In my work as an executive coach to startup CEOs, founders, and executives, I too often see leaders get frustrated and disappointed when their team fails to understand or embody a core value. But when you’re at the top, you have to take responsibility. If your team isn’t living the values, it’s on you. You need to take a different approach. While docs and slides with values are a great starting point, I’ve found one way to increase the odds that people will “get” your core values is to attach them to stories. So instead of me telling you why a good story is valuable, let me show you.
The year is 1898. Edison is the time’s Elon and “startups” build on electricity instead of internet. The telegraph is only a half century old, the lightbulb freshly twenty, and the telephone barely a teenager. It is the installation phase of the third industrial revolution, the “age of steel, electricity, and heavy engineering.”1
The day is April the ninth. President William McKinley will declare war in twelve days, marking the start of the Spanish-American War. In Elbert Hubbard’s, A Message to Garcia, the President needs to get a message to General Calixto García, the leader of the Cuban rebels.2 3 4 Someone recommends First Lieutenant Andrew Rowan, “[He] will find Garcia for you, if anyone can.”5
Hubbard paints a heroic portrait of Lt. Rowan. First, and perhaps almost as important as his eventual delivery of the letter, when asked to deliver the letter, Rowan does not ask, “Where is García?” Or any other “idiotic” questions. Instead, the Lieutenant takes the letter and—forever the good soldier—embarks on his mission. He arrives in Cuba via dinghy, traverses the Cuban jungle, and risks hostile territory full of armed combatants.
It would yet be forty years until The Wizard of Oz, but Hubbard’s description conjures images of lions, tigers and bears—oh my! Rowan delivers the message. He is a man—as Hubbard remarkably put it before the internet—who will “do the thing.”6
The story of Rowan’s eager, willing, and capable delivery of a message to García takes up a mere quarter of Hubbard’s two page essay, however. In the remainder, Hubbard decries the state of the average American worker. Hubbard dares the reader to ask anyone in your office to write up a brief memo on the life of Correggio, an Italian renaissance painter.7 8 Hubbard suggests that, instead of the average worker “doing the thing” and writing up a memo, they’ll ask a series of questions they should be answering on their own:
“Who was he? Which encyclopedia? Where is the encyclopedia? Was I hired for that? Don’t you mean Bismarck? What’s the matter with Charlie doing it? Is he dead? Is there any hurry? Shan’t I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself? What do you want to know for?”9
Hubbard’s tribute to the rare reliable man was a hit with numbers likely in the millions.10 Thomas Edison apparently loved it so much that he adapted the story for a silent film in 1916. It was again adapted for the screen in 1936. The phrase, “to carry a message to Garcia” became common enough as a rallying cry for leaders in search of their Rowan that even President Richard Nixon uses the phrase on the Watergate tapes.11
“A Message to García” is achievement rhetoric at its finest, something we could use more of.
The piece is an homage to the rare reliable man who “does his work when the ‘boss’ is away… when given a letter for García, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions,” and does the thing assigned.12
Hubbard’s conclusion to the tribute is rousingly poetic:
“Civilization is one long anxious search for just such individuals. Anything such a man asks will be granted; his kind is so rare that no employer can afford to let him go. He is wanted in every city, town, and village - in every office, shop, store and factory. The world cries out for such; he is needed, and needed badly—the man who can… carry a message to Garcia.” 13
Founders are capable of getting a message to García. It’s what makes them founders. As Hubbard says, civilization is built on and depends on founders getting metaphorical messages to García. Messages that, when delivered, usher in waves of technological progress.
But at some point, founders need to find other men and women to deliver messages to García. They need executives, managers, and individual contributors who, when given a task, complete the task without questions. They do the thing.
In the madhouse pressure cooker environment of running a startup, too few CEOs, founders, and executives recognize the power of a story to set expectations. They pop a value like “ownership” up on a slide in an all-hands and expect people to get what it means. Some might. Many won’t. Instead, take ten minutes. Tell the story of García. Let it be known that any and all who can carry a message to García on your team will be rewarded, because that is what ownership and reliability look like.
After all, the message you’re responsible for getting to García is building a team capable of getting their messages to their García.
On June 12th, I married my wife, Kate on the island of Crete in Greece. Eighty of our favorite people, family and friends, joined us to celebrate. Kate and I almost went the low-key city-hall route, but decided to go big instead. And we’re so glad we did.
One thing that I’ve gone over and over about in my mind since is the value of making a big deal out of things that are a big deal. Taking the time to write speeches, design the set list, dress like we mean it, hear each others’ thoughtful messages to one another, and cry and embrace our parents as they did the same was something I’ll never forget.
Similarly, my grandfather passed away last year. We didn’t hold a funeral for him for nearly a year. Rites of passage exist for a reason, and when we do away with them, delay them, or minimize them, we do ourselves a disservice.
So whether it’s a wedding, a funeral, a launch party, a celebration for hitting this month’s number, or recognizing whoever at the company carried a message to García, get everyone together and mark the occasion.
Why We’re Unprepared for Co-Founder Relationships
As an executive coach to startup CEOs, founders, and executives, I see more than my fair share of co-founder conflict. At some point last year, I decided to sit down and write some thoughts on why so many co-founders end up at each other's throats. In this piece, I contrast how we get into relationships with co-founders with how we go about dating and eventually getting married to our life partners. Given that Kate and I just got married, I figured this was an apt time to bring this one out of the archives.
I hope you enjoyed this issue of Essays by Andy. If you’re looking for an executive coach and are interested in learning more about working together, head over here.
That’s it for this issue. I’m looking forward to what’s next!
Andy.
Footnotes