Can BigCos Act Like NewCos?

Father, husband, brother, son. Renaissance optimist, passionate communicator and marketer. Building brands at @ProcterGamble. Welcome to MY mind and musings.

Aug 11, 2016

If you know these terms, you can help answer my question. If you do not know these terms, come back to answer my question after you’ve been here: http://newco.co.

I work in a BigCo (the BEST BigCo, as far as I’m concerned - and the one with the biggest opportunity to deliver groundbreaking change for people all over the world, IMHO) making every attempt to act like I don’t. This has generally been well accepted by my colleagues and my leadership, but there has been some recent tension on several exciting projects — that we are actively building on — resulting in my attempt to make a recommendation that our specific working group take a critical look at how we build our teams.

Dave McClure’s “Hacker, Hustler, Designer” framework for structuring your founding team at the startup level is brilliant. It’s built for agility, demands excellence from all players, requires constant coordination, and results in a dynamic working group dedicated to making progress every day. Building a new business in a BigCo, one might argue, would require a team like that, but what we’ve seen happen is we have no hackers, a hustler with an injury and a cart full of ten loafers to pull, and a designer that left his/her colored pencils at home. This subpar framework is the result of many things, but mainly:

1) BigCos are designed to cycle talent in and out of roles regularly for the purpose of building leaders. Founding teams don’t cycle until they die.

2) BigCos have A LOT of people who work on A LOT of things. 10% here, 20% here, maybe 40% here, and split the rest of your time on some org building and capability. Founding teams are singularly focused until they die.

3) BigCos plan and staff for the long term. A few people work on what needs to be done immediately, but big groups of people use critical dollars doing work that can’t even be applied until much later. Founding teams don’t have the luxury of focusing on tomorrow or they’ll die.

4) BigCos are very afraid of data. No need to expand, we just won’t use it to our benefit the way startups do.

I’d love your thoughts on these points. How do we structure ourselves? How do we drive focus? How to we attract Hacker, Hustlers and Designer who bring their colored pencils?