Earlier this year, Victoria Downing and Mark Harari interviewed me for the Remodelers Advantage’s PowerTips podcast. Though PowerTips is intended specifically for owners of remodeling businesses, Vic and Mark were gracious enough to let me spend the entirety of the interview discussing leadership philosophy (one of my favorite topics).
Tag Archives: culture
Communication is terrible
One of Bezos’s more memorable behind-the-scenes moments came during an off-site retreat, says Risher. “People were saying that groups needed to communicate more. Jeff got up and said, ‘No, communication is terrible!’ ” The pronouncement shocked his managers. But Bezos pursued his idea of a decentralized, disentangled company where small groups can innovate and test their visions independently of everyone else. He came up with the notion of the “two-pizza team”: If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large. That limits a task force to five to seven people, depending on their appetites.
Should businesses match charitable contributions?
One of our team members recently asked,
What do you think about having our company match charitable contributions?
Here is a slightly edited version of my reply:
Thanks for raising that question. Philosophically, I think the business exists to provide people (both shareholders and employees) with the freedom and means to pursue whatever path they choose for themselves, including the support of organizations they feel merit their investment. But I am uncomfortable with our business supporting non-profits directly (except in cases where there is a direct marketing benefit or business-case to be made for how that support helps further our mission). As such, I would rather our shareholders and employees make donations individually, using the profits they’ve earned from their investments or the money they’ve earned from working here.
Having lent board-level leadership support to non-profits in the past, I have learned more than I wanted to know about how many of them operate. As a result, I’ve become extremely selective about the organizations to which I lend my family’s support. Peter Buffett correctly described the rise of what he called the Charitable Industrial Complex, and his arguments for scrutinizing the results of personal charitable investments resonate with me.
My opinion is, of course, imperfect and likely wrong. For that reason especially, I think it more appropriate that people make their own decisions about how to support their favored charities. My gut tells me that by amplifying an individual’s charitable donation preferences with other peoples’ money that we 1) inevitably use their money to support organizations that owners wouldn’t otherwise choose to support, and 2) dampen the supporters’ scrutiny of the non-profit’s actions and results.
Milton Friedman said there are four ways to spend money, and my sense is that matching contributions would fall into his fourth (and least efficient) way.
Geoffrey Graham 