Tony Perez On Security, Business, And Life
At the end of one of my keynotes last year I was asked:
Tony, how did you know what decision to make?
In war, there is nothing worse than a leader that can’t make a decision. People die. While not as dire in business, your indecisiveness will slowly kill your product, your team, your moment, and eventually your company.
The idea of implementing a process is one that should provide insight and guidance. Yet, I find myself conflicted when I think about the idea of putting them together. Not because they lack value, but because I know that their intentions will be lost over time, and they’ll inevitably be leveraged as a crutch and seen as an absolute.
This bring about a fear within me around the idea of processes. There is no denying their effectiveness, but you also can’t deny their ineffective attributes; like their affects on the innovative qualities your team sometimes requires. Granted, there are obvious situations in which you require them.
Recently I spoke at WordCamp Minneapolis 2015 on Building and Running a Global Workforce: The People Aspect of a Remote Company. While I usually speak about security, in this talk I share the challenges of a remote work force and speak about people issues, culture, growth challenges, scaling, and everything in between.
In June of 2014, I stepped into the role of CEO of Sucuri. In the presentation, I also share some of the lessons we have learned at Sucuri throughout the past five years of doing business at a global scale.
Check out the video of my presentation:
For the better part of the past 7 months, my business partner, Daniel, and I have been infatuated with our culture. All aspects of it, what it really means, what it means to us, and more importantly, how is it defined.
I think the basis of the question has really been, who and what are we about?
I think we have always known, but we never really took the time to sit back and really capture it in a way that made sense to us, and even our own team.
Interestingly enough, what we’ve come to realize is that your culture is not really something you define, it’s something you are. I know, that’s deep!
I think it was at our Quarter 3 board meeting in 2014 that we really started to capture, appreciate and recognize the culture that we had set in our business. Mind you, our business first opened it’s doors January 2010.
Like most first-time entrepreneurs though, our thoughts were nowhere around the idea of a culture as much as it was, figuring out if we really had a business.
I’ve been watching the Sony Hack with a lot of interest, for a variety of reasons. Mostly because of my interest in the security and enterprises environments.
Yesterday however, we all witnessed perhaps one of the biggest disruptions to an industry that has gone largely undisrupted for many years.
For the first time, I think, we saw the release of a new movie release, by a prominent movie producer – Sony – take their work and forgo the release in traditional movie theaters, instead opting for an online release. In my eyes, this has the potential to be the most accidental disruptive action to what I consider to be an old past-time for many people.
Running a business you will be faced with more decisions than you count or track, what will set you apart is your ability to make a decision.
Indecisiveness is the one trait you cannot afford when tasked to be a good leader.
The risk of indecision is preferable to the terror of indecision.
Mainmonides
To date, I have made more bad decisions than I care to admit, but have yet to come to a point where indecisiveness paralyzed me. I may get weighed by my own analysis or thought process, but I attribute that mostly to the process of trying to make the best decision possible. Note that I don’t emphasize on making a good decision.
In hindsight everything will always be clear, a success will be attributed to a good decision and a failure will be attributed to a bad one. The reality is though, that a success might be reached via a bad decision as much as a failure can be attributed to a good decision. Such is the conundrum we must bare with every decision we make.
What I am coming to terms with is that there really is no good or bad decision when you’re in the process of making it, just what is and isn’t and what will and won’t happen.
Yesterday a very well respected entrepreneur, Rand Fishkin, put out a very personal post on his struggle with depression over the past 12 months and it’s affects on his ability to run his business, although deeply personal and very open, it resonated with me for a variety of reasons. In fact, it something that resonates with me because of how close to home it hits.
Perhaps the hardest and loneliest job you’ll have, yet the most exciting and rewarding as well. It’s frankly the craziest experience that words can hardly adequately describe in a way that many will understand or appreciate. I think what was special about his post was the honesty, his revelation of all that is good and bad with being at the top of your business.
Found this very good TED talk on communication and leadership by Simon Sinek…
It always amazes me how simple and yet complex a concept this is. I am not talking about software roles and responsibilities, I am talking about the people aspect of projects and businesses.
Everyone has an idea, everyone has an approach, and it feels as if the fields are always greener on the other side of the fence. Why is that? Why do we as humans have this urge? This need to interject and fiddle with theories and proposals. It is not just the person outside looking in, but the one inside looking out.
Why do you feel the need to get validation? This need to confirm that an idea may or may not work? These are the questions I find myself wondering these days.
This is funny that I’m writing about this because some might say that I fall into this category, but I can’t help but think there are worst people than myself out there…:D
Granted, everyone has a topic or two that they are intimately familiar with and as such are able to engage and provide good sound advice and input. Then there are those people that just don’t shut up.
Office politics, that seems to be the theme these days. Never before have I been exposed to the interoffice and intercompany politics that I have been experiencing as of late. What’s most amusing is that it’s all levels, not just senior management, but the lowest levels as well. It is grossly overwhelming.