this. And how often do we have that where we put in spiffs and we don't think about what the actual experience will be? And what we get is not what we were looking for. Everybody should look this and say that every person in my business is going to take any metric that I put on them.

52:35And they are actually going to make that their number one job is hitting that metric. They don't care about why we have the metric. They're just going to go hit the metric. What are the bad outcomes? You think you're labeling one thing or measuring one thing with a number, but really the ground truth underneath it has shifted. Sometimes it's people will cheat the numbers. And I remember the year that we had like four severity one incidents in the same year. And the CEO got really cranky. He's like, we have a huge reliability problem. Like this is not good with our customers. Then we've had four severity one incidents in the year.

53:05So I'm putting all of the executive team. Here is our metric. There will be no more than one severity one incident next year. I feel stifling. I was in charge of the incident process, which included after an incident happened, right, reviewing the incident, including looking at what the severity of the incidents were and whether they were appropriately called at the time. Every executive in the room argued that every SEV-1 wasn't really a SEV-1 and was really a SEV-2. Doesn't matter to me. And one of them is my boss. And he would just declare. He would be like, that's a SEV-2. Write that in the database right now.

53:38We only had one severity, one incident that year. I will tell you, in reality, we had multiple severity one incidents, but the CEO was happy and everybody else was happy. But it hit a hit a problem because you had a metric that was tamperable. It reminds me of those little chalkboards that they are whiteboards that they keep in warehouses. I think they had one in the show The Office and it says X days since the last accident. Yeah. And it's like, OK, you can write whatever number you want on there. Is it true? That broken ankle over there. Yeah, that's not really an accident. For our next segment, I want to ask some better questions brought to you by our friends at EY.

54:14And let me tell you, they think a lot about great questions across enterprise risk, audit, diligence. They're a smart bunch. So I'm going to I'm going to ask some smarter questions right now. There was this story that really hit me hard, and it was about Logan Ryan and making expensive time worth it. Can you tell that one? OK, so for for people not familiar with the story, Logan Ryan, the defensive back in the NFL, He's now a broadcaster, so you'll occasionally see him calling games. His wife was pregnant with their, would have been their third child. She had an ectopic pregnancy. Her life was at risk.

54:49Literally, it's like right after a practice, you know, she calls to talk to him and she's like, yeah, I just don't feel well. And her husband happened to be talking to one of the trainers at the time, was right next to him, you know, explained to the trainer and the trainer said, go to the ER right now, which saved her life. She would have died. Logan is in a different city. He's in New York at the time. He's playing for the Giants. She's in Tampa Bay where they live. And the whole team is behind this. It's like, go be with your wife right now. The fact that we've got a game coming up in a day or two doesn't matter.

55:16Go be with her. And she says to him, she says, I got my sister here. I'm now fine. Go play the game. Bring me a ball. In that game, he actually brought her two balls. I think first and last play of the game were both turnovers triggered by him. He ends up with two balls that he takes away from the other team. Like best game of his life. And there's a lesson here. And I don't want to say, look, you should never be with your family. That's not the lesson. But the lesson is not being with your family is expensive time. You have paid a very high price to not be with them. Are you making that price worthwhile?

55:47Like he did not go mail it in. He made it that not being there, having paid that price, turn that price into something. I've traveled the world, you know, as an executive. There are things that I personally do not care to do that my wife thinks are the most amazing thing ever. So when I travel, I go do those things. I am afraid of heights. I climbed the Sydney Bridge. Why? So I get a picture at the top and send it to my wife. Not like I traveled the world to go climb the bridge. I would be here to go sell to customers, but I have to show up a day early so I can adjust. I went and did a thing that you would have thought was amazing and you're very excited that I went and did it.

56:22Every time I travel and I tell everyone on my team, I'm like, even if all you do is just take an extra half day, go be a tourist wherever you are. You've already spent this time to be away from your family. The company has spent an arm and a leg to get you there. So go do one tourist activity so that this place that you went to in this time that you spent is not, you know, airport, taxi, hotel, meeting room and back. It's you'll have a memory of a great meal that you had or you went and did a thing. Every piece of time that you are spending expensively, make it worthwhile for that expense to happen.

56:54This one resonated with me because I travel for work just like you and I struggle with it. I'll finish my meetings and have a few free hours. But I feel the sense of guilt for not being home because I have kids. I know my wife is actually taking the brunt of it, having having to carry the load without me. So instead, I kind of just waste my time. And sometimes I feel bad about this. I'll complain to her that I feel bad about not being there. You don't get to trump that I'm doing this. So go do a thing and you should come back and say, look, really wish I had been here to help you. But while I was there, I got to go do this great experience.

57:25Let me tell you about it. So you can vicariously at least enjoy what happened. But now that I'm here, I'm fully present. Right. I think it's a great lesson for people. Like we said, not encouraging people to travel to get away from their families. But if you do have this time that is expensive in the sense of not being with them, make it worth it and show up fully for both the work part of it, but also the experience part of it. And on showing up fully, I want to sneak in one more piece of advice here, which is take transition time. I used to do this when I was driving in Boston. We already referenced how awful it is.

57:56We had two small kids. I would get home and I would sit in the driveway for five minutes and just breathe and meditate. Drop all the stress. So at the moment I walked in the door, I was fully present. Because what I had been doing is I would drive home, I'd get out of the car, I'd race in. But now I'm like, I need to unwind. My wife has been there with two small children for the like 11 hours that I've been out of the house. She does not want to hear me prioritizing I'm unwinding. But if I just sit in the driveway for that five minutes and unwind, First of all, I would tell her I was doing it so she would know.

58:26The kids didn't know I was there. But the moment I walk in the door, daddy's home. Grab the kids. Get her a break. Like, now I'm fully present. It's sage advice because something I've been trying to do, I work from home, so I just walk downstairs. Don't just walk downstairs. No. And I don't want to walk downstairs and then pick up my phone to unwind. So what I do is I'll check my phone for any text or anything I've missed. Maybe I'll check ESPN for two minutes. And then I'll leave it here. That's great. when I go down, I fully like left that mental space. Taking five more minutes to transition is better than only being 60 % present.

59:00Andy, this has been an absolute blast. I learned so much from you. I learned so much from your book. Where can people get it if they're interested? So they can get it pretty much anywhere. It's on Amazon. It's probably the easiest for most people. There's a couple of places you can get it in bulk. You know, my website, CSOAndy.com, you can click on 1 % Leadership and there's like a bunch of bulk places, which I recommend, especially if you were like, oh, hey, I want to get it for my whole team. I want to bring Andy in for a keynote. You know, always happy to do those. I'm doing a couple of those this year for conferences.

59:29So if you want to bring somebody in who's been there, who can help your team with better leadership, go grab copies of your book of the book for them. Highly recommend it. Well, thank you for spending time with us. Thanks for having me. Run the Numbers is a mostly media production. Yelling an intro by Fat Joe. Artwork by Meg D 'Alessandro. Show is executive produced by Ben Hillman. Nothing said on this podcast is intended to be business or investment advice. It's the sole opinion of me, a guy who feeds his dog way too much ice cream and has a history of net operating losses, LOL. If you like this podcast, hit subscribe and give us five stars.

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