It Takes a Tribe

by Will Dean

  As a company grows and matures it can be tempting to think that your creative, learning years are behind you. Tempting, but also fatal. I was struck by the recent research that said the most reliable way to enjoy a long retirement is in fact to never retire, but to keep mastering new skills and engaging in new pursuits. (Our question to Tough Mudders at the start line, “When did you last do something for the first time?” should never go away.) There is a psychological condition we all succumb to called “The End of History Fallacy.” When asked two questions, “How much have you changed in the last decade?” and “How much will you change in the next decade?” the answers are extraordinarily consistent across all ages and groups. People believe that in the recent past they have gone through a great deal of change, but when they look to the future they believe there will be a lot less. At whatever point we are in our lives we tend to regard the present as a watershed moment at which we have finally become the person we will always be.

  This is a fundamental mistake. We should never simply content ourselves with the familiar. As any Tough Mudder will tell you, completing the challenge ahead depends above all on determined forward motion, and an ability to keep adapting and trying new approaches. Likewise in the business, in any business, standing still and admiring achievements is never an option. If you are not growing, chances are you are dying.

  MUDDER INNOVATOR: Rob Camm

  Given my skepticism about how much value my academic study had for my business, I’m enjoying the irony that last year I was invited to help establish and chair the new Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Bristol University, where I earned my undergraduate degree. I’ve relished the opportunity to put what I have learned at Tough Mudder, and some of the best lessons of my time at Harvard, into practice, to put my money where my mouth is. The Bristol initiative is, I think, unique in the academic world. Ours is the first department to offer a syllabus that does not aim to provide a standalone business qualification but that instead integrates insights into innovation and entrepreneurship into the university’s other majors. Students can take four-year courses in Music with Innovation or Computer Science with Innovation, and so on.

  The approach Bristol has taken has allowed us to experiment at the center in creating a framework of innovation that initiates students in the virtues of the quick and cheap build-measure-learn loop, in terms of their own specializations. It does not aim to teach leadership as a pseudoscience but instead focuses on providing anecdotal insights from people who have established businesses and lived to tell the tale.

  As part of my own teaching involvement I launched a competition last year for our undergraduates to design and create a new Tough Mudder obstacle using our innovation principles. I was privileged to be able to launch this venture on stage alongside Rob Camm, a veteran of two Tough Mudders, who in recent years has learned far more about obstacles and how to innovate to overcome them than anyone in the room. As ever when any two Tough Mudders are gathered together, the thing Rob and I wanted to do most was swap stories. He talked the audience and me through his own history with the event, as a way of introducing the challenge of obstacle creation.

  Rob has a special place in Mudder history. In 2015, he became the world’s first tetraplegic to complete a Tough Mudder and earn an orange headband. He navigated the course with the help of friends in a pioneering wheelchair that he controls with his chin. Now twenty-two, Rob has been tetraplegic, with no movement in his body from the neck down, since he was a passenger in a car crash in 2013. The crash happened just a week before Rob was due to start as an undergraduate program at Bristol, when he was on his way to a party in a friend’s car after playing rugby. He subsequently spent ninety-six days in intensive care.

  A year later, on a permanent ventilator, and in his specially modified wheelchair, Rob took up his place at the university and is now in his final year studying politics, philosophy, and economics. Onstage, he explained how his plan was to do postgraduate work to become a lawyer. Before the accident Rob was a committed rugby player, and the thing he missed most, he suggested, was that sense of being part of a team. One of his reasons for doing Tough Mudder was to experience that feeling again. His team included his dad and his sister. “I was pretty impressed, to be honest, that they both got round, not to mention me,” he says with a smile.

  Innovations of all kinds have become a necessity in Rob’s everyday life. He collaborated with physicists and engineers to develop an all-terrain wheelchair like a mini quad bike. The Tough Mudder course was a big test of the vehicle—and also of Rob’s stamina. “It takes quite a lot of endurance,” he suggested, with classic understatement. “I need so much strength in my neck because I control the chair with my chin, and I have to push that forward all the time. I train by trying to build the strength in my neck by going out in the chair on different paths as much as I can. Just like you would go out for a run to build strength in your legs.”

  Mud itself isn’t always Rob’s enemy. In some ways, a bit of it is good. Hard bumpy ground is tougher, he explains, “though if the mud gets sticky, then it’s a struggle.” Rob has completed two Tough Mudders, and he used the experience of the first to make modifications to his quad-bike chair the second time around. The first time there was a lot of media attention but the second one was more enjoyable, he says, because he could just relax. Obviously, some parts of the course were impossible for him, but he was determined to push himself to try to navigate as much of it as he could. “In some ways,” he says, “all my life is like a Tough Mudder. Just getting anywhere requires a lot of planning and a lot of determination. I’ve always had that determination I think,” he says, “but obviously it’s a bit more necessary now.”

  Rob looks to the future with optimism. He places his hope both in the challenges he can overcome and the ingenuity required to get him through them. He is thinking of trying to get up Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales. “People tell me it has never been done in a chair like mine, or by someone on a respirator. They just say it is not possible. Which to be honest is probably the worst thing that anyone can say to me.” And he also has faith that scientists will make advances in the treatment of spinal cord injuries. He recently became the first person in the world with his level of disability to attempt to walk using a pioneering “skeleton” that is controlled by brain impulses. Seventy electrodes were attached to his skull and he was invited to imagine the process of walking: “left leg up, left leg forward, left leg down, and so on . . .” The skeleton remains at the development stage, but Rob retains an innovator’s faith in the power of trial and error: “If this doesn’t work, perhaps the next thing will.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Founder to CEO: The Challenge of Entrepreneurial Leadership

  Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.

  —Henry Ford

  On my bathroom wall there is a framed letter, which reveals that my relationship with Bristol University was not always quite as friendly as it is now. It’s a letter I was given by my economics tutor. I say given, because he made a point of calling me out of a lecture and handing it to me in front of all the other students. He appeared to be shaking with anger. The letter reads as follows.

  Dear Will:

  I am sorry for the late return of these essays. However, my apology is qualified by the fact that your essay on the minimum wage is more than 4,000 words long and your essay on European Monetary Union is more than 3,000 words long. These essays are respectively the longest and second longest essays that I have received this year. It has taken me well over an hour to read and type up my comments on these two essays. Given the importance that I have attached to writing essays that are within the 2,000 word limit, it is totally unacceptable for a student to turn in two essays each of which is more than 1,000 words over this limit.

  There is no doubt that you are a student of very considerable ability but you are also one of the most arrogant studen
ts I have ever taught. This is reflected not only in the length of your essays but also the style and content. Both of these essays contain numerous fundamental errors and mistakes. These mistakes stem not from any lack of ability or understanding. They result from arrogance which seems, on occasion, to prevent you engaging with either the literature or your lecturer.

  In the context of the final exams I doubt this will matter. I fully expect you to graduate with a first. In the context of the labor market the outcome is likely to be very different. No private sector employer will tolerate behavior of this kind or write you a letter like this, or offer the kind of advice I am trying to give you.

  Yours sincerely,

  etc.

  I guess my tutor—whose ideas I admired and whose lectures I really enjoyed—had a point, though I’d argue with his analysis. I don’t think I was arrogant in the way I approached my studies, let alone the “literature” or the “lecturer.” It didn’t make me at all proud to think I had wasted his time or that I hadn’t followed his instruction. He was probably right in saying that future employers might have disapproved of my behavior. But the fact was I felt I had no choice but to do the essays in the most effective way I knew, otherwise I couldn’t see the point of doing the work at all. I wasn’t being deliberately rude. I was simply, unconsciously, behaving like an entrepreneur.

  I have read many books and been in many lectures where there has been an attempt to describe the qualities that create this semimythical character, a reading list that has been emphasized for me of late because I am now tasked with delivering coherent insights on the subject back at Bristol University. In all these studies it often seems to me that the crucial element of that self-selecting character that often gets overlooked is this: entrepreneurs find it almost impossible to do what they are told when the instruction seems arbitrary or perverse. They are not lovers of other people’s rules, particularly when those rules get in the way of their own goal. They have great difficulty in “going through the motions” or “playing the game.” Or if they do, they will make it abundantly clear that they think the game is a joke.

  It’s a minor example, but I tend to think of that letter on my bathroom wall when I hear what has become an almost constant demand from political leaders for more “entrepreneurial ideas.” Or when business leaders or hospital directors or educators argue that “an entrepreneurial spirit” needs to be seen in every department of their organization. The people who make those demands should probably be careful what they wish for. Entrepreneurs are rarely able to limit their belief that things can be done better. They are not going to work by their own rules in one area, and be compliant company men in another. In my experience, for better and often for worse, they are not natural employees.

  When I was working in counterterrorism, I often heard people say, “We need more entrepreneurial thinking in our approach to jihadis.” I completely agreed. As I have written, I was given a lot of responsibility in the Foreign Service at a young age to demonstrate exactly that kind of thinking. That suited me fine. I had some great managers, who were tough on me but showed me a lot of trust and respect and from whom I learned a great deal in terms of strategy and resilience and leadership. For that reason, I am reluctant to criticize the Foreign Office and I am always fiercely defensive if other people do so. But ultimately, the Foreign Office was still part of the British civil service, one of the most hierarchical and bureaucratic institutions ever created (the outlaw drama of James Bond’s life starts from that fact). And it eventually became clear I did not fit that structure.

  Despite often being singled out for the work I had done when thinking like an entrepreneur, which had produced some tangible successes in the fight against terrorism, I was also informed that the FCO were unable to promote me to a level at which I might have been more effective because I was “too young.” Ironically, because my project had proved so successful, I had not gone through the conventional career path of a lengthy foreign posting. While in my view that didn’t affect my claims, it was made clear that my peers and seniors would not approve. As a compromise the Foreign Service did what they had always done in such situations: they removed me from the role in which I had been effective and sent me to India with a house and servants for a couple of years, effectively marking time until a promotion was age-appropriate. I tried to work in India as I had always done, but my boss there was less inclined to see the value of an entrepreneurial spirit.

  When she was away I did my best to take responsibility for setting priorities in her absence. One time, a minor diplomatic crisis came up, and I threw all my efforts into dealing with it. It meant, regrettably, that I was unable to complete some of the work she had asked me to do, including a presentation I had promised to prepare for her. On her return, I explained as clearly as I could what had happened, telling her that I would now complete the work she had assigned me.

  She took me to an office and sat me down for an appraisal. She was, much like my old economics tutor, apparently shaking with rage. “You are,” she informed me, in her precise English accent, “the laziest, little c——t I have ever worked with.”

  I thought about this judgment for a moment and told her that couldn’t be right. She must be mistaken. No one had ever called me “lazy” or “little” before. Her three-word appraisal did have an effect though; it made me decide between two courses of action, which I had been weighing for a while. First, I thought I would act on an ambition to go to Harvard to learn how to run a business. And second, I decided that if I could help it, I would never work for anyone again.

  In this sense, I think entrepreneurship is often what is left when you have ruled out all other safer and often more lucrative options for yourself. Much as the culture sometimes tries to insist otherwise, it is, for this reason, not an option for everyone. It is lonely and stressful and pretty much never a shortcut to being rich. For all the abundantly “creative” possibilities you might feel you have at the outset, the execution of ideas and all the difficulty it involves is all that eventually counts. Making new ideas happen in the real world is generally hard and unglamorous. For this reason, I stress to aspiring entrepreneurs that a start-up should be not so much a choice as a psychological necessity.

  At the root of that psychology is a refusal to accept the status quo, a sense that everything—processes, products, services—could be done differently and better or with more energy and fun. Seth Godin, the self-styled marketing maven, calls entrepreneurs heretics. Heretics can’t help but see the world as it might be rather than as it is, and they are inspired by the need to persuade others to try to close that gap. I see this heretical habit of mind in many entrepreneurs whom I admire and who have become friends.

  It is fundamental, for example, to Neil Blumenthal, who with three friends from Wharton business school founded Warby Parker in 2008. Neil was struck by what you might call a classic heretical “that just can’t be right” moment. His came when he was looking at the things he carried in his pocket, and what struck him was simply this: How can my glasses possibly cost as much as my iPhone? His glasses were made of plastic, they contained no rare earth minerals, and their technology hadn’t changed much in a century. And, because they had a tiny designer logo on the side, they cost five hundred dollars. How could that be so?

  Blumenthal created a plan that, like all great business plans, became an obsession: to sell beautifully designed glasses for under a hundred dollars. Of course, like my plan for Tough Mudder, that plan did not win the Business Plan Competition at his school. His professors saw mainly problems—the price was too low, people would not buy a personal item like glasses online—but Blumenthal, and his three cofounders, were not put off. He was, he recalls, inspired by the fact that both his grandfathers had been entrepreneurs; they had made him see that “business was really just problem solving.” And there were always problems to solve (he got around the online problem by sending his customers five pairs of glasses to t
ry for five days, four of which they returned).

  Warby Parker has now sold 1.5 million pairs of glasses, and it has done so according to the other founding principles Blumenthal was passionate about: it has a zero carbon footprint and it has distributed a million pairs of glasses to those in need in the developing world through a Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program. In 2015, the company was valued at $1.2 billion. None of that would have happened had Blumenthal not looked at the objects in his pocket and had a “that just can’t be right” moment.

  James Reinhart had a similar thought when he was a student in Boston and looked in his own closet. He wondered idly, and then a bit obsessively, what percentage of his clothing he actually wore and what percentage was just taking up space in his closet. He calculated that about 70 percent of his clothes were literally a waste of space. And then he did a poll of friends and asked them to check their closets; they came up with a similar percentage. Armed with his “that just can’t be right” fact, Reinhart resolved to change the way we buy, wear, and store clothing.

  His idea for thredUP, which offered an easy way to clear out closets and to repair, sell, and distribute quality clothes, was rejected by thirty banks and venture capitalists. Reinhart wasn’t discouraged, because he was a heretic: he knew there was a problem that needed fixing in how we all lived, and he believed he had a solution to it. Eventually, he found some funding and got thredUP off the ground. In 2015, Goldman Sachs invested $81 million in his business, which now operates across the United States. Reinhart suggests that thinking like an entrepreneur is thinking about “how the world looks today, and about what can make it ten times better.”

  We didn’t hear much of those kinds of simple messages at Harvard Business School. But it was the kind of conversation that I would have after class with Jennifer Hyman, one of the only other entrepreneurs I met at Harvard. Jenn and I bonded over our shared interest in deflating the egos of some of our more entitled “master of the universe” classmates and through our obsessive enthusiasm for our heretical start-up ideas.