Equality, Trust & Authenticity with Barak Berkowitz

+ Notes

Barak has played a formative part in the evolution of Silicon Valley’s technology ecosystem ; 9 years at Apple, through Logitech, as CEO of Six Apart and heading up Operations and Strategy at MIT Media Lab. He’s been CEO to multiple startups and advises CEOs across the world. In his illustrious career, he has proved repeatedly that if you create an environment in which people thrive, you get better results. His stories, of how he has driven success and growth, offer pragmatic, actionable tools and knowhow to help us be more successful leaders. Find out why he was delighted when a new recruit mistook him for the janitor, why trusting people to do the right thing is the right thing to do, and how listening to employees at all levels is common sense.

+ Transcript

KATZ: Welcome to humans, leading humans towards a future of work that works for people. Good morning to you, good afternoon to you good evening to you wherever you are listening to this from, I hope you're thriving. I wanted to start today's podcast by just saying that one of the things I really really love about doing this is that it gives me 20 minutes to really listen to the stories of my guests, and I mean really listen and it's wonderful because I find out things about people that, even though I've known some for years. I've never known before. Just before I started recording this, I realised that I'm really touched these incredibly successful and time poor senior leaders, these extraordinary people, feel safe to share their real, authentic stories with me and with you, lovely listener, of course, and to volunteer their vulnerability. So I just wanted to say really massive thanks to my guests so far for being so authentic I am learning so much from your stories, I can't thank you enough. And I've got to say a massive thanks to you to for joining me on this learning journey. My guest today is Barack Berkovitz who has been through a hell of a journey over the last four decades. He's been part of all sorts of the parts of the evolving technology ecosystem that has totally changed our world. He's seen a lot of change, and a lot of consistency. So that's taken us from nine years, Apple In the early days, where he grew Japan from 200 million to 2 billion in revenue through Logitech through CEO at social media companies including Six Apart, and as advisor to CEOs, and then led operations and strategy at MIT Media Lab. This man really is the real deal. He has proved time and again that if you create an environment in which people thrive. You get better results. It's common sense. But common sense. as you may have heard me say before, is not so common in big companies. In big, complex organisations. He's a bit of a rock star. But I also know that it will make him absolutely cringe to hear me say that, because for all of his success, he is a wonderfully warm and modest man. I'm very excited. But in time honoured tradition, before I introduce Barak let me explain why I am dedicating time to make this podcast for you.

If you work inside an organisation, whether it be private or public, big or small. If you work with humans. (Actually if you don't work with humans, there's nothing to see here look away) But if you do, and you're finding it hard to get your team to see the world through your eyes, to see what needs to happen, it seems really obvious to you but you just can't get them motivated and energised to work with you on that journey, believe you me, we all know it's tough. Bring on humans, leading humans. This audio fuel kit is made for you with love: packed with the stories, the tools and the inspiration we all need to shine as leaders. So, keep it in your backpack for the times when you desperately need a shot of energy, to be inspired, to believe that you can succeed. Because here's the thing; leaders across the world have succeeded. They have proved that you can lead teams in even the most complex situations. You CAN get them to change their behaviours and their mindset. IF you understand that a leaders only job is to create environments in which people feel respected, rewarded and recognised. Now I am lucky enough to know a lot of those leaders. So, I'm on a quest to collect their stories, to give you the courage and the know how to lead more human, so that you can be more successful.

So next week, I will be talking to Julie Doleman She is the Managing Director, Global Expansion at Experian and believe you me, she is a force of nature. I’ve had the honor of working with her. We all have so much to learn from the way this woman leads. I can't wait. But for now, drum roll. The moment we've all been waiting for Barak Berkowitz

I am so so excited that you're actually joining me for Humans Leading Humans!!to give you a bit of background, I met Barak for the first time at this fantastic event called DLD, which is run by a guy called Yossi Vardi and Steffi Which is one of those incredible gathering gatherings of the most insightful, inspiring people you could ever want to meet. It's one of those events that you never quite make it to the stage because the people are too interesting and you keep having to chat to them. Now, we're also both part of this network called Kinnernet All of those people are amazing but some of them I've become particularly fond of, and I like spending time with the rank is one of those people so Barak do you want to tell the people who are listening a little bit more about what you've done, not who you are because who you are is an amazing human but what you've done.

BARAK: Thanks Katz. I share the affection and so happy to be here and nice of you to invite me. Basically what I've done is worked in the tech industry for quite a while. I got involved in tech because I'm dyslexic. And I found this magic machine that could make it look like I could spell or where I didn't have to worry about typing. I started to always even as a kid really care about how machines could enable humans to do more than they were naturally able to do. How they are forced multipliers for organisations and force multipliers for individuals. And so that led me on a career that wandered through starting one of the first computer consumer computer stores in the world at Macy’s New York, working at Apple, both in the US and Japan, at Logitech. One of the first search engines Infoseek, and most recently I ran operations at the MIT Media Lab So I've in one way or another, wandered through the growth of technology and the evolutions of technological business and impact on society.

KATZ: What a story and I think you've probably seen things change a lot, and something staying very constant. Thank you for that. Tell us your first story.

BARAK : So my first story is just an amusing story but I think it does have some insight into organisations and how to build an organisation that feels right and what I'd say at first is, I've been the CEO of startups, often, and I've also taken the awkward role of being the CEO for a startup that was founded by somebody else, and the founders still being there. And that's actually been something I've done a number of times in the last few decades. And this is early on when I was the CEO of Six Apart, and the founders Ben and Mina Trott who are pretty famous in the social media world had hired me and I was the third employee, and then we hired a administrator, or actually maybe she was hired before me to work with Ben and Mena. We needed to hire an office manager. We got a lead for someone and invited her in to interview. First she talked to Ben and Mina, who talked to her together, then she went off to talk to Melu, the administrative slash programme person who was working with Ben and Mena. Now, like in a lot of startups, you have to do every job on your own. I had set my goal for that day to pull Ethernet wires throughout our new office, to make sure we had our network working well. So I'm in coveralls with the tool belt etc.So eventually I interviewed her and liked her a lot. Mena told her to talk to Barak too. So I sit down with her, the names Mulu, and we have a really great conversation. She leaves. We make a decision to put out an offer to hire her. When she accepted she said: “You know, I'm really excited about coming on board, I was excited, not just because of what you're doing and meeting you, but I'm particularly excited because you even had me interview with the handyman. And I thought that was such a nice way of you to introduce me to the Caretaker to show me how equal you are.

There are a few lessons to learn from that. The most important one is probably that it's a pretty important measure of how your organisation is working. If it's hard to tell who the CEO is if you go into a meeting room, or an interview or anything else. And unless somebody tells you, you can't quite tell who's in charge. You might know who's in charge of that meeting or you might know who's in charge of that specific task, but in an equal organisation, an organisation where there's a lot of room for openness and creativity. It should be pretty hard to just walk in the room and know who the CEO is, and that was, you know, I think what melu thought was great, and it's something that, you know, stood out as a memory that even Ben and Mena talk about today.

KATZ : Yes indeed. It’s the E for Equity from the CREATE framework . it's about everybody being equal; whatever you are doing, no matter where you are in the hierarchy, you should be willing to get down and get your hands dirty. I love that. Barak the janitor. I wonder how many organisations you've led, you've been part of where you absolutely can't say that is the truth. Where you can walk into a room and you can see immediately by the way everybody's treating the person in charge… that dynamic is not healthy at all. Okay, that is a brilliant story number one story number two.

BARAK :So story. Number two, I’m going to tell another story about Six Apart Although though it is a method I've used in other places too, but this is the first time this came up. The situation was a company emergency. Every company has moments that shaped the company around a crisis, around a problem. In this case, we're running a service that people are paying us for on a monthly basis. The service went down. It went for quite a while, it went down for something like nine hours. The time it went down was the middle of the night in California, which was part of the reason it went down, but we had customers all over the world. And so after you’ve fixed the cause of the problem, there are two things that you need to do. The first is you need to figure out how to make sure that problem doesn't take place again. But more importantly, even before you make sure that happens you need to figure out what you're going to do with your customers and how you're going to treat them fairly in this situation. And so we pulled together a meeting with a large range of employees, people from the networking group people from marketing, the executive team, etc, and started talking about the problem and how would compensate people and how angry some people were. One of the things that came up really quickly was, as you can imagine, if it goes down in the middle of the night in California, there were many people in California who never knew there was a problem. It did not impact them at all. Maybe their blog was not accessible for nine hours but that was not that critical to them. On the other hand, we had people in Europe and in Asia, who felt that this was a disaster: somebody who was launching a product, somebody who had put out a press release about a post that they had put up, and that they really felt impacted and let down by us. And so we had a long conversation about what to do. And we kept coming back to this issue, that it was unequal, that if we gave too little to everybody, then the people who were very badly hurt would feel that we didn't appreciate the pain they felt, and if we gave too much to people, we would be hurting the company and unnecessarily creating problems with our cash flow. And so the decision we came up with was to simply trust the customer. So I wrote up a fairly long email to explain what had happened, how we were sorry about it, how we were going to make sure that it never happened again and said to them : Look, if you do nothing, you will get two weeks of credit, and we will give you two weeks of credit, you don't have to do a thing that you will simply pay two weeks less for the last period. If you click on this web link. You can choose to get four weeks of credit. One more week of credit or zero weeks of credit. So with that, we first of all gave it pretty generous credit to people and said: “If you do nothing, you'll get this generous credit of half a month”, considering we were down for eight hours, we thought that that was very generous. But if you really felt harmed you could get an entire month free, but we also said: “look if you didn't feel this was a problem at all. You can click one week or zero”. And, you know “be fair to us that if you got all the service you wanted”. We forecast at first was that it would average out to slightly over one week of credit, though a lot of people thought it would be over two weeks of credit. that nobody would take less than the two as it came out, we ended up having the average rebate being a little bit less than one week of credit.

KATZ : Wow

BARAK :A huge number of people chose zero, and a large number of people chose one week, and four weeks was incredibly rare actually.

KATZ : Wow. Well there you go. So you respected the customers, you trusted the customers, and lo and behold, something happened that was even better than you both imagined. And you know, that's the thing if you treat people fairly. They treat you fairly back. Dan Ariely who you'll be a guest in a few week, has an insurance company whereby people don't really have to get very much proof, based on the same principles that actually if people don't feel like they're going to be screwed by you, they will do the right thing. Yeah, I love that.

BARAK : And I think the other thing is, it did a lot of things inside of the organisation, because first it made all of the employees feel empowered to bring up crazy ideas, and to try to push the edges. And secondly, it made the employees proud of the organisation. The fact that we were being fair, meant that they really feel felt strongly that one they would be treated fairly and two that they could feel good about how we respect that our customers.

KATZ : I love that. And again that's equity, it's just being fair. If everyone can one can see how decisions are being made and feel part of the decision making process. That puts people in a space where they're going to be the best they can be. Absolutely number. Story number three please Barak. What's your last story?

BARAK : I’ll tell the story about one company but I've used the approach in many. I went into a company at the time called True Knowledge and became the CEO for a founder who'd founded the company 12 years before. The company was in a period of transition. There were a lot of stresses in the company. One of the stresses was that we our main product was a product called Evi), which was an app. And many people knew us by that product called Evi, but the company's name was still True Knowledge. When you were walking around the company people would sometimes call the company, Evi and sometimes they “True Knowledge”. But, in trying to have a conversation with the executive team tried to make a decision about what we should do about the company name and how we should deal with marketing of this became really difficult. So what we did was brought everybody into a room and had a one day off site. The first exercise we did, which I've done many times, was to give each person three green post it notes, and three red post it notes. The instruction was for everyone to write down three things about the company that you think are great, they can be incredibly simple things, or incredibly difficult, and great things difficult things, and right the do the same with the things that you think are broken, and again they could be as broken as “the leadership should quit” to as simple as, you know “I don't like the snacks in the snack room”. It generally takes quite a while for people to come up with three bad things and three good things, it's always interesting, which is harder to come up with. And then we ask people to volunteer to put them up on a board, and if somebody else has the same one they put it up on the board too. And what always happens is groupings appear. And in this case, one of the biggest groupings was the name of the company, and the marketing of the name of the company, and the communication about what the company actually dis. And the challenge of that was so obvious, the majority of people in the company, put these posits up. They said: “what are we? Are we true knowledge are we Evi? Are We Living in the past or are we living in the future?” You know, could we give up something like this. And what was really interesting is one of the promises I make at the beginning is that “some of these things the company might be able to fix today or in the next couple of weeks, and some of the things may take months to fix because they might be very hard or we don't have enough cash,or we need to get more cash to fix it. It turns out that, after talking to people and after everybody getting together. It was clear that there was a consensus to change the name to Evi even for people who felt emotionally connected to the old True Knowledge name. So we were able to change it within a period of weeks. So not only did people get to feel like wow, I didn't know this everybody thought the same thing .. and get to appreciate the fact that if we talk about stuff, more openly, we will learn more about what's going on in the organisation more quickly, and most people are really strong and most people know what's great, but they also see immediate action from their feedback. And and the fact that people's opinions are valued in the consensus, and leadership doesn't always have to come from the top down.

So I think that that was a very successful name change. Very soon after we sold ourselves to Amazon, and it was an example of how, in an organisation, generally, if you ask, go find out. Most people know what's working and most people know what's broken.

KATZ : I am horripilating right now. This resonates so much with me because obviously that's exactly what beep is about. It's about saying that every single person inside your organisation has an insight. That insight may not feel good to hear. But if you can fix that thing, if you can hear it. Especially if there are a lot of people saying the same things. Giving people a voice, and giving them the tools by which they can fix the myriad little things that are bugging them is so powerful.aker

BARAK : I totally agree. And in fact, I'll give you an example without the company name. I recently did this with the company that I'm mentoring the CEO, and I've always done this exercise as you know as an open exercise so not anonymous. But I was told by a number of people in the company before we did it, that wouldn’t get answers if it wasn't anonymous. So I found a tool that allowed us to do it in a zoom environment and do it anonymously. And it turned out that the single largest item that came up, and in fact, there were a total of 27 people in the room, and 18 of them mentioned that they were afraid to speak their mind. And it was something that was obviously hard for the management to hear, but at the same time, there was no way to close your eyes to the fact that the way this system was set up, nobody could give the same answer twice, and nobody could vote twice. If you have more than half the people in your company feeling that they're afraid to speak their mind, give their opinion, criticise something that's going on, you're never going to be able to fix things. And the cost of that in terms of time, energy, and lost resources, you know this critical resource of your employees is so great that there's no way you can be successful. Once you see that you can't ignore it and not move to try to fix it. And I will say that that company has done a lot to to fix that. Today, right now it seems that people already feel more at ease.

KATZ So important, everything you've just said resonates with me so much. Because the truth is, you know, and I talk about this a lot with the leaders that we work with - Just because you're listening, doesn't mean that they're not feeling it, it doesn't mean that they're not talking to each other, so you can stick your fingers as much as you like. Listening to it may hurt, and Carol Layzell talks about this and other people I've interviewed for this podcast have talked about this as well : it sometimes doesn't feel good to get feedback. But that feedback is really important if you want to be successful. Thank you for. Brilliant. Three and a half stories, love that.

KATZ : I feel so honoured to have had this conversation with that man, and I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I did. And I know that you know this already, I fiercely believe that everything can be better, always. So, I really really, really want to get your feedback: What did you love? What resonated? What could we do better? What do you want more of? Who do you think deserves to join our list of imaginal guests.

So if you've got any suggestions or comments or feedbacks, or, of course, a story that you think will inspire listeners in next week's episode, please. DM, my company at @beepmindshift or DM me at @katzy Or, obviously you can DM me on LinkedIn I want to hear your feedback.

So next week's guest is the extraordinary and most definitely imaginal Julie Doleman, who is the Managing Director of Global Expansion at Experian. She is a delight. And there is so much to learn from her. You have been listening to humans, leading humans towards a future of work that works for people. This podcast is brought to you in partnership with the marketing society. And if you are a senior leader. If you need to know how. And the network's to succeed and you're not already a member get over to their website and become part of that tribe, I would 100% recommend it, and a massive, massive thanks to the fantastic SuperTerranea for the magical sting of stings, Go to we are beep To find out more about the CREATE framework and how we support companies by unlocking the problem solving potential of humans.

Thank you so so much for joining me. Please subscribe, the links in the notes. Please don't miss any more of this storytelling magic, Be Inspired. Be Imaginal. Be more Human! and I look forward to seeing you next week.

Follow [Barak Berkowitz](https://www.linkedin.com/in/barakberk/) on linkedin:

Follow Katz and send feedback on what you think and what could be better on linkedin:   

Katzy on twitter

beep on twitter

Find out more about how beep supports lasting shift in behaviour and mindset to drive efficiency, resilience and agility

Humans Leading Humans is brought to you in partnership with the Marketing Society. TMS inspire, accelerate and unite the worlds smartest leaders -  find out more and join the global community

Thanks to SuperTerranea for the magical sting of stings