The mysterious CSO of Isagenix has been a sort of mentor to me through his lifespan at Isagenix (a little less than 2 years). Through that time, I proved time and time and again to earn his trust. I had weekly 1 hour office hours where he’d pretty much teach me 1% of what he knows.
Here, I’ll share 10 of my favorite lessons learned.
Some of these are tactical, some are technical, but all of them are necessary.
Trust is Earned and Transparent
Most people won’t trust you upon first impressions, especially when you somehow take on a more ambitious task
Transparency pairs well with trust because it shows you have nothing to hide. This is super hard to achieve in a corporate setting as we all know.
The issue with transparency is that you can lie about being transparent. This is probably where “too nice” people come in. That’s why I’m always a fan of people who are a little mean. They speak the truth.
Trust takes time, but Transparency is something you can start at any time.
Forward, not BCC
Never BCC a higher up or anything like that. It’s much safer, and professional to Forward emails to people who need to be kept in the loop.
The connotation of a BCC email
The biggest “whoops” is if the intended email that the BCC receiver reply all’s to the whole email accidentally. The key word is here is accidentally. Usually, accidental emails get you in trouble.
By forwarding an email, you’re putting a mental barrier for the people you want to secretly hear your conversation, to not respond so hastily.
You should only BCC if you are sending annoying podcast updates or you’re trying to hide all of your suppliers in one big email.
Corporate Judo
MY CSO used this term to redirect terrible information back at the sender. Judo is the sport where you use one’s energy against them instead of being kicked in the face and taking it.
Corporate Judo requires a very open mind and the ability to counter information. It’s to use one’s words or actions against them.
This is like being a detective where you have all of the pieces and then you need to form an arrow straight through the heart.
Though this type of skill, takes a lot of experience and emotional intelligence, the best advice I can give is when you get incoherent rage filled blabber, you cannot impulsively reply no matter what. Take a deep breath, close your computer, and make a bench sample, or eat that emergency ice cream and come back later.
Start sending updates
A clever trick my CSO did was to develop something called a “Top 5”. This is where he would ask the top R+D brass and me to send him the top 5 things that were accomplished this week. There were about 8 people in the R+D Brass so that was 40 email updates per week to the CEO.
Every member was grilled on format. It had to look like this:
Peanut Butter Bar Pilot – Scheduled a pilot at the copacker to make peanut butter bar. 1000 bars will be produced and used to validate processing and will be used for shelf-stability and consumer validation.
Or something like that.
It’s important to keep it simple, don’t use any acronyms, and write in complete sentences.
Doing this and sending it weekly every week caused a lot of cool things to happen. Not only did the CEO love it, but the email list on who got these updates grew very fast. Not only that, but other people in the departments sent their updates as well, causing a viral effect of efficiency.
Customer Focus your emails
Whenever you tailor an email, think of your audience. Though we usually write differently depending if you’re sending to the boss, a friend, or a CEO, this is a no brainer.
Yet when I say to customer focus on your emails, it’s not content that makes the difference, rather, it’s format.
For format, think of this: How quickly will a top level exec read you email? Most likely, 2 seconds if not, less.
Therefore, it’s very important to structure your emails as simply but efficiently.
Here’s some tips:
- Mobile friendly – We now can check our emails by our phone, and we do so quite often. Don’t make huge paragraphs, rather, digestible chunks
- Bold or Italicize the main points – If your emails are lengthy, use bold and italicize to focus on key concepts.
- White Space – space out every 2 to 3 sentences if needed
- Bullet points – Depending on the situation, list advantages and disadvantages of your idea using bullet points
- Embedded and attached – The most important skill is to learn to embed images or pdfs, or graphs into your email. The amount of effort it takes for someone to open an important attachment actually takes a lot of effort. By embedding a specific image to your emails, you have a much higher chance of someone reading it. When you post an image on an email, you have to cite (embedded and attached)
Move forward, without permission
I had a bar that was under wraps and I wasn’t confident in launching it. We were planning to do taste tests in our January event but that didn’t pan out. We were supposed to run a pilot then, but the timelines didn’t work out.
My CSO said to run the pilot anyways.
But what are we going to do with 1000 bars?
Well, give them out to people.
It turned out people absolutely loved the bar. Every week, people asked for more of them and I had to keep on getting them from the warehouse.
There will always be roadblocks from doing this. Because it wasn’t marketing’s idea, they didn’t even consider it. It took the power of a lot of fans to squeak it through commercialization.
Smother with speed
The faster you go, the more people will complain. If you don’t listen to the complainers, go fast, and get things done, they will eventually pick up the pace as well.
One of my CSO’s initiatives was to go faster. This pumped me up and allowed me to unleash my creative freedom. During our latest big event, we sampled 20 new line extensions of bars and chips. Not only that, but we stockpiled 15 flavors of shakes. We had so many validated product ideas that marketing was good to make products for the next 5 years.
People complained about it a lot. We had too many products just flooding the pipeline and people thought we were nuts but as we kept on launching products, people started to get it. Those who didn’t get it, left.
Showcase other people’s works
People with big egos with something to prove have an issue taking credit for the people below them.
One example of this was when the CSO invited me and a couple of other top brass to do a quick 5 minute presentation of the accomplishments in R+D. I thought every department did this.
But that wasn’t the case.
Other board executives did the presentation themselves. When it was the CSO’s turn, he aligned us all out and we did a huge presentation about the myriad things we accomplished.
Because I’m a funny guy, I went first and people were laughing. After 3 hours of boring exec monologues, it was refreshing to hear a team of people speak.
In all cases, my CSO and now my friend David Despain will always showcase other people’s work when something is done. It’s very important that leaders do this as it not only empowers your teammates to work more efficiently, but it will also actually make your job so much more easier. It’s because you’re investing your time building a machine (teammate) that can make decisions so you don’t have to.
Be there
I was very surprised at how many meetings my CSO went to that were considered not super important in a corporate sense but very important in an R+D sense. Though hard to explain, I think many know what I mean.
It’s valuable for the CSO to be in a meeting because it pushes things forward whether you like it or not.
Because the CSO can’t be everywhere, it’s extremely valuable to have his presence at meetings, even for a little bit.
Yet I do think it’s important that it’s not just the CSO who has to be there, there has to be a small band of innovators who aren’t afraid to say anything and work well with each other to amplify their presence. Having the CSO there, or perhaps any C-suite powerhouse at a meeting will amplify a team of doer’s to get stuff done faster. For a company, that is much more valuable that a strategic session that takes 5 hours to sleep through.
“What’s the best that could happen?”
One of my favorite phrases I use now is “what’s the best that could happen!”
That’s what caused me to push forward.
That’s how I’ve ended up where I am today, and those are the words I’ll always say when a decision is placed in front of me.
