CHAPTER 76
Leader Profile: Avid Larizadeh Duggan
Path to Leadership
I first met Avid back in 2001, when I was running product at eBay. I received a call from a friend I had worked with at Netscape, and he told me just to trust him and hire this person because he was sure she would become an exceptional product person. I did trust him, and he was right.
Avid studied engineering but wanted to learn product. After rising through the product organization at eBay, she decided to get her MBA at Harvard. Afterward, she went back and forth between the venture capital world—mostly at Google Ventures—and leading tech product companies, most recently at Kobalt Music.
Along the way, she's invested and advised several strong product companies, and has been a leader for Code.org (the organization helping women and minorities learn to code).
Because of her contributions to technology and beyond, she was recently awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE).
Leadership in Action
Avid's own words follow.
My leadership philosophy in an innovation‐driven context can be simplified into three main components: (1) trust and safety (2) freedom and autonomy, and (3) culture and purpose.
Trust and Safety
A leader is not supposed to have all the answers, but is supposed to ask the right questions, and more important, create an environment where the right questions are surfaced.
To do so, a leader needs to make her team feel safe. In this environment, no one is smarter than everyone else, trust is established, collaboration is natural, and conflicting ideas are frequent and comfortable because it is safe to be candid.
Teams must feel safe disagreeing with their peers and with their leaders. It is an environment where people don't fear failure because it is part of the process of iteration. That's how good ideas become great ideas.
It is an environment which celebrates a growth mindset rather than success at a point in time, encourages continuous learning, and rejects the know‐it‐alls. By bringing out the best in your teammates, you find the best in yourself.
Freedom and Autonomy
In a digital world where innovation is key, where data is flowing freely both inside and outside the company, and where change is constant, work has become increasingly complex, changeable, and informal in nature.
As a result, an organization needs to get rid of its traditional hierarchy—which mainly promotes people having interactions with others in their own department—in favor of a system which encourages input and collaboration from people with different skill sets across functions internally and externally with partners and customers.
Therefore, leaders need to focus on bringing strong people together and giving them greater freedom to generate ideas and execute them through collaboration.
A leader should articulate what needs to be done and why, and then let the team decide how to do it.
She will set things in motion, guide her team, and clear the obstacles when the team is in trouble.
This has similarities with the role of a product manager. She will have to work cross‐functionally with teammates and stakeholders, lead, influence, motivate, and trust them—without ever ordering them to do anything.
She will ensure they are motivated and know what their purpose is. She will coach them and help them develop in a safe environment. She will connect the dots internally and externally to empower her team with additional information, better tools, and efficiency.
She will ensure that they have the data they need to experiment and iterate quickly, as well as the autonomy to make informed decisions based on their learning. She will clarify the chaos in a world where change is a constant.
Culture and Purpose
Good leaders focus on culture and purpose because culture drives innovation and performance. The greatest capital of an organization is its people.
To innovate, people need autonomy and meaning. It is crucial that a leader define what the purpose is to make sure that everyone inside and outside the organization—including customers and partners—knows what they are doing to promote it.
This purpose needs to be clear and consistently communicated in the way it is messaged, as well as consistently reflected in every aspect of the day‐to‐day running of the company—from the types of hires made, to the processes used, and even to the way the office space is designed.
Innovation in Established Companies.
I have applied these principles in startups and established companies. The latter are much more challenging because they often are no longer the innovators.
They struggle with legacy technology and complex processes, while often complacent in the belief that their leading market position is secure because they have been in that position for a long time. They overestimate the speed at which they are able to innovate.
This is where the role of leaders becomes extremely important to the survival of the company.
Unless the senior leaders understand the true nature and urgency of the threat, they will not be willing to put the organization through the stress of change, despite its necessity—especially if that would cause a short‐term impact to profitability.
This is because consistent innovation in established companies requires radical changes in the way teams work, the technologies used, the skill sets required, the culture of the company, and as a result, the mindset of the leaders.
They need to put the principles described above in practice, starting with trust. Once the teams trust their leaders, they will be more willing to make change, as they won't fear the repercussions of not getting it right the first time.
This trust needs to go both ways, and leaders need to empower their teams to be autonomous, as most innovation comes from those on the frontline and not from the executives or the board.
And, critically, the teams need to understand why they are going through the upheaval of change and to what end and purpose. They need to be motivated by something larger than themselves.
Once an established company comes to realize that its future depends on significant and ongoing innovation, and it does not believe it has the muscles for this today, then there are really two options: the company can either innovate through acquisition, or it can learn to innovate through its own people.
To innovate through its own people requires the change to skills, culture, methods, and leadership that we've been talking about. And, yes, this is hard, takes time, significant investment, and focused commitment.
So for many established companies—especially legacy companies—they often believe it is easier to innovate through acquisition.
The challenge is that, in order to realize the benefits of these acquisitions, this often requires integrating the acquisitions deeply into the workings of the parent company. And if that parent company does not make most of the same changes to their leadership, culture, skills, and empowerment, they would need to innovate through their own people, the acquired teams that were behind the innovation leave, the innovative products decline, the happy customers are no longer so happy, and the company is back to where it started.
This is why I spend so much of my time and efforts helping leaders of companies to realize their role in leading the necessary changes.