The Daily Dose

Jason Freedman is the co-founder of 42Floors, making it easy for everyone to rent office space. He’s a two-time Y Combinator alum and blogs regularly on humbledMBA. This post was originally published on the 42floors blog.

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I want to share an interesting conversation I had with Kiran Divvela back when he was still interviewing for our company.

Kiran runs all of our data supply chain activities. He’s one of those rare types that communicates well, has solid management skills, is fluent technically, and was a perfect startup culture fit.

Kiran was one of our toughest hires. We knew he had options. We thought that we were in the lead for him culture-fit wise. The big question left for Kiran was learning enough about our industry since commercial real estate was new to him. He needed to truly believe he was going to be part of building a big company.

After we made him the offer, I made myself available to talk through any questions he had. It was like fundraising due diligence all over again. We went through the deck, and I showed him our short, medium and long terms plans. We went on long walks where we talked about each piece of our strategic plan.

One moment has stuck in my mind. He was asking me how we were going to keep our data updated once we were at scale. It was an important question. If you fail at it, users have the worst experience possible, calling on listings that actually aren’t available. If you’re great at it, you become known as the best source of information anywhere and everyone flocks to you.

Kiran would be leading our data efforts and that would include not only acquiring the data but keeping it updated.  At this point, in the young life of our startup, simply getting commercial real estate listings was the most important activity.  Keeping them updated was a challenge I knew was on the horizon but we hadn’t had to deal with it too much yet.

With our small scale at the time, we had been able to solve this problem manually. That wouldn’t really work at scale. As we walked down the street, doing yet another lap around South Park, I shared a few of my ideas with him.

But they weren’t great ideas. More like trying to write with a crayon when the rest of our conversation had been written in pen.

Finally I cut myself off and told him flatly, “Look, I don’t really know.”

It was the truth.

“I don’t know”

Every commercial real estate listings company – actually every real estate tech company, commercial or residential – has struggled to figure out how to keep listings updated. While there are lots of tactics, there is no one true silver bullet.

I had lots of ideas I wanted to try. One of the reasons I was so excited to have Kiran on board was that he would be the one who would actually get to try them, as well as come up with tons of new ideas.  But at this moment, the most truthful answer I could give him was, I don’t know.

And he smiled and responded back, “I was waiting for that. I like it when people say I don’t know.”

I burst out laughing.

Kiran explained that he likes it when people say I don’t know because it lends credibility to everything else that they’ve said.  He was already pretty close to making up his mind that he was coming to 42Floors, he just wanted an honest accounting of what we had answers to and what remained as questions.

Why don’t people ever admit it?

Ever since that encounter, I’ve tried to pay attention a lot more when people say I don’t know. We did a whole bunch of Y Combinator mock interviews during the last session. The YC alumni in our company try to offer some time before each batch to work with the people that are preparing.

I found that very few of the startups were willing to use the words I don’t know. A couple of times a founder was in such a salesy mode that we both knew he was bullshitting his answers, but he refused to show anything other than total confidence. I just saw it as foolishly naïve.

One startup that got in actually used the words ‘I don’t know’ several times. The founder was super confident in her product, super confident in her team but had some uncertainties about how she was going to acquire users and didn’t really know how big her market was, both of which were problems she said she would address. But it was so refreshing to hear her honesty.

I don’t have enough data points to generalize yet, but it seems promising. If you have the confidence and honesty to say I don’t know, you’re probably going to win over a lot of people.

You don’t need to know all the answers

One place I’ve always struggled to say I don’t know is when talking with engineers about technical stuff beyond my knowledge. No one wants to look stupid so it’s easier to nod your head when you don’t know what someone is talking about. I realize now it creates the opposite effect.

Every time I appear to understand something I don’t, it just makes me look foolish.

I try now to just simply say that I don’t know and ask people to explain things to me. Fairly regularly, one of our engineers, Aaron O’Connell, will take time to explain what it is he’s working on. He’s got a Ph.D. in physics and he’s a gifted coder, but he never seems to mind taking the time to explain it to me in a way that I can understand.

See, no big deal.

I also say I don’t know a ton to my board. We have super smart guys on our board and nothing gets past them. Saying I don’t know with them turns a question into a homework assignment.

As long as I follow up with the answer later, they never mind. And it’s 1000x better than bullshitting a half answer.

Thank you Kiran for inspiring this post.

Andrea Ayres-Deets is the Lead Writer at ooomf, an invite-only network connecting short-term software projects with handpicked developers and designers. Andrea writes about psychology, creativity, and business over on the ooomf blog.

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I once worked for a company who was really proud of their mission statement. They had it printed on everything and talked about it often.

For all that talk, there was very little action. Somewhere along the way I realized that we were deluding ourselves. We weren’t changing the system, we were working directly in the confines of it.

We weren’t only lying to ourselves, but we were being disingenuous to the consumer about what the main intention of the company was. You could turn on your television and see the management reciting the mission statement with an impassioned plea to viewers, but no one in the company was living it.

This is not an isolated problem. It’s one so many companies, especially startups, must confront. How do you live your mission statement, honestly, thoughtfully, and with purpose?

If there was any doubt in your mind about the precarious position of mission statements, look no further than the mission statement generator:

The mission statement has become the cornerstone of corporations, higher education, CEO’s, and even families. Beginning in the 1970s the mission statement began its surge in popularity—dominating the corporate world for the next thirty-odd years. You couldn’t turn around without being assailed by books touting the benefits of mission statements.

But do they work?

Research on the effectiveness of mission statements is shaky at best. At worst it relies on anecdotal evidence and presumptions as proof of their usefulness.

“The fact that there is no reliable and recognized base of research on mission statements is somewhat amazing because the virtues of having a well-articulated mission statement are extolled in almost every current management textbook.”

Perhaps the best explanation for why we continue to use mission statements comes from Christopher C. Morphew:

“Mission statements are normative—they exist because they are expected to exist.”

We’ve become so accustomed to seeing mission statements that the absence of one would cause us to question the company or organizations legitimacy.

Where do mission statements go wrong?

They are either too boring or too presumptuous to make any impact. The worst mission statements over exaggerate and rely on flowery language to give the impression that they are a company of action—even if the reality is much different.

Let’s take a look at this mission statement as an example:

“Serving corporations, institutions, entrepreneurs, and individuals, our attorneys build enduring relationships by providing legal counsel informed by business insight to help clients achieve their objectives.”

Ah, yes the age old tradition of achieving objectives. It’s certainly vague enough to give you the impression that the company acts with the best interests of all people. Unless I told you this is from a corporate law firm composed of a few hundred attorneys who mostly help Fortune 500 companies obtain their objective of absolving themselves of expensive asbestos litigation.

Does saying you are committed to serving stakeholders really put you in a better position to actually serve these stakeholders? Isn’t there a better way to get employees to buy into your company without offering them a slice of bullshit pie?

Why yes, yes there is.

Mission statements can provide a sense of purpose and clarity, but they mean nothing if you can’t fulfill the objectives of your mission statement. Here are five tips to help you live your companies mission statement:

1. Lose the hubris

Success doesn’t come because someone chose the right buzzword. If your mission is to provide a free app for people as a utility to improve their lives, than let this guide your mission statement.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t be optimistic, but a healthy dose of realism is needed. Overreaching only undermines your company instead of helping it.

2. Do be concise

If your mission statement is longer than eight words, you may want to reconsider it. Employees and customers won’t remember what your company is about if they have to consult a jargon filled paragraph.

Your mission statement should be something no one easily forgets.

3. Be inclusive and ask questions

You should not write your mission statement in a vacuum, devoid of any outside help. It’s important to have as much input as possible about the purpose of the company.

Ask employees why they believe the product or service is needed? What values are important to them? What’s more important than money?

These are just some of the questions Warren Berger of FastCo believes companies should answer in the quest to define your mission. Questions before content; make sure you’ve thought it all through.

4. Don’t hire someone to write your mission statement

Hiring someone to write a mission statement gives the impression that there is more concern about outward appearances than the real purpose of the company.

The act of writing a mission statement is about learning what matters the most. The exercise of writing the statement is almost as important as what you finally end up with.

5. Enough talk, do it

The mission statement means nothing if you aren’t living it. Your mission statement has to be clear, it has to quantify what you want to accomplish. If it does that, it will help crystalize what policies and decisions you need to achieve your goal.

Mission statements should evolve as your company evolves. Always search for how to improve, for ways to better live your mission statement. This means constantly asking questions and searching outside for inspiration.

Writing a mission statement should help you focus on what matters most in language that is clear and accessible to everyone. Do that, and living your mission statement should come effortlessly.

Top image credit: Shutterstock/ollyy