I recently watched Cory Johnson interview Jeff Weiner on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg West” and it was mind-blowing for me as an entrepreneur and that’s why I’ve decided to share. You also might learn a thing or two.
ON THE MAJOR CHALLENGES FACED BY HYPER-GROWTH COMPANIES
The challenge we had before are similar to the ones we have now; remaining focus clearly defining the core of the and staying true. (With) Hyper-growth companies it’s easy to get distracted by the numerous opportunities ahead of you.
One of my favourite lines in business is managing hyper-growth is like putting a rocket out in the space; if you’re off by inches at launch you can be off by miles in orbit.
ON SCALABILITY
Making sure you have the right foundation so you can scale. Not only having the right team, which is paramount, but also the right infrastructure, the right processes and I think that has made a huge different for us.
ON THE SPEED OF GROWTH
…Making sure you’re prepared for the variability. It’s a very dynamic environment so you have to be comfortable with change. I think you have to be really focusedWe talk about focus so often, we actually created an acronym:
F- Fewer things done better
C- Communicating the right information, to the right people at the right time.
S- Speed and quality of our decision makingON OPEN COMMUNICATION
I hold town meetings every other week. I think open communication is so important and again it comes to the notion of managing speed. The more optics we can provide to our employees, not only of what’s working but also of what’s not working, the better we can all come together to improve what needs to be improved upon or to learn from the things that are working and to continue to invest and share that across all 26 cities that we operate around the world.
ON CULTURE AND VALUES
…For us is taking the time and investing in our culture and values, defining what those mean. For us culture is the collective personality of our organisation and it’s not only who we are, it’s who we aspire to be.And I think that adding that element of aspiration gives you the permission to dream a bit about the kind of organisation you wanna build
Values are the operating principle we use to make day to day decisions which is a subset of that culture. And once you understand those elements of your organisation you’ve gotta hire against it, you’ve gotta ‘unboard’ against it, you gotta do learning development against it, you gotta evaluate performance against it and it’s all about leadership manifesting it day-in day-out. It’s not enough to put it on the wall, you’ve gotta leave by it.
ON TRANSFORMATION
They key word about this company is transformation; cultural transformation and We think about that in 3 ways:
– We think about transforming the trajectory of our employees’ careers
– We think about transforming our company and realising the full potentials of our platform
– And we think about transforming the world and realising our vision to create economic opportunity for every professional in the world. Where we’re defining professional as the 3.3billion people in the world of course
Jeff Weiner is the current CEO of LinkedIn and former Vice President of Yahoo’s network division. LinkedIn is a a business-related social networking website with over 25 million users around the world.
By Adejuwon Isola-Osobu, CEO 1500naira.com
Technopreneur: Adejuwon Isola-Osobu
Town Crier Naija 