execute at 4 in the morning?
“Your job is to last more than a year”
“Well. You will be the 5th head of engineering in 4 years… and your job is to last more than a year. And you can’t pick any technology direction.” Really? Thanks. Have a nice day…
… I had been grinding it out in roles for years and had plenty of stories and no good place to show what I could actually do. The interview process for this one had been arranged so that I talked to the man who would be my boss last, which I learned later was deliberate … he let the organization get a read on me before he spent his own opinion. So I finally sat down across from him and asked my question. What has changed since my predecessor left? That was added AFTER I had been fired… if you read these you will know that story…
If you have ever taken a job that everybody in the building already knew was a chair with a trapdoor under it, you know the specific silence that follows a sentence like that. You are doing arithmetic in real time about whether the person opposite you is telling you the truth as a warning or as a shrug. execute is almost never about your plan. It is about whether the person above you does what they say…
…and then he said the thing that changed it
Riley had been on the road for more than 20 years. In 1956 he played 342 one-night stands, which is a number from his own organization and still hard to hold in your head. Through the 60s he was known, respected, and commercially stuck, in a career where the ceiling was the size of the rooms that would book him. Bill Szymczyk was the producer, a man who would go on to make records with everybody: Joe Walsh, The Eagles… In June 1969 they cut a session in New York. The album was made fast, because fast was what the road allowed … time in a studio is time not earning.
… so B was back out on the road when, at 4 in the morning, the phone rang. Bill wanted to add strings. Not a small idea. Strings on a blues record, in 1969, to reach the pop audience, on top of the most identifiable guitar playing in America. Years later Riley said, more or less, that at that hour he would have agreed to anything. That was the breakthrough… a 4 a.m. call. No moment of clarity, no decision he agonized over, no strategy session. A tired man on a hotel phone saying fine, try it.
It reached number 15 on the Hot 100 and number 3 R&B, and it became his first million seller. At the 13th Grammy ceremony, held on 16 March 1971, it won Best R&B Vocal Performance, Male. After that, the rooms got bigger and stayed bigger for 45 years.
Overnight success is executing the last 4 hours…
Overnight success is a real phenomenon. It is just that the overnight part is the last 4 hours of it.
Most of the leaders I work with are somewhere in the 20 years and cannot see it, because the 20 years does not feel like anything. It feels like Monday… The Seeds are in the ground, you’re executing, and nothing is visible above the soil, and the temptation is to dig them up to check
The 4 a.m. call did not work because it was a good idea. Good ideas turn up at 4 in the morning constantly and almost none of them survive to Tuesday. It worked because there were 20 years of playing underneath it. Bill could add strings to that record and have it come out extraordinary because the thing he was adding strings to was already the finished work of a man who had played 342 nights in a single year.
He took responsibility, and then he drove to the store
Back to my new boss. What he said next changed my life a second time.
“And I take full responsibility for that. I have made the necessary changes to set you up for success, if you are willing to use my support.”
I had heard sentences shaped like that before. What was different was that he then laid out a plan with enough depth and specificity in it that I could tell he had actually done the work before I walked in. So I took the shot. His belief let me execute the plan I built with the team, and sure enough, I lasted the year… and beyond…
execution was his sweet spot, and the Seeds he planted deepest with me. We were talking about referral incentives for hiring. Cash was the incentive and cash was not working. Somebody floated a big screen television, back when those were still a thing people wanted badly. No discussion, the meeting ended. None of thought about it until…
… that afternoon, 2 of them were sitting in the lobby. He had driven to the store and bought them. It turned around our hiring. But that is not why I still tell it 25 years later. I tell it because everyone in that building learned, in about 4 hours, that when he said a thing would happen, the thing happened. You cannot buy that with a memo. He bought it with an afternoon and 2 televisions.
execute the commitment when you make it…
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: pick the smallest thing you promised somebody this week and finish it today, in front of them.
Not the big one. The small one. The introduction you promised, the answer you owe somebody, the tool you said you would get approved. Pick the smallest commitment you made this week and close it before you go home, and let people watch you do it. Speed on small promises is how an organization learns whether the big ones are real.
I spent a long time being the leader whose plan was excellent and whose follow-through was a queue, and closing that gap for other people is most of what I do now. Schedule time with me here.
Twenty years of nights, and then a phone rang at 4 in the morning, and after that The Thrill Is Gone.
