-It all depends on the individual, but probably no individual, great or not so great, could achieve anything if that individual didn’t have a team, which that individual built. If I didn’t have a team, I wouldn’t have achieved all that I have achieved today. I think that if you Dima hadn’t had a team too, you probably wouldn’t have celebrated 19 years of Simpals yesterday. After all, the team is very important, and without a team you can’t go anywhere and build any business. So I’d like to give you the floor to tell me, do we need teams in business? Is it necessary to build them or not?
-Thank you. Let’s make life easier for our operators today. I’m not going to get up, so focus. My friends, this is my second time at your economic forum. I really enjoyed the first one, even though there were some rough edges, but I love them. What’s more, the video that was published, a lot of people wrote to me afterwards, people came on Shortcut, and they quoted me several times. They said, that’s cool. So I also have a personal personal interest in coming to you more often, because I pack my own thoughts better and tell others about it. Today at Irina’s request I would like to tell you about how I see teams, how I understand team building, I will also tell you my short path that I took. Short, because it began literally recently. That is, there was a long one, and a short one has just begun. Let’s consider for the moment, who is a leader? A leader, if you take it in nature, is the leader of the pack, who tracks down the prey, and first gets at its throat, in order to get meat for the whole family. The leader – he is the smartest, he is the strongest, he always knows, he always has answers to all questions, he never thinks about his decisions. And the strength of the team depends on the strength of the leader, that is, the stronger the leader, the stronger the team. And we, the company, are a family, where there’s a father – the leader, where there’s a mother – his assistants, and all the other employees are children, we’re responsible for them, we have to take care of them. And this paradigm that I live in, and that most people live in, has led me to a very unpleasant situation. Because I’m a fairly rigid and chaotic person. Because I’m a creator, I like things to be constantly changing, I have a constant pile of ideas, and I do it quite rigidly, quickly, and not everyone is comfortable with it. So I was always the center of the universe in my team, and I was always deciding who was going to do what, and making decisions instead of the people who were supposed to do it. Because I knew it was better, you couldn’t do better. What has that led to? In 15 years it led to the fact that my team was completely atrophied. They atrophied the initiative, they stopped thinking about responsibility, about making decisions. They clearly understood that they will come to us and tell us what we need to do, they will give us a specific algorithm of understandable actions for which they are not responsible. And at one point I realized that I was alone. I realized that what I want to get, only I want. My team wants comfort, peace of mind, that they don’t get their brains screwed on, that they don’t get their paycheck.And when I tried to share my plans, they were so abstract and incomprehensible to the team that I realized I was alone. And I realized that we needed to move on, so my partner and I sat down to study, and we thought, “Does the whole world work according to this scheme? Aren’t there other tools, other schemes that can form a team?” And it turns out there is. It turned out that Google, Facebook, and large American corporations work very differently. And today I want to tell you about a few specific tools that you can use that will probably change the structure of your organization and you will get to a completely different level. One of these tools is called OKR (Objectives and Key Results). It’s a thing that Google uses. It’s really very simple, once a quarter, the team comes to you, to the board, and says, “We want to achieve these goals in the next quarter,” and the goal is not just to increase productivity by 15%, but the goal should be very motivational, human, simple and understandable. For example, we want to beat our competitor by three times. Or, for example, we want to become the coolest penguin producer in Moldova. That is a clear and understandable thing. Or, for example, we want to be the best. So there aren’t necessarily any metrics. But the next point is how we are going to achieve this goal. So these are key results, i.e. metrics and figures that will make it clear whether this ambitious goal has been reached or not. And here we have specific figures: we must increase the productivity of our site by 3 times, we must increase the return metric by 1%, we must increase shipment, for example of boots by 12%. And if we meet these figures, then our main goal with parrots will be achieved. What’s very important is that the team generates their own goals for the quarter. So they don’t come down from the top. They come in and say, “And we see our project development like this.” And only once a quarter does the leader have the right to suggest, maybe roll right or left, or maybe we’ll try to do it after all. And if the team is okay, then okay. If not, then no. That is, using only the main principles, the basic principles of the company, yes, where are we going at all. So on the basis of these, the team itself decides where to go next. What happens next? The team works autonomously for three months, the head does not get into it. Just once a week they go out, for example we have about 20 projects in the company, about 20 teams that are engaged in completely different projects. What happens once a week is all the teams get together and talk about how they spent that week. The beauty of OKR is that you can’t say I worked that week. All the key results are broken down into quarterly, 90-day percentages. So if your goal is to increase sales by 30% for the quarter, then every day you have to increase sales by 0.3% so that you end up with 30. So every week all the teams get together in a big call, and perform. Everyone is given 3 minutes to talk about how you spent that week. And all the teams say, “We spent this week like this, we should have done this, and we only did this because we didn’t have time.” And everybody can see whether they’re in the red zone, green zone, or yellow zone. And there’s no way to argue, to figure out why that happened, what happened.The trick here is that they don’t report to the management, they report to their colleagues how they move. And when you see that everyone is in the green zone, everyone is moving where they need to go, and you have a red one, you start thinking, “What’s wrong with me? Why is everybody moving and I’m standing still?” Management may not attend these meetings at all. That is, the team itself is motivated in this way. This is the second tool. The third is an idea bank. Where do ideas come from in the company. If I used to come in like a seagull, yes, seagull management, flew in, shat on, flew out. That’s also how I used to come in and say, “Here’s an idea, let’s do it!” Nobody asked why it needed to be done, why it needed to be done now. And they just quit doing everything that they were doing before, I thought, this is bullshit, and do this now, this is definitely a prospect. It really demotivated the whole team. Now we have an idea bank. What is this? Roughly speaking, it is an excel file in which any member of the team can send in an idea – what would happen if we do something like this, what would it lead to. A lot of these ideas are thrown in, and I also throw them in, and my partner throws them in, and everyone, up to the programmer, can throw in ideas. Then once a week there is a prioritization. What is this? When the whole team gets together, we have a certain algorithm, there’s rais, there’s ace, different algorithms, when we prioritize a hypothesis. Well, for example, one of the algorithms is what impact it will have. Numbers are put up, the team votes, “We think this is a cool idea, it’s going to make a big difference in our product.” Scores are given from 1 to 10. Then the second question is: “How long will it take to implement this idea? Scores again. And we look, we choose those hypotheses, which with minimal effort will bring the maximum benefit. In this way they are sorted. The very top ones need to be done the fastest. And then the company understands what needs to be done in the next quarter. In fact, you don’t need management here either, you just come in and, as one of the project participants, toss ideas around and watch for prioritization. The next tool is one to one. It’s a thing where all the heads of all the departments are required to meet once a month and talk to each employee. This is a personal thing; there is a special technology by which it is carried out. The idea is that you have to get into the head of the person, your subordinate, and understand what’s going on with him, what kind of light he’s in. Because we usually decide what issues – business issues, projects are moving, where we’re going, what needs to be done. And to have a heart-to-heart talk, and to understand the person in general is motivated, whether he wants to work or not, is usually not done. That’s the kind of thing we do. Next. We now have experts in our company. These are the people whom we cannot afford to take on the salaries, because their salaries are very high, but we can afford to take them for 10 hours a month and use them. We also have people from Moldova, from Russia, from Ukraine. Top level experts that we just hire by the hour and negotiate. The team knows that they have three hours this month, and they can hire any expert in the world that they want and talk to them. Also a very important point with hiring. Whereas hiring used to go through me, now it’s up to the team to decide whether or not to take that person on. I don’t impose on them anymore. They have candidates, they talk to me and say, for example, we like these two people. Then I can get involved, choose one of them.That is, they don’t get anything else from above. But we have this rule – we only take A-class people on the team. That’s how energy efficiency is class A, B, and C, and so is the level of professionals. Because class A people bring class A people into the company. Class B people bring class C people into the company. And class C people don’t bring anybody. So you have to try to build a team from the top. It is very important to make this scheme work, to share shares with the top managers. This understanding came to me about 3 years ago, and I realized that the salary can motivate only programmers, for example, and not all. But the person who makes decisions, who is responsible for the project, must understand that all of his efforts should be reflected in his income. This does not mean that everyone earns from profits, some projects have other metrics, such as social impact, like attendance, which is not measured in money. But in any case, his salary, his income should be tied to the metric he is working on. Only then will he feel like he’s in the same boat as me. Otherwise, he will think that I am flying a spaceship and he is paddling a canoe. I want to bring up Shortcut again. Last time I told you about my initiative to meet with the guys, where they come and share their problems and wishes. I try to help them in any way I can. And now we had one interesting case. A young man came to Shortcut and told a story about how he earns money on 999. It was very curious to listen when the man told that in some positions he earns more than I do. Because he just hacked them. Well how, he didn’t hack them like a hacker, he just wrote a machine that downloads all the information from 999, processes it, and gives our customers better service than we can provide. That is, he found such loopholes, such logic he came up with, that it’s more profitable to place through him than through us. I was impressed with that. I invited him to join the team. I realized that I wanted him to work with me, because after talking to him, I realized that he could increase the profits of 999 by one and a half times. That is, if we normally grow at 10 percent a year, he and I decided that we could do +50. And that motivates me as an entrepreneur a lot. But there’s another thing. When you bring someone into a company that you’ve known for a week and you say this young man here will get a cut, the one I’ve known for a week, and you, who’ve worked here for 10 years, won’t. Everyone asks, “What the fuck, Dima, what’s going on? This young man decided to double the price on his ad submissions, and you’re giving him a cut for it?” I say, “No. This man has an understanding that anything is possible, and I want you to learn that from him. That anybody in the company can come to me with an idea, and tell me how you can make money on 999, and I’ll give him a share of that profit, please.” Because the most popular question I hear lately is, “Could you do that?” And I answer that yes, it could be done that way. But it didn’t occur to me, not only my team, but it didn’t occur to me. That is, I didn’t announce to all my friends, to all my colleagues, that come and suggest how to make money.And that was a big insight for me. And now Julian is working on our team and trying to hack, grow hacking is such a technology, to hack growth. If the curve is going that way right now, there’s a special technology that can lift it vertically. And right now, it’s very important for me to understand. I want to get my point across to you that it’s not important to figure out how to do it, it’s important to figure out and find the person who can do it. That is, for me now, the goal of a leader is not to know everything, but to know where you can find it. And we’re not called family now as we used to be. Because family is still about whoever you have in the family, whatever family members you have, sick, crooked, slanted, we won’t abandon them, and we won’t put them in an orphanage. We will carry them, we will treat them, we will understand them. But really, the business is a little bit different. We’re a professional team of top players now. And if you’re a wreck, and if you’re lazy and lack initiative, we’ll break up with you. But if you’re just wrong, of course we’ll support you. The main thing is the desire to work. And the leader for me now is not the one who first gnaws at the throat, and the leader is the one who smells it, tells the team about it, and the team already makes meat out of that smell. So, friends, I still think you should not work instead of the team, but with it. Thank you.
