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160 6 SECRETS TO STARTUP SUCCESS

mation about a situation or an issue. Invariably, business dis-
cussions are heavy with advocacy, where 80 to 90 percent of
the air time is devoted to staking out positions and pushing
points of view. This leaves very little room for inquiry, aimed
at surfacing and evaluating new data and testing assumptions.
And it points to a tremendous learning opportunity for most
new venture teams: to promote more frequent inquiry into
the thinking of others and to cultivate more skillful methods
of advocacy, such as revealing the logic underlying an asser-
tion or inviting others to scrutinize one’s logic and add new
perspectives to it.8

OVERCOMMUNICATE

In a fast-paced startup environment, it’s easy for founders to develop
lazy or sloppy communication habits and to think team members are
up-to-date on emerging issues when they are not. Integrity of com-
munication means ensuring that all relevant people are kept in the
loop, and that you, as a founder, are aware of the ideas, concerns, and
opportunities in orbit around you. Healthy communication is a mul-
tidirectional process, an infinite loop of outgoing and incoming data
and meaning. Although each conversation is a building block, it pays
to put broader practices and mechanisms in place early in your
startup process to knit together information and thinking across the
venture. These can include daily or weekly huddles, email updates,
regular phone calls, lunches or happy hours, and, of course, meetings
of all varieties. It’s popular in today’s leadership literature to slam
meetings as a perversion of human nature, to be avoided at all costs.
But problems with meetings always stem from controllable factors,
and anyone who says they hate meetings can also recall a few that
they enjoyed and benefited from. The solution is not to eliminate
meetings, but to ensure that they are judiciously scheduled, well
planned, and efficiently led.

Overcommunicating does not mean communicating everything
that comes to mind, but rather clarifying what core messages need to
be shared, then repeating these with numbing regularity. J.C. Faulkner

American Management Association • www.amanet.org