[MUSIC] The other example of a, of a start up company with a unique management model is a company that you've never heard of called Happy Limited. It is an IT training company based in London. And it's run and founded by a chap called Henry Stewart you see in the picture. Now, obviously I'm choosing this as a very, very different model to the Google model, because there are, there are hundreds of companies out there like Happy. And I'm just going to tell you very briefly what their model is. It's a company that, that sells computer training. And so if you want to learn how to, you know, how to, how to do Excel spreadsheet analysis, for example, you can go to Happy, and they'll run a training course for you. Henry started this company because he was really fed up with how bad quality information technology training typically was. And he's a little bit of a maverick, he's a fun guy, and he decided to create a company in his own image. And I won't go through the details of it. There's going to be a, a case provided in the course room for you to read up on it in detail. But he decided he was not going to create an ordinary company. He was going to create a company where the entire management principle was based on the assumption that employees know best. And his role was very much just to sort of coach them to hire good people. Coach them, and leave them to get on with it. So, I have a couple of other things he says, for example are, look, people work best when they feel good about themselves. So, my job, as their leader, is essentially to create a happy working environment. He practices what he preaches. He says, we hire for attitude and train for skill. We hire people who are just very positive, high energy people and we give them the technological, technical training they need. We celebrate mistakes. We're encouraging people to make mistakes because it's only by making mistakes that we learn. Any project, for example, that, that people want to do, he will preapprove it. He will not review it before giving them the money. He just says, go ahead, do it. Now the key point here is this is a company of 30 people. This is a company which is almost by design staying small. And by virtue of the fact it's still small, it continues to operate on these somewhat unusual principles. Henry has not attempted to scale the company in the way that Google has scaled, and I think it's fair to assume that if he did scale the company, he would have to adapt some of his management practices. The point is, of course, that it's much easier to have innovative management practices when you're a small company, when you know everybody, when you're able to manage the thing on an informal basis. So a few summary points around essentially creating an innovative management model, as a startup. First of all, by starting with a clean sheet of paper, you are in a position to impose your own values on that company. You don't have to inherit an old model and rethink it. You simply do things the way that you see fit. Secondly, it's important to get the, the governance right. In other words, to make sure that you actually have the right systems in place for giving people responsibilities. Now, most small companies of course start as small private companies. They don't have external venture capital. But as soon as you start to grow, and as soon as external investors become involved, like Google, you have to be very thoughtful about ensuring that you continue to do things the way that you want. Because it's a fair bet that as soon as you hit the public markets, as soon as become listed you're going to get an awful lot of very traditional pressures to do things in very traditional ways. Third, it's important to get the right people. It's a fairly obvious point, but you need to make sure that the people running the organization, not just yourself, but the people immediately below you are people who actually share your values. And it's particularly challenging when you decide to step down as the founder, to make sure that the right person or the right people take over from you. Many, many very innovative companies struggle when they move from founders to successors. And then, finally, as I've already hinted sustaining this model as you grow is difficult. Not just because issues around governance and ownership and control, but also simply because as you grow, the inevitable consequences of that are that you have to impose some level of structure, some sort of processes to, to manage complexity. And of course, as soon as you do that, you run the risk that you dilute the very essence of what you're doing. I would argue that Google of, you know, of all the kind of 50,000 person plus companies in the world, has done the best job so far of maintaining that informal culture that they'd had at the outset.
