Last week I got the tremendous privilege to interview the founder and CEO of Stoke Space, Andy Lambert, for the VHTB podcast and I learned a great lesson.
Before I tell you the lesson, let me back up a little bit before I tell you exactly what this moment was so you can appreciate why it was so impactful to me.
The book tackles a problem that I have seen at every company I have worked at.
The creation of a “shared consciousness.”
When General McChrystal took over as the head of special operations forces in Iraq, they were at the height of the Iraqi insurgency. As he took command, the first thing he noticed was that there were all of these great individual teams working for him, Army Rangers, Navy SEALS, etc, but they were not able to work together. He tells several stories about dumb mistakes like using different radio frequencies that would cause at worst casualties or at best mission failure.
Shared consciousness was his answer.
He needed to find a way to make it so that all of these individual teams could work together, always knowing what the priority was, how they could support one another, where each team would be operating, etc.
The book outlines several actions that he took but the one that stood out to me was the creation of a daily, 90-minute All Hands meeting for his entire 4000-member command.
If you have spent any time in the corporate world, that probably sounds crazy to you. All Hands are often the least productive meetings a company has. Big picture ideas. Fancy words, mission statements, and values. I once worked with an engineer who had an app on his phone that calculated the cost of an All Hands by factoring in how many people worked at the company and the average second-by-second compensation of each person.
In my experience, the problem isn’t All Hands per say, it is how All Hands are typically used.
If you have a meeting on an annual or quarterly basis, it is impossible for it to deliver any useful information. When things are happening weekly or even daily, the best you can use a quarterly meeting for is to simply highlight what happened last quarter. You can’t put any actionable information in that meeting. The reason why General McChrystal’s All Hands was effective was because it was daily. The situation was changing so fast that the only way to disseminate all the information to all the people who needed it was through this daily cadence.
Fast forward to the present and my meeting with Andy.
If you have never heard of Stoke Space. Let me tell you a bit about them. The company is seeking to create the world’s first fully reusable orbital rocket, just like SpaceX is trying to do with Starship. They are pursing this goal using a wild second stage concept that incorporates the second stage’s engine into the heat shield itself. As the engine is firing, the cold fuel for the engine actually flows through the heat shield that both improves the efficiency of the engine and pulls heat out of the heat shield. It is really amazing.
Since their founding in 2020, they have built and flown their second stage in a small hop test. They have built a completely different engine that will power the first stage of their rocket. The have begun building and testing of the structure and avionics of the rocket itself, which will be called Nova BTW. And they have built out and activated not only test facilities in Washington State but also their launch facilities at Cape Canaveral.
Here is the kicker. They have done all of this with less than 350 employees!!!!
Of course, the first question on my mind was, how are you doing this? How are you able to coordinate so well and make sure everyone is always away of the company priority. In order to do what they have done, they must be all rowing in the same direction.
And this is where Andy blew my mind.
“Every Monday we have a company All Hands where we cover the status of all our projects, priorities and blockers.”
This is the first time I have heard a CEO confirm what I have always suspected. If we want to move faster, it makes sense to “waste time” and bring everyone together on a HIGHLY regular basis to make sure everyone knows what is going on. To make sure everyone has a “shared consciousness.”
This is the hill I am willing to die on.
Most organizations would benefit from having more, larger meetings. Done correctly they can not only eliminate confusion, but they can take the place of countless smaller meetings.
If you want to listen to the conversation with Andy, make sure to subscribe to the VHTB podcast. We are having a lot of great conversations about the “soft” side of the hard-tech industry. If you are subscribed to this email, I think you will enjoy it.
- YouTube: https://bit.ly/4sooBQo
- Spotify: https://bit.ly/3YRPxue
- Apple: https://apple.co/4q3Zn8k
Matt