3
THE EXPLORER 
Curious, Systems-Centric, and Dispassionate
They looked at me like I was crazy because no one had ever framed the problem that way.
—Brian O’Kelley, Explorer, AppNexus
“This is horrible! I hate it! I can’t believe I ever hired you!” This verbal assault from his boss at Right Media greeted Brian O’Kelley after O’Kelley’s six weeks of hard work in building an internet ad-serving platform.1
While a Driver probably would have returned to his desk, packed his box, and quit, the Explorer is more likely to respond with a question, as O’Kelley did: “OK, so tell me again: What is the problem you’re trying to solve?” A deeper inquiry into the problem hooked O’Kelley on its complexity.
The Explorer Profile
| Factor | Description |
|---|---|
| MOTIVATION |
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| DECISION-MAKING MODE |
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| MANAGEMENT APPROACH |
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| LEADERSHIP STYLE |
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He learned the CEO was trying to create a platform for serving banner ads that solved two problems at once. One problem was how to optimize the price of a banner ad when different advertisers value it on different dimensions: some on the basis of cost per thousand people reached, some according to cost per click, and still others according to cost per acquired customer. The second problem was how to protect the platform from bidder price manipulation.
This kind of complex problem attracts an Explorer like a hot fudge sundae attracts a kid with a sweet tooth. It is multifaceted, requires an understanding of dynamic systems across multiple domains, and, if solved, can change the game itself.
The incumbent solution for this problem had been developed and commercialized by a company called DoubleClick. It relied on enormous computing power to crank through hugely complex calculations to set the price for each banner ad. O’Kelley saw the problem differently. In college, he had learned how a distributed network of servers could enable a significant increase in computing power. And from his courses in econometrics, he discovered the price-setting power of auctions.
Putting those two insights together, he created a prototype for an entirely new system. He and the founder then met with a team of Israeli entrepreneurs to show them their idea: “They were trying to solve a really hard ad-network problem with technology. What I did was change the business problem to one focused on setting price dynamically. They looked at me like I was crazy, because no one had ever framed it in that way. All the engineers were jabbering and mad because they did not think of it. All the businesspeople were jabbering because they thought it was brilliant.”
Brian O’Kelley is a classic Explorer. His motivation to build stems from a deep curiosity in the way systems operate. He maintains a disciplined tenacity to keep working a problem until he cracks it. His decision-making style is linear, rational, and fact-based; he believes the best way to solve a problem is to break it down into its constituent parts.
O’Kelley went on to apply these same skills to build and scale his own company, AppNexus, the largest ad-serving company in the world. If you’re an Explorer like O’Kelley, your type is reflected in your management approach as well, where you tend to be hands-on with respect to the most important areas of your company. Explorers lead through attracting and inspiring those similar to themselves—curious, systematic, and analytically gifted.
How Explorers Engage:
“What System Is at Play Here?”
If you are an Explorer, you get your Builder Personality Type label from your twin drives of curiosity and confidence to seek and develop a better approach to solving commercially valuable problems. You consistently bring your detailed systems thinking to every part of your business. You did not necessarily set out to be an entrepreneur, but rather are always on the prowl for the next puzzle to solve, the next mystery to decode.
Bringing your systems thinking to each of the growth dynamics works well most of the time, particularly as you build through the first few levels of scale. Launching your first products, winning early customers, and attracting your first set of investors are all challenges that can play to your linear, fact-based, problem-solving skills. However, as the business scales, you—like your Driver cousin—must fight the urge to do everything on your own and quiet the voice in your head that says, “But I could do it better myself.” In fact, Explorers tend to be even more controlling than Drivers. Let’s dig into each of the five dynamics to see how this personality unfolds.
The Solution Dynamic:
Converting Ideas into Products
As an Explorer, you’re interested in solving problems to drive impact, not just to explore and tinker as a form of intellectual satisfaction. So you understand the importance of prototyping and iterative refinements along the way to create a final product you can demonstrate to potential customers.
“There has to be a better way!”
Explorers have a keen power of observation, not so much of people, but of systems and processes. They are fascinated by thinking through why something operates the way it does, and they constantly wonder if there is a better way to achieve the intended outcome.
For instance, why pay exorbitant prices for hard-to-find cosmetic colors when all the colors in the world exist on the internet and you can download and print them on the substrate of a blush or lipstick? This was the question Grace Choi, the builder of Mink, a 3-D printing company that specializes in makeup, asked. Or the question posed by Sara Blakely, who invented Spanx: Why are pantyhose and shapers the way they are? Is there a better way? These questions led her to create a more effective solution to the traditional girdle by providing greater coverage in a material that was more comfortable. Blakely said, “This discovery allowed me to find my purpose, which was to help women.”2
The Explorer is attracted first to the problem itself—ideally a thorny one worthy of his or her time and talents. Often this happens by chance, as it did when Tom Leighton was working at MIT down the hall from Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. One day, Berners-Lee told Leighton he believed traffic congestion and volume could significantly limit the potential and growth of the web itself.
That casual conversation got Leighton and his graduate assistant, Danny Lewin, intrigued with how such a massive problem might be tackled. It took a combination of brilliant algorithms and an excellent team that persevered through initial customer skepticism. The result was the creation and rapid scaling of a company called Akamai, a $2 billion global enterprise that now delivers much of the world’s web traffic behind the scenes.3
Most Explorers are not MIT professors, but if you are an Explorer, you share that puzzle-solving spirit of fearless curiosity. You’re drawn into entrepreneurship motivated by the belief you will find a better way to solve the problem.
Explorers are inquisitive; they look at things from various angles and perspectives, whether that’s the “God’s-eye” view from above or from the microscopic level up. They often outflank traditional industry competitors by thinking four or five moves ahead.
“I thought, ‘How can I make this highfalutin concept real?’”
Tom Phillips, of Dstillery is another Explorer who, like Brian O’Kelley, is playing the ad tech game. In Phillips’s business, the problem that hooked the founders of his firm was the belief that paying for ads on a price-per-click basis was attributing value to the wrong metric. Phillips believed internet advertising should be measured in terms of how effectively it builds a brand’s reputation.
Phillips joined the company in its infancy after the founders had developed a core concept around consumer affiliation. They believed if they could figure out which consumers were attracted to a given brand, they could use personal affiliations identified through social marketing platforms (Pinterest, Tumblr, etc.) to spot similar consumers. With this insight, they felt they could launch more-compelling digital campaigns to drive a brand’s awareness, relevancy, and reputation. Phillips explains what attracted him to take over as CEO: “They had created this highfalutin concept, and I thought, ‘How can I make this real?’”
This is classic Explorer. Fascinated by a complex system and drawn into the commercial opportunity forged by the question, Phillips asked himself how the company could make the concept real.
The second problem that attracted Phillips was determining how digital interactions create brand value. “The claim that my platform is producing conversion for you gets a lot of marketers’ attention,” he says, “even if it is measuring the wrong thing. Clicking on a banner ad is not building a brand. It’s a bit like the rooster taking credit for the sun coming up.”
Phillips goes on: “Companies that sell these cost-per-click campaigns are sales-driven. Their technology is OK. What they do is highly expedient, but is of limited value. Running campaigns that get credit is easy; running campaigns that build brands is hard.” For the Explorer, translating ideas into solutions involves two key elements: it must both function as intended and create measureable value.
If you’re an Explorer operating inside an established corporation, you have the advantage of a target-rich setting with a host of complex problems on which you can focus your systems thinking and analytical strengths. The key to a career as a business builder, or at least to many years of gratifying impact, is to ensure your domains of exploration are aligned with the corporation’s strategic focus.
Some of the most successful corporate Explorers pursue what we call the headlights strategy, solving a problem in their company’s strategic field of vision—something the firm has already identified as an important problem. That’s the story of Norbert Berta, whom you will meet later in this chapter and who literally saved the J&J Tylenol brand. At the very least, you will build your internal “suite cred” with senior executives—credibility you might redeem in getting the funding and talent you need to explore, solve, commercialize, and scale a venture initiative more of your choosing.
Some corporate Explorers prefer to work in private, at least until they’re satisfied they’ve come up with an elegant, effective solution worth sharing more broadly. If you are one of these Explorers, you could think of it as your own skunk works, maybe in your garage at home or in your off hours.
After some Explorers have run this problem-experiment-solution cycle several times, their self-confidence begins to swell, and they develop what some colleagues may perceive as a bit of an intellectual superiority complex. As an Explorer, you may think you can disaggregate almost any problem into its constituent parts and then discover a better way to address it. This belief often leads you to enjoy solving problems alone, which is how you often come up with your best ideas. This lone-wolf approach, though, brings up the questions of how effective are you at leading and managing teams at successive levels of scale.
The Team Dynamic:
Galvanizing Individual Talent for Collaborative Impact
While Drivers attract followers with their self-confidence and tenacious pursuit of the goal, Explorers often attract people who share their deep-seated curiosity. But teams sometimes need technicians more than thinkers when the business grows larger and more complex.
As Brian O’Kelley put it, in the early days of building AppNexus, “I didn’t really know anything about the finance function, but I read books, tore apart the P&L statement, and mastered how it worked. I just couldn’t imagine doing it any other way.” When asked what propelled this desire to understand his company’s finances at such a detailed level, O’Kelley said, “It’s not because of the money. In fact, I really do not care about money. That is not interesting to me, but understanding how things work is.” In short, the Explorer pursues a deeper level of understanding of systems in order to control them.
So how does a control freak recruit, cultivate, and ultimately inspire others to become part of the team? You start with like-minded people. O’Kelley recruited his first followers into AppNexus from Right Media, where he had first cracked a key piece of the ad tech code.
The measure of O’Kelley’s persuasion skills was reflected in his separation agreement with his former firm. He was entitled to take one person in contravention of his nonsolicit restrictions. He selected his chief technology officer, who received a very generous counteroffer by Right Media if he stayed for just one year. Yet the promise of how O’Kelley’s new firm would solve the very same problem was more enticing. In fact, one year later, on the day the employment restrictions expired for O’Kelley’s other key protégés, they also came aboard.
What was it about O’Kelley and his Explorer curiosity that drew this group of former employees to follow him into his next venture? It was the allure of the problem this Explorer had set out to solve and the track record he had already started to build in solving and commercializing high-impact solutions.
If you are an Explorer, the very thing that attracts your early team can become a challenge as you begin to scale. “Brian, you know the first hundred employees you hired feel like an elite corps, but the other three hundred people who work at your company feel like they are not part of the elect.” These words came from an organizational development consultant who spent time talking to people at AppNexus. Upon hearing this diagnosis, O’Kelley’s cofounder rushed to the defense of the first one hundred—their loyalty and camaraderie were exactly what he wanted. However, O’Kelley, ever the systems thinker, immediately shifted his management tone to counter the perception that favored the initial hundred—exposing a difference of opinion that would ultimately result in the departure of this cofounder.
It was 1999, and I was trying to save the tech industry from a coming train wreck.
—Derek Lidow, iSuppli
After completing a successful career as CEO of the company his grandfather had founded, Derek Lidow listed five problems that intrigued him. If he could solve one of them at commercial scale, he might be able to launch his own company. Although fundamentally an Explorer, Lidow also has a bit of the Driver in him, in that he was motivated to demonstrate he could not only lead a company but, like his grandfather, build one as well.
As he shared his idea for addressing inefficiencies in the supply chain for electronic components, many people quickly saw its appeal. Given his reputation as a thoughtful leader and deep problem solver in silicon chip design and manufacturing, Lidow had no difficulty attracting talent to this juicy problem.
With experts in place and early demand for a better way to source parts in a fast-growing industry, Lidow told us, “iSuppli benefited from many unfair competitive advantages: my good reputation in the tech community, my direct knowledge of what was valuable yet not being done well in the market, and my personal financial ability to kick-start development.” However, these things rarely align perfectly by chance. Rather, they are evidence of this Explorer’s gifts of systematic problem solving, anchored in the confidence he can create a better way.
It was a call from the company’s largest customer that galvanized iSuppli. Lidow remembers the customer’s ultimatum: “Throw out all you have been working on and deliver one million Tantalum Capacitors next month! If you can’t supply this product, we will blame the delay of our global launch on your firm.” Using his systems thinking and coolheaded attitude, Lidow assembled his team and disaggregated the problem into its constituent parts. He then deployed his people around the globe to source and deliver the parts to each plant on time—a virtual miracle. But not beyond the reach of a gifted Explorer.
This against-all-odds accomplishment was the catalytic moment for iSuppli. It helped coalesce a group of experts into a team willing to follow Lidow through fire to conquer a vexing problem no one else could.
This response is vintage Explorer. Attract like-minded followers, lean heavily on a favorite group—until doing so stalls scalability. Then, invoke systems thinking to see the problem through the eyes of the new people, and shift to a more meritocratic view of all employees to recognize and reward their contributions and impact. Some may see this response as the work of a coldhearted mechanic who sees people as cogs in the wheel. We see it as tackling the problem head-on and understanding the mechanism at play—applied equally to product, process, or people.
Look at how Tom Phillips has built and measures his team at Dstillery. He uses metrics and transparent communication, constantly providing feedback. In fact, everyone is rated and measured every quarter. He calls it the “purge tool.” The tool is a rating from 0 to 100, with truly exceptional performance earning above 100. “We are honest with ourselves and with each other,” Phillips says. “If you are not at one hundred, say, ninety, we are telling you it is fixable. If you are at an eighty, we are telling you to go.” Transparent. Quantitative. Unambiguous.
“We had something our competitors did not—super-pumped-up employees.”
Another Explorer, Mark Bonfigli, the founder of Dealer.com, applied this same kind of systems thinking to improve the human-touch elements of recruiting and culture in his company, allowing it to scale to more than a thousand employees and ultimately selling it to DealerTrack for over $1 billion. In the early days, Bonfigli and his cofounders were working so hard they all became dangerously unhealthy. A former high school tennis star, Bonfigli gained over fifty pounds; one cofounder developed Crohn’s disease, and the other had to have his gallbladder removed.
Bonfigli got religion. He created a corporate wellness initiative with an in-house 20,000-square-foot fitness area, complete with an indoor tennis court, fitness instructors, and even an on-site masseuse. He realized if he did not make his company culture more balanced across the mind, body, and spirit, he and his team might fail to achieve their goal of changing the game in digital marketing for car dealers.
Soon, his wellness-focused culture was attracting high-energy talent. Bonfigli then realized his engaged and energetic sales and customer care teams could be a competitive weapon in the marketplace. He explains: “We did have a few inventions that were sort of cool and separated us, but the reality was some of our competitors had a more robust solution. We had something they did not have—happy, enthusiastic, inspired, and super-pumped-up employees who were smiling on the other end of the phone.” What started as a systematic way to ensure the health of his workforce turned into Dealer.com’s competitive advantage.
As an Explorer, you are a magnet for like-minded problem solvers. You are clear, to the point of being blunt, in your communications and your expectations for your teams. As the business grows, you should continue to apply your systems thinking to issues of talent management and look for opportunities like the one Bonfigli found in converting an employee benefit into a competitive advantage. After all, your people really are your key differentiator in the long run.
The Customer Dynamic:
Transforming Buyers into Partners
As an Explorer, you focus on problems. You work closely with customers to deepen your understanding of their problem, its context, and each potential use case. Then you work with a nearly religious zeal to engineer a superior solution. You may actually believe this intense focus on solving customer problems obviates the need for sales and marketing. In fact, Explorers might have a certain disdain for selling, believing the best products sell themselves. One Explorer explains, “We don’t really care about selling or pushing the product. We’re just focused on improving it, and then the selling takes care of itself.”
If you are an Explorer, you focus your innovation on a new and superior way to solve one of your customers’ toughest problems—making you and your solution particularly attractive to Geoffrey Moore’s early adopter segment. It is this kind of customer who sees the potential of your innovative solutions. These initial customers are relieved someone else is on their side trying to solve their problems in a new, imaginative, and thoughtful way.
A key question for Explorers in this regard is whether you have the patience to wait for these market-lagging customers before turning your curiosity to a new challenge in the marketplace. Or if you don’t have the patience, can you surround yourself with colleagues who do, so the company can truly harvest the rewards from your early breakthrough efforts?
On the other hand, the Explorer who sees the system in people terms may be able to attract customers differently. Bonfigli and his cofounders at Dealer.com forged a more emotional form of customer engagement, which began to dissolve the boundary between their company and their buyers, the goal of every new venture as it scales.
“When we saw your Halloween party, our CEO was a hundred percent certain we would work well together.”
One day in late October, the Dealer.com management team was pitching to one of the biggest dealers in the country. At one point during this tense meeting, Bonfigli’s cofounder glanced out the internal window at a ruckus on the floor below, and his heart sank. He had forgotten it was the company’s annual Halloween party, when everyone dresses up and prances around the floor in their costumes, some of which were pretty wild. He looked at Bonfigli, getting his attention and signaling with the universal gesture of a finger across the throat, “We’re done for!” Both Bonfigli and his cofounder thought to themselves in agony, “There’s no way the management team, who has just flown into Burlington from Charlotte early this morning, is going to take us seriously if they see that these dudes from Vermont allow this kind of wildness in their office.”
Bonfigli felt as if they had lost the pitch before it really began. At one point, the noise level was so high that the visiting management team went to the window and looked down at the wild costumes and all the energy and excitement. Off-kilter and embarrassed, Bonfigli and his team attempted to close the meeting and hustle their guests off to the airport. Bonfigli explains, “About three hours later, I get a call from the chief marketing officer, and she said, ‘We just touched down, and I just want to tell you we were blown away. We want to move forward with a contract. We weren’t a hundred percent sure in the meeting, but when we saw your Halloween party, our CEO was one hundred percent certain we would work well together.’”
For Explorers, systems thinking can pay off with customers, even when the system in question is company culture and employee morale and health, not just another clever algorithm. Bonfigli connected his understanding of human motivation with something missing in the car-dealership world—being authentic, somewhat silly, and having fun. In so doing, he unleashed a deeper and more enduring level of customer relationship, inspiring them to become true partners.
The Sponsor Dynamic:
Aligning Financial and Other Supporters
For some sponsors, investing in the ventures of Explorers makes sense because of the engineering mindset from which these builders create and commercialize. This compatibility can provide a common vocabulary and perspective. Explorer-friendly investors value a systematic approach to identifying and solving economically valuable problems. Many investors, appreciating the ingenuity of what Explorers are trying to do, are motivated by the possibility of earning outsized returns by combining the brains of the Explorer with their money.
As an Explorer, you may see problems arise when you expect your investors to be as engaged in the problem as you are. One Explorer bitterly describes how his investors “thought they owned us because they invested enough to control twenty percent. They were the biggest pains in the ass . . . They didn’t care about our solution, if we weren’t sleeping, if our people were unhappy. All they cared about was maximizing their return.”
The Bezos commitment to innovation inspires a level of inventiveness that does not occur in other companies.
—Chris Pinkham, Amazon Web Services
Chris Pinkham had just convinced the higher-ups at Amazon to let him return to his native South Africa for the birth of his first child and to continue supporting his work on a project that would ultimately become AWS (Amazon Web Services).
Before this move, when he was working for Amazon in Seattle in 2003, his curiosity led him to wonder whether there was a way to create “an infrastructure service for the world.” He thought about the underlying problem: “the cost of maintaining a reliable, scalable infrastructure in a traditional multi-datacenter model.” As an Explorer, he wondered whether there was a way to connect a distributed set of servers that could be deployed on demand, for any business customer, with unbounded expandability.
But then, back in his home in South Africa, Pinkham and a like-minded engineer named Benjamin Black teamed up to write a white paper on their idea, which can be a particularly effective way for a corporate Explorer to obtain financial sponsorship within a large company. Jeff Bezos liked the idea and gave the green light to develop it further.
First, Pinkham recruited and inspired a small team of engineers to develop EC2, the underlying technology that now enables AWS. By 2005, Pinkham was granted permission to engage with customers.
When we asked Pinkham (who, by the way, refers to himself as a “situational” rather than serial entrepreneur) what he believed enabled him to explore and commercialize EC2, he told us, “The Bezos commitment to innovation inspires a level of inventiveness that does not occur in other companies.”
Distance helped, too. Years later, Jesse Robbins, who oversaw Amazon’s technology infrastructure at the time, was quoted as having said, “It might never have happened if they weren’t so far away. I was horrified at the thought of the dirty, public Internet touching MY beautiful operations.”4
By 2016, AWS, enabled by EC2, served more than a million businesses and generated nearly $8 billion in annual revenue.
As an Explorer, you want to feel intellectually, if not emotionally, connected to your investors. You’d like them to appreciate the problem your team is focused on—and respect the elegance of the engineering your team developed to crack it. You feel the same pride as a parent showing pictures of her or his children, fully expecting some form of fawning. When investors don’t provide this affirmation, they miss an opportunity to deepen the connection with the builder and the opportunity to strengthen the all-important bond of trust.
Explorers can also have contrasting motivations with their investors. The ambivalence Explorers sometimes feel for the investor who did not care about the solution was echoed in our discussion with Brian O’Kelley. The CEO of AppNexus is focused on improving and expanding his platform and ensuring his company continues to innovate in the ever-changing landscape of ad tech. In a heated discussion with an investor about an issue that would affect the CEO’s compensation, O’Kelley deflected the point by responding, “You know, I have no idea what my salary is, and frankly, I don’t care.”
Although the primary source of alignment between builders and investors is obviously financial reward, it may not work as directly or as expected for Explorers. If you are an Explorer, you should be clear with your investors about the nonfinancial elements that are important to you, because investors are likely to be unaware of the power these can play in forging deeper alignment and trust. So look for a venture partner who is as intrigued by systematic problem solving as you are. Perhaps you may even want to make sure he or she is a fellow Explorer. You will find additional guidance on the connection between Explorers and financial sponsors in chapter 8, where we examine this relationship more deeply.
If you are a corporate Explorer, finding a financial sponsor inside the company is a key step in advancing your vision. Some pursue the explicit pitch strategy to those who control the budget. Another approach that can work particularly well is the bootleg strategy. Here, the Explorer works behind the scenes building early proof of product–market fit and economic viability. This approach can be especially effective if you have at least the winking acquiescence of your boss and company culture. And if you’re lucky enough to work in a company whose culture resembles that of 3M, Gore (the famous maker of the revolutionary Gore-Tex material and products), or Google, you may even enjoy explicit permission to work on this kind of project on company time, at least within certain limits.
The Scale Dynamic:
Elevating the Business
Brian Coester, the founder of CoesterVMS, a company that enhances and simplifies home appraisals for residential mortgage underwriting told us: “It’s not just about the technology. It’s about the people. But it’s not just about the people; it’s about the combination of technology, people, and understanding.” Coester was describing the artful way he has built out and scaled his residential home-appraisal platform. In fact, the core value of his platform is allowing home appraisers to scale themselves by codifying and simplifying the appraisal process.
Like many other Explorers, Coester stumbled on this problem as a young child, when he would occasionally accompany his father on home appraisals for local mortgage banks. The young Coester noticed that while his father was examining a house for sale, he wrote extensive notes on various pages held together on a clipboard. His father would then spend hours researching comparable homes before writing up the appraisal.
After college, Brian Coester began to think about how a computer platform could simplify and scale the appraisal business. He realized there was incredibly valuable knowledge embedded in the heads of all of the old-time house appraisers—knowledge that could be encapsulated in a checklist. He then mapped this information and determined it could be recorded in a database.
By comparing the data for each house appraisal to such a database of comparable values for other houses, the system could ensure the information each appraiser was entering was within an appropriate range, given other houses in the neighborhood. This real-time data check improved accuracy, reduced follow-up questions, and enhanced the mortgage underwriting process.
“Every person’s core functionality has to do with getting the company better.”
I don’t think they can ever sell another product under that name. There may be an advertising person who thinks he can solve this, and [if so] I want to hire him . . . to turn our watercooler into a wine cooler.
—Jerry Della Femina, Della Femina Travisano Partners, commenting on J&J’s Tylenol crisis
On September 29, 1982, seven people were murdered by someone who introduced cyanide into Tylenol capsules and then placed them back on the shelves at several pharmacies in the Chicago area. The murderer had opened the gelatin capsule that contained the active ingredient in Tylenol, acetaminophen, and replaced it with the lethal chemical.
The use of one of America’s most trusted brands as a murder weapon struck fear in the entire nation and led many to believe the brand should be retired. But not Norbert Berta, a Hungarian émigré who was a senior engineer at McNeil Consumer Products, the division of Johnson & Johnson that manufactured and marketed Tylenol. Days after the poisoning, this corporate Explorer began to ponder whether the capsule dosage form could be reengineered to be tamper-proof (or, to use the term coined later, tamper-evident).
Over the subsequent few months, Berta tinkered at home in his kitchen with different approaches, trying to figure out how he could compress acetaminophen into a tablet in the shape of a capsule. After experimenting with many approaches, he figured it out and the caplet dosage form was born. Since the caplet was solid, it could not be tampered with as easily as opening a capsule.
Norbert and the Tylenol marketing team quickly brought prototypes to retailers like Walgreens and Ralphs supermarkets to get their input and to demonstrate that because this solid dosage form was safe, the Tylenol brand could go back on their shelves. Berta quickly garnered executive sponsorship for his idea through his credibility and track record, moving from prototype to manufacturing. Given the scale of the number of caplets that would have to be made (literally billions to replace the entire national retail inventory), the engineering challenge was not small.
With an attractive solution, strong retailer support, and executive sponsorship that reached up to the CEO, Tylenol was relaunched in caplet and tablet form in 1983. Thanks to both J&J’s culture of corporate responsibility to do whatever is necessary to maintain consumer trust and the inventiveness of a corporate Explorer named Berta, the Tylenol brand remains a key part of America’s medicine cabinet.
When we asked Coester how he scaled his business, he explained that since follow-up calls were the most labor-intensive part of his service, the company had to focus on resolving customer issues the first time around: “We asked, ‘What could someone possibly call about?’ and then reverse-engineered the underlying cause into our platform. Every person’s core functionality has to do with getting the company better.” He then proudly told us, “We used to have twenty people in the call center; now we have five.”
At CoesterVMS, everyone is expected to be a problem solver, even when this expectation leads to converting one’s role into something the computer can do, thereby eliminating one’s job. Coester’s choice of the term “core functionality” reveals a perspective some Explorers hold. People are cogs in the system, and their contribution is described as “functionality,” rather than in the more humanistic terms a Crusader or Captain would use.
Coester demonstrates how Explorers like to tinker with the way a system works to identify new ways to accelerate growth. If you are an Explorer, you have a keen eye for which problems offer the opportunity to create and capture value through a systematic and inherently scalable process.
The Explorer’s Gifts and Gaps
Throughout this chapter, we have seen how Explorers apply their systems thinking and deep curiosity to identify and then exploit commercial opportunities. As an Explorer, you have a powerful set of gifts and have figured out how to apply them to generate economic value. However, your exceedingly high need for control and its secondary effects can hinder you along the path to scale. Here is a brief summary of your gifts and gaps:
- Curiosity and systems thinking: As an Explorer, you are endowed with an extraordinary curiosity, which motivates you to plumb the depths of why things operate the way they do. We saw this curiosity lead Brian O’Kelley, Derek Lidow, and Brian Coester to wonder why the incumbent approaches to banner-ad serving on the internet, the electronics component supply business, and the house-appraisal business, respectively, operated as they did. These and other Explorers apply a systems thinking approach to their curiosity to begin a catalytic process that asks why, moves on to “I think I have a better way,” and culminates in building and commercializing it.
- Ability to make it real and scalable: Another gift that distinguishes Explorers is their ability to understand how a system works, convert this understanding into an idea, and make the idea a reality. We saw this gift in action with Tom Leighton, Tom Phillips, and Grace Choi, respectively, as they each tenaciously pursued their ideas for managing internet traffic congestion, brand building through affiliations identified in social marketing platforms, and creating printable makeup. Explorers are not satisfied with merely figuring out how something works; they don’t stop until they have made it better and then applied their systematic thinking to scaling that better solution.
- Ability to attract talent: In many ways, an Explorer can become a bit of a folk hero among his or her community of people drawn to a specific kind of problem. Explorers use the question “Is there a better way?” as a magnet to attract enormously talented and like-minded systems thinkers. Earlier in this chapter, we saw Chris Pinkham and Mark Bonfigli each attract the talent who could build, respectively, the foundation for Amazon Web Services and one of the fastest-growing digital marketing firms for auto dealers. In some ways your articulation of the problem and perhaps the beginning of a vision on how to solve it create the same force of attraction that Crusaders enjoy (see chapter 4). This gift allows you to recruit the followers you need to take on successively larger and more complex problems.
- Autocratic predisposition: You probably already intimidate many of your employees with your demanding standard of understanding how everything works and the speed with which you move from thought to action. While these factors may give you confidence, they can stifle those around you, leading them to become mere extensions of your will rather than true colleagues who can contribute far more.
- Tendency toward “smarter than thou” style with support functions: Most people have neither the processing power of the CPU in your frontal cortex nor your intensity. This combination not only intimidates those around you, but can also alienate them. Early on, when you are forming your team, this challenge may be less likely to show up, because everyone who is drawn to you, the problem you’re focused on, or your vision is likely to share your intensity and thinking style. However, as you begin to build for scale and you need more functionally focused team members in finance, operations, sales, and marketing, some fault lines may open up between you and some of your people.
- Detached, bot-like, tendencies: Robot, that is. No doubt, everyone who works for you is already blown away by how smart you are and how you can solve problems nobody else around you can. This formula is your comfort zone and can be the initiating force that allows you to launch your venture and win your first few customers. However, to grow your business and ultimately to become a better builder, you need to stray out of your comfort zone and show a bit more of your heart as well as your head in interacting with members of your building crew.
“Elevate and Delegate” Strategies to Become a Stronger Explorer
Each of us approaches the challenge of self-improvement differently. Some of us prefer to hone or elevate our strengths first, others opt to concentrate on fixing perceived weaknesses, and still others choose an almost à la carte approach across their own mix of strengths and weaknesses, depending on circumstances or their sense of momentum. Whichever game plan you adopt, here are six suggestions to improve your effectiveness as an Explorer:
Delegate more and sooner: You’re a solutions maven, not an operations expert. You should delegate a good deal of the day-to-day management of the company to others. However, in our experience, this is far easier said than done, because one of the core characteristics of Explorers is a strong need for control. If you are an Explorer, this need translates into your very hands-on approach with almost everything. Many of you build trust with someone else only after you are convinced the person has developed a deep and structural understanding of the domain equal to your own. This requirement can be a pretty high bar before you are comfortable loosening your grip and turning over the reins of a functional area such as finance, operations, or sales to someone else.
We have seen some Explorers make this change from hands-on to delegator through the route of mentoring and teaching. As discussed, you are a gifted recruiter of talent. Mentoring that talent is the next step. In fact, you can satisfy your urge to control by showing others how you think, solve problems, and convert ideas to systematic action. You will find that many of the people you have attracted are already receptive to your approach. So give them the coaching they need to achieve the level of proficiency you require to let go. As your business reaches scale, the return on your efforts will be far higher in tackling progressively bigger and more complex problems, while building your crew members’ capacity to operate the day-to-day business operations.
Focus on next-generation solutions and beyond: With your newfound time (from executing the advice above), you should stoke your problem-solving powers by raising your company’s solution set to the next level. This means converting stand-alone solutions to product or service lines, converting lines to platforms, and transforming the platforms to a plan for geographic market expansion. This kind of solution architecture at each level is likely to appeal to your systematic problem structuring and solving, while expanding the reach and impact of your venture.
This step, and step 1, requires you to let others in to your most private thoughts about where you feel your industry is headed. As an Explorer, you need insights and perspectives from others. And equally important, you need sparring partners to test and advance these ideas. You must fight your instinct to tackle this as a lone wolf.
As your business scales and the problems accelerate in size and complexity, you need to anneal your ideas in the heat of ideas of others who are your intellectual peers. If you have formed your board effectively, you will find some of this talent within that group, but also look in places like universities, consulting firms, and other industry thought leaders.
See the system aspects in the softer issues: Sure, it’s easier to think through inanimate problems that have a consistent pattern to them, like machines and software. But it is the animate ones that actually scale and deliver your business vision. As Mark Bonfigli illustrated, you can use your systems thinking to address how best to attract, measure, and continue to cultivate the talent you need to scale. Think of it this way: your organization’s culture may well be the most important code you crack to help your business grow to its full potential.
Share the ball: On issues large and small, you will create more ownership and, most importantly, a stronger emotional bond between individuals and their work if you share key decisions that affect the day-to-day performance of your team. Ajay Goyal runs a fast-growing payments company called Prepay Nation. He is a classic Explorer who figured out how to use the cell-phone-billing infrastructure to transfer cash to family members around the world. He describes how he elevates the performance of his team: “We give our employees the freedom to work from home within the confines of clearly defined targets and objectives.”
This strategy has attracted many working mothers who are diligent and committed members of his team, albeit from home. Ajay told us, “We don’t have a heavy-handed approach. We give them the freedom, and they return the favor by going out of their way to make our organization run better.” However, to ensure everyone is collaborating on a common agenda, he now asks each person to come to the office twice a week (or as needed) for white-boarding sessions. “We share ideas, problems, and identify ways to run the business better, from cost savings to customer service—we unleash the creativity of the group.”
Delegate to C-level buffers: Consider relying on a highly effective chief people officer and a cadre of direct reports who can buffer the rougher edges of your intensity with your crew members. For example, Brian O’Kelley has several direct reports who do this for him, and Brian Coester has someone he refers to as “the adult in the room.” This person helps translate his idiosyncratic style into less intimidating and more productive approaches others can follow.
For this delegation strategy to work, you’ll need to select your lieutenants carefully. Ideally, they appreciate not only your rational problem-solving strengths, but also your vision, and, with the patience and tact you may lack or may be unwilling to invoke, they can help translate your vision to others.
- Show a little humanity: Bryan Roberts, a venture capital partner at Venrock, has helped create many unicorns (startups valued at over $1 billion) in health care. He notes: “As people become more successful and important in the world, they become less like sentient beings and more convinced that whatever they do is right.” Roberts’s observation seems particularly important for Explorers, who have a tendency to distance themselves from others. In our experience, Goyal’s approach of allowing his followers to get closer emotionally can engender a whole new level of awe and, consequently, inspiration. We encourage you Explorers to study carefully how Crusaders work their magic in this regard. A little emotional connection can go a long way for you.
Once you gain perspective and insight about which Builder Personality elements are holding you back, you can unleash a whole new set of strategies for growth. We encourage you to read all the chapters in part 1, because embedded in each chapter are lessons or techniques you can use to become a stronger builder. In chapter 9, we introduce the concept of the master builder and invite you to aspire to a higher level of building skills and techniques.
