Interlude - Index of

52 | Beginnings
points of view is critical for good decision making, but if you
want people to speak their minds, you must consider their
advice seriously even when you don’t follow it.
Suppose some explorers reach a large mountain and want
to get to the other side. It’s too steep to go over the top, so the
only choices are go around to the left or go around to the right.
Once the leader chooses a path, there’s a great incentive to keep
going. The alternative is to backtrack and go around the mountain
the other way, but that may be equally hard. Sometimes you
should reconsider a decision—if you hit a dead end or if you get
new information—but you can’t afford to do it every time you
encounter a small problem. I felt like Mike sometimes ran his
explorers back and forth so much that we couldn’t make any
forward progress. The plan of record was Dan’s way of saying
that we were going to stick to the same path for a while. It had
a calming and stabilizing effect on us all.
I learned that Dan focused on the way decisions were
made as much as he focused on the decisions themselves. Dan
held an all-day staff meeting shortly after he arrived, and at the
end he said, “I want everyone to rank our candor. You know
each other better than I do. Did people say what they really
believe? Did you? I won’t ask you to explain your score, but
I’m going to go around the room, and I want everyone to give
a grade from one to five—five is good—on how candid you
think we were with each other during this meeting.” Dan felt
that there was lots of bad politics at NetApp, and he wanted to
quash it. He didn’t mind if people disagreed with each other—
that is a healthy part of finding the best path forward—but he
wanted us to do it in the open, to each other’s faces. We went
around the room, and the average score was two, maybe two-