This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage companies execute faster and cheaper. Check out his linkedin at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenleaver/
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
One thing you’ll hear many successful startup entrepreneurs say as one of their key learnings is that they don’t try to just sell a better version of what the competition is selling.
Rather they are trying to sell something completely different that targets a different audience.
For example if the incumbents are warring it out trying to sell apples, they don’t try to sell a better apple. Rather they sell a banana.
And so a person that wants to buy an apple will go buy from one of the incumbents. If, however, the person wants to purchase a banana then you are the only one around selling a banana and they buy from you.
Essentially put yourself in a market of one because everyone else is optimizing for something else.
This is how i’ve grown to view how I work and the systems I use.
I’m not trying to be better than others at the traditional management game. I’ve already played that game in the past and while I feel i’m ‘ok’ at it… I’d much prefer to play a game that is designed for me to win.
Traditional management advice is what I call the ‘apple’
This is how traditional managers manage. They all sell apples.
It is the management system of the vast majority of managers out there. Particularly in the corporate world.
You hold 1-on-1s, do lots of team meetings, you invest a lot in relationships and ‘culture’, etc.
Everyone does more or less the same thing with perhaps a small twist (instead of selling a red apple, someone sells a green one).
I played this game for about the first 15 years of my career.
You optimize for things like your relationship with your boss, your ability to be ‘seen’ and ‘heard’, being good at politics, etc.
And so a certain type of leader typically makes it to the top while most others flutter somewhere in the middle and then plateau.
My system is what I like to think of as the ‘banana’
I don’t do 1-on-1’s. I pretty much never have team meetings. I don’t invest in culture. I don’t even try to get to know the team.
We all work via tasks in a very disciplined way that I call my ‘everything is a task’ system, which i’ve talked about numerous times in this blog.
I’ve been using this system for about four years now and I love it.
I’ve used it inside client teams (typically startups that number from 15 – 100 people). And i’ve used it on my own startups and side hustles.
I don’t know of a single person out there that is better than me at this system.. because it is my system. I designed it around my strengths.
And as long as i have the proper leverage, I have found that I can pretty much always get my system to work in any team.
And if I can get it to work, then it consistently creates very powerful outcomes. It is just very good at “getting shit done”.
My ‘banana’ optimizes for very different things
In my system I don’t optimize for the same things that those ‘apple’ managers optimize for. The things I optimize for are things like:
- Work transparency: I want to know literally every task that the company or team is doing and have visibility on the work that is done as comments. I also want to know that I have an accurate expected finish date on literally everything we started.
- Performance transparency: I want to be able to filter on my Clickup board and quickly see all the tasks that a person is working on and what progress was made this week.
- Communication velocity: I want to know that the entire team is clearing their Clickup inbox every few hours meaning that everyone in the team gets a response to a question in a timely way.
- Flexibility: I want to be able to find and onboard someone to do almost anything within 24 hours (by using platforms like Upwork). Then i want 2-3 people to compete for the same role knowing full well that in 1-2 weeks i’m only keeping one of them.
- Followthru: I want to know that every task that we prioritise to do is followed up in a timely way. And that nothing gets forgotten or ignored.
- Cost efficiency: I want to have a cost base that is like 50- 75% less than any team or company that is doing something equivalent. And yet I want to get the same scope done better and faster than they do.
Sure ‘apple’ managers might somewhat optimize for some of these things I mention above… but probably not to the same extent.
Using these systems I deem that I could outcompete any team or company I have ever been a part of for the first 15 years of my career by a decent margin.
And that is not to say that those teams and folks were bad or inefficient.
Also i’d honestly deem that some of those teams were run by people that were smarter than me.
It just infers that this system is better streamlined for getting things done fast.
In certain conditions an apple will win, in others a banana will
Now it is important to note that in certain situations an apple will still pervade.
For example if you work for a large corporate and don’t have much leverage, than trying to implement my systems is going to be pretty futile.
Other team members will respond slowly, not be disciplined, and generally continue to play by the old rules. And there won’t be much you can do about it.
Also they’ll be investing in relationships and politics and if you’re not, you will be at a disadvantage. Because that ‘apple’ system still rewards such behaviors.
So part of how I see the world now is that I need to create favorable conditions for bananas to pervade. Meaning it needs to be my team or company.
Or if I’m working on a client I need to agree in advance that I’ll have the leverage to get my systems to work correctly.
And as long as I am able to do that then everyone wins. The company gets stuff done much faster and cheaper, and I play a game that is specifically designed around how I want to play.
Parting words
I no longer want to be better at selling apples than other managers. So I don’t read management books, I don’t bother reading Linkedin posts with traditional management advice, etc.
Rather I wanna run circles around traditional managers by ignoring all their rules, and playing by mine.
And I highly recommend you consider doing the same. Use a management system that is designed around your strengths.
And then choose to work in places where you can use that system.
I can say first hand… you will enjoy what you do a LOT more!
