Shaan's 9 Unorthodox Management Tips

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) shares his tried and true unconventional management tips that you won't learn in business school. ----- Links: * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Show Notes: (02:40) - Tip 1 Dr. House (05:25) - Tip 2 The Holiday (08:30) - Tip 3 Misery Love Company (09:00) - Tip 4 Hired Too Many (12:45) - Tip 5 Super Power (17:40) - Tip 6 Tesla Master Plan (20:15) - Tip 7 Calendar Audit (21:10) - Tip 8 Peer Groups (22:00) - Tip 9 Kickoff Document ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Shaan Puri?

  What's up y'all? Sean here. Sam is in Europe, traveling around with the fam. And so I'm on my own today. And I wanted to do something cool, and I think I got a great idea. So I believe, here's my guess, I think this pod is going to be one that people really, really like, because I know I would have wanted to hear this at some point in time. And the reason why is because most of the people who listen to this podcast are in some form of leadership, right? You might have started your own company or your own business. You might be kind of an exec somewhere, or a manager somewhere, or you want to be a leader, right? So, most people who don't want to be leaders are not listening to a podcast like this. So, the problem is, me and everybody else sucks. Everybody sucks the first time that they are managing people.

• 0:52Shaan Puri?

  And, and this isn't like, you know, how to manage people 101. There's a lot of books that are written about this. There's some best practices, there's common sense. But I wanted to share some of the unorthodox, some of the weird things that I do, that I have found work for me. And they might not work for everybody, but they work for me. And, not all of these people are going to agree with, not all of these will work for you. But, again, they all work for me. Nobody, I couldn't find any of this stuff in a book. I heard about these either from somebody, or I just kind of made it up on my own. And so I think I have five, maybe six, different things that I do that are unorthodox, but work. Okay, so let me start with number one.

• 1:36Shaan Puri?

  And this is called Dr. House. It's inspired by Dr. House. So, if anybody watches the TV show House, he always does this thing. The show is like, there's this genius doctor, but he's kind of like a curmudgeon. And, all the other doctors really respect him because he's amazing, but, he's kind of hard to work with. And one of the things he does that's amazing, but hard to work with, is, he has these like three junior doctors who are kind of like, he's, I don't know, advising them, or whatever. They work under him. And when a patient comes in and they run a test to try to figure out what's wrong with the person, he doesn't just look at it and say, here's what's wrong with the person, right? First of all, it's usually not that straightforward. Second of all, even if he kind of has an idea, he doesn't spoon feed it to his,

• 2:21Shaan Puri?

  to his team. Instead, he will usually slap the, the, the, like, maybe the scan or the data or the, the x-ray or whatever up on a screen and he'll say, what do you see here? Or he'll say, what's weird about this? Or he'll say, what's interesting about this? And then the team has to start thinking and getting curious and looking at the thing and saying, well, there must be something there. What do I see? And this is really effective. I do this all the time. I will take, let's say, some data I'm looking at. When I'm curious about something, I see something that makes me go, hmm. And what I used to do is I used to just like share that with the team. Hey, guys, here's what I found. Look at this data. This data shows that A is B and C, right? I would like give them a conclusion. I'm basically spoon feeding them an answer. They'd read it, they'd say, yeah, that makes sense.

• 3:06Shaan Puri?

  And then they would go on with their day, right? Because they didn't have to struggle to understand it. They didn't have to be curious enough to go find it. They just got spoon fed an answer and they say, yeah, yeah, I'm not surprised by that. All right, I'm gonna move on. Or, oh, that's weird. Okay, sounds like you got the answer. I'm gonna, again, move on. So I do it the other way, which does three things. One, it trains the team to be curious and clever, right? Because you're not looking for some luck. I'm not telling you to go do 10 more analyses. I'm saying there's something in this. What is it? It's a little bit of a riddle. The second is it's not a gotcha, right? Like, I'm genuinely asking, because they will see things that you don't see. So even if you saw one interesting thing, they might find two others that you didn't really appreciate.

• 3:48Shaan Puri?

  And the last is it trains everybody on how to, because, you know, maybe one person out of the group will see the interesting thing, but the other four will say, why didn't I see that? And that trial and error, that like guess and check, is how people get better at stuff. So you'll train a team of curious, clever people who get good at finding insights in data. And so that's the Dr. House technique. I recommend you try it rather than spoon feeding your team answers. Okay, the second one I learned from my wife. My wife was a consultant. And she used to go to these companies and I was like, it was always like, I'm getting alignment, right? She would go, it would be a board meeting of like, you know, Yahoo's board meeting. It's like, you have 10 executives at Yahoo and they cannot, they all think they're on the same page.

• 4:32Shaan Puri?

  And then only when you ask them certain questions, do you realize that like, everybody has like a different, you know, game plan, vision of what we're trying to do here, et cetera, et cetera. So she got good at sussing that out, but people are a little bit, um, not defensive, but they're a little bit limited when you just ask them very literal, logical questions that tap into only the analytical part of their brain. Like if you say, what are our three key objectives for the year? That sort of feels like they're taking a math test. And so she does this thing that was called the holiday party. The holiday party tactic is she had me, she had me go to a whiteboard and she goes, all right, let's fast forward. It's Christmas Eve of this year and we're at the company holiday party. I want you to start drawing what's at that company holiday

• 5:16Shaan Puri?

  party. I'm like, what do you mean? She's like, just draw things that would make it an awesome company holiday party. So I'm like, okay. So all of a sudden I'm having kind of fun. I'm something creative. I'm drawing. I'm just thinking of cool shit that could be at a party, right? So my guard is down. And so, you know, I'll draw like whatever. There's a DJ and I, we kind of laugh because the DJ booth is like, you know, my drawing is bad. And then I'll draw the next thing. And then she'll say, okay, what's on the screen? What are you celebrating? And that question, what are we celebrating is like, that's kind of like, what are we trying to do this year, right? What's the milestone that we hit? And instead of saying, what are we trying to do? It's assuming it's already done, that we're already celebrating, we're popping bottles because we hit 1 million users or 10 million downloads or 100 million in revenue, whatever it is. And so I'd, you know,

• 6:00Shaan Puri?

  we'd say our, our big North Star goal. Cause it's like, that screen can only have one big thing on it that we're all cheersing our glass to. So what is that North Star metric? And then she would say, cool, let's walk around like, you know, who's at this party? And you know, there's this little exercise. And as she unfolded this party, it kind of, at first it got me in the mood for winning, right? Because it's like, I'm already working backwards from the assumption that we've won. Then I identify the North Star goal. And then after we do that little game, it only takes two minutes, then we would say, all right. So how are we going to get there? Right? What would be the things that we would need to do now so that that party happens? And all of a sudden, we're talking and brainstorming from a place of certainty and confidence,

• 6:42Shaan Puri?

  rather than fear and doubt about not being able to pull it off and the stress, right? Because when you're in fight or flight, your brain only works in a very limited capacity compared to when you are, you know, at ease, relaxed, which is why, you know, great ideas come to you in the shower because you're relaxed. You have warm water pouring on top of your head. And so your brain kind of melts away and can start to, you know, put together different data points that are not there when you're tense. And so I love this tactic of the holiday party drawing game. It really loosens people up. It gets them thinking, it focuses them on the North Star goal. And then when you make a plan after that, they go into that plan from in a state of mind of we already won. Okay, now here's the opposite.

• 7:24Shaan Puri?

  This is called the misery loves company tactic. Okay, so whenever we're making a plan, at the beginning of any plan, everything seems achievable. And everyone's optimistic. And it's hard to say, it's one thing to ask somebody, what are the key risks in this? And then people, you know, again, they get a little defensive, they're using the logical part of your brain. So a better question is, you know, if I was to, let's say, you know, you go do this, I go do my thing and we get busy. And, you know, six months from now, 12 months from now, we catch back up. We're getting a beer here at the local pub in the afternoon. It's four in the afternoon, we go grab a beer and we say, man, that idea was so cool.

• 8:08Shaan Puri?

  Let's assume it went wrong, right? So, man, that idea was so cool. Can't believe it didn't work out. And what happened? What is the most likely reason we would give that things went south?

• 8:23Shaan Puri?

  And this is a way to identify the core risk, the chief assumption, the riskiest proposition in your plan is to sort of work backwards from we're getting a beer, we're hanging out, it's already failed. And we say, man, that thing had so much potential. What went wrong? What do you think is the number one reason it might go wrong? And then because you're identifying that upfront, you can now like work against that. You can get, you can game plan around that. Okay, here's another one. I find that people get very defensive about the status quo, especially the leaders, because as a leader, you're sort of responsible for the way that the company works, right? You're like, you're responsible for how many people work at your company, right? If I said, did you hire too many people? Most people don't

• 9:08Shaan Puri?

  want to say yes. And the reality is that certainly, I don't know, 20, 30, 40% of the time, the answer truly is yes, you've hired too many people. But if you ask CEOs, they'll rarely ever say yes. And in the same way, you'll say, are you working on a bunch of useless stuff? Or are you working on a bunch of extraneous things? They would say, no, I mean, these are all important, they're valuable. Right? So people get defensive about their current plan. And so how do you get, how do you get people to, to identify the fat in their, their plan, right? Be able to trim the fat without the pressure and the stress of them feeling like they're wrong, or they're being blamed, or that they're gonna have to make some tough decisions, have some hard conversations, and because of that, they just want to avoid it. So here's what I do. We play a game. It's sort of like

• 9:53Shaan Puri?

  that, you know, that F murder, marry game, right? Where you decide, you know, out of these three choices, who would you, who would you murder? Who would you marry? Who would you F? So similarly, let's just focus on the murder part, which is like, if I asked you, right? So I could sit down with, with any manager in my company, I could say, in your team, I know you love your team, and I know they're, they're all great. They're all great in their own ways. But if you had to do it. What would be the three, who would be the three people that you would cut if you had to cut? Not saying you will, where you're not going to cut anybody, but who would those three people be? Similarly, like out of all the projects and initiatives you're doing, what are the three that you would cut if you had to cut three initiatives off? Which ones would

• 10:34Shaan Puri?

  go? And if you could do this with anything, right? Customers, all your customers on the roster, your clients, who are the three that you would cut where they're just a pain in the ass? It's not worth, the juice is not worth the squeeze. And if you can create a safe, a safe space, basically where somebody can freely identify what they would cut if they were gonna cut, but don't worry, we're not asking you to cut anything. And you do it yourself, right? You're not just asking others to do this, but you do it yourself, and you think aloud, maybe do it as a group, like, hey, what would we, what projects would we cut? You know, which team members are really not, you know, are at the bottom, right? There certainly is a top and a bottom. Who is that, right? Which customers are the top and the bottom? And if you can identify those, it plants a seed. And people, once they've

• 11:17Shaan Puri?

  said it out loud, they've heard a truth. It's very hard to unsee a truth. And it might be a month later, or two months later, or three months later, but eventually they will decide to trim some of the fat, either on their team, their projects, or their client list, that will help the team grow. So that's the F murder Mary tactic. Okay, I think I've done, what is that? Four tactics. Okay, let's do another one. This is the superpower one. So this is a way to build people up. So I did this at my, my last startup, and people really resonate with this, which is I made a presentation about each person in the team. I did this on a Friday afternoon. I said, hey, guys, let's go do a little happy hour. And I said, I got a presentation for you guys. I said, you know, I've learned that in it, in any team, you can, you can look for two types of people. You can look for

• 12:01Shaan Puri?

  people who lack weaknesses, meaning they're pretty well-rounded, they have no fatal flaws, but they may not be great at anything, right? They're, they're just good, they're, they're at least good at everything. Or you can have some people that are amazing at some things and kind of weak in other areas. And I've learned that the, the best performing teams are filled with people who are amazing in at least one area. So you're hiring for an extreme strength, not a lack of weakness, right? That's an Andreessen Horowitz framework that I really loved. And so I said, I'd like to, you know, I said, but the funny thing is, for most people, they don't, they're not even aware of what their extreme strength is. And because you're too close to it, it's so normal for you to be great at it. You don't even really realize you're great at it at that at some point.

• 12:46Shaan Puri?

  It's other people who pointed out. So I'd like to point out for you this superpower that I've seen each of you have. And then I would give, and so I put each person's face on a slide. I would say, hey, this is like, for example, hey, this is Derek. Derek's our designer. Derek, what I've noticed is your superpower. I don't know if you're aware of this, but most designers that I've worked with, they're creative types. They're sort of like, you know, messy desk procrastinator types. They pull all nighters when they get creative inspiration and they do amazing work sometimes. And other times, you know, they get stuck with sort of a creative writer's block of sorts. I said, Derek, your superpower is that you're a great designer, but you're like the mailman. You deliver every day at the same time, right?

• 13:28Shaan Puri?

  Like I give you the, the brief, I scribble a, a scribble, a poorly written address of where, where I'm trying to get this package. And you're able to interpret it like a mailman and say, oh, I know where this is trying to go. And then you deliver it every day at 5:00 PM before you leave. And I said, I, you're like the mailman, I said, and you know, you don't work on the weekends. I know that you're not the type of guy that I should be hitting up for that, like that crazy project we're going to do on the weekend. So you're like the mailman, you deliver every day of the week, except for Sundays. And so I gave him basically a superpower, which is you have this amazing ability to consistently take a loose set of instructions and deliver on it. And I gave him a nickname that goes with it. That's why I call you the mailman. And then, yeah, that's your superpower. And I gave it a little symbol and then I like, you know, then went to the next person. I said, oh, this is Furcon.

• 14:12Shaan Puri?

  Furcon is, uh, you know, he's not going to win any awards for, for being the most eloquent speaker or the, the most politically, um, you know, polished kind of guy. But man, when I, when you talk to Furcon, it's almost like he's allergic to bullshit. Like, you know, when someone's allergic to peanuts, you can't even have a peanut dish. You, you feel uncomfortable taking peanuts around them because you might kill them. I said, that's what it's like when I bring bullshit around you. I don't even feel comfortable saying bullshit around you because you're so good at seeing through bullshit and saying, that doesn't make sense. Or wait, I thought you said this other thing. So how, how could both of those be true? Right? And so I, you know, you were like, um, you were allergic to bullshit. That is your superpower. You just can't stand it.

• 14:54Shaan Puri?

  And that because of that, it makes the rest of us up our game and not bring that, bring half baked plans or incongruent, illogical plans to you because you'll sniff it out in a second. And the beautiful thing is these things are both true and aspirational, meaning they are this way, but by giving it their superpower, they then want to live up to that identity you've given them. And so you can kind of architect the type of team you want by calling out areas they're good, but they may not be the best at it, or they may not be doing it all the time. But by giving them their superpower, they will start to do it more often. Okay, so that's the superpower technique. Okay, I'm going to give you three quick ones. The Tesla master plan. If you've never read it, Elon Musk wrote a master plan for Tesla,

• 15:38Shaan Puri?

  you know, back when it started. So he wrote the master plan V1 like 10 years ago, and then he wrote V2. And basically, he said, master plan V1 basically was like, you should go read it. I've handwritten his many times and then wrote ours, wrote my own plan for my own business after writing his. And so his plan basically says Tesla's job is to accelerate, you know, the societies move off of fossil fuels onto sustainable energy. To do that, we need to create a car that's high performance and high efficiency. And so we're going to start with the roadster, the expensive car, then we're going to make the next car, then we're going to make the mass market Model 3 car, blah, blah, blah.

• 16:21Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, you know, so in summary, here's the master plan. Build an expensive car to build the brand, build a less expensive car to get more people on it, then build the, use the economies of scale and the learnings from production to build a mass market car that will get to everybody, right? That's the master plan. And then he wrote a master plan V2. But it is very powerful if you can write the master plan for your company, right? It's basically, and it doesn't have to be right, right? But it's you putting it out there. What are we here to do? How do we plan to do it? And like, you know, here's the takeaway. And if you look at his writing style, it's a very empowering style. And so I like to take his master plan and then write my own. All right, the next one comes from the CEO coach called Matt McCary or something like

• 17:04Shaan Puri?

  that. He has this technique called the calendar audit. It's very simple. Imagine you print out your calendar from the last week and you look at every, every meeting that was scheduled, every kind of block of time that you used, and you take three highlighters. You take a green highlighter that says, "That was something that I enjoyed that gave me energy." You highlight those in green. Then you take a red highlighter, you say, "These ones that I highlighted in red are the ones that I felt like my soul was being sucked out of my body," right? Like, "These are the soul-crushing, energy-draining, things that I dread, parts, things of my day that I don't look forward to." You put those in red. And then you have the yellow that are like neutral. And you look at that and then you say, "Okay, this is an audit. I now need to take these red things and I need to figure out over time how I'm going to get more green

• 17:48Shaan Puri?

  than red, right? How I'm going to phase all the red away and get to only green." And that might be hiring somebody who does, who likes doing that thing, because what's red for you might be green for them. Or just getting rid of it, or minimizing the time you do it and saying, "Do we really need three meetings for this? Could we not just do it in one? Could this meeting be an email, right? Or whatever." So a calendar audit is a very valuable technique. Okay, so that was, so, so far, we've had, number one, the Doctor House screenshot technique. Number two, my wife's holiday party work-backwards question. Number three, the, "If we got a beer, saying, you know, saying, 'Man, it's a bummer that thing failed. Why did it fail?'" Right? That's number three. Number four is creating a safe space for the F-Murder Mary game, right? Who, who are the three that you would double down on? Who are the three that you would cut?

• 18:33Shaan Puri?

  Three is just a magic number. It might be 3,000 for you. I don't know. Whatever. It doesn't, the number doesn't matter. Same idea. What are the bottom 20% of things? What are the top 20% of things? So what you're trying to identify. And with a promise of, "We're not taking an action on this right now." Uh, so that's, what, four? Yeah, that's four. Number five was, tell each person their superpower and give it to your team as a presentation. They will live up to that reputation. Number six is the Tesla master plan. Number seven is the calendar audit. Okay, I'm gonna do two more, maybe three. Number eight is peer groups. So anytime I have an objective, like, let's say, I want to become a great poker player, or I want to get to 100,000 Twitter followers, or I want to build a D to C brand that does $50 million a year.

• 19:16Shaan Puri?

  I will create a text chat group of five other people who are in the same ballpark as me of where they're at now and have that same ambition as their top ambition. Mentors and advisors, overrated. Peer group, underrated. And so that's what I would do. And I would start by texting them, and then I would do like a once a month kind of call where we could spend three hours on the phone or in person hanging out, shooting the shit together, sharing tactics and strategies, what's working for them in trying to achieve your mutually shared goal. Okay, last one is the kickoff document. I think this is number nine. A kickoff document is a template that I have, and I could share this, but if you subscribe to my newsletter, I think you get it.

• 19:57Shaan Puri?

  So just go to sean pory.com, and I think you can get it. Or if not, just email me at [email protected]. Okay, so the kickoff document is basically something I do before I start a project, because I believe that clarity is power. And I think too often, people go into doing something without actually being clear of what are we trying to do here? Why are we trying to do it? How will we measure success? And what's the first thing that we should really do? And that's what a kickoff document does. So the kickoff doc has three sections. The first is, what are we trying to do? One liner. The next is, what's a win look like? And I define a win in two ways. I say, what's the floor of this win? Meaning, what is the minimum that I would consider like a successful, good outcome? Like, what's achievable thing?

• 20:41Shaan Puri?

  And then what's the F yeah win? Which is the like, the result that would make me say, F yeah, then that really worked. And so now I got kind of like a range. I have like the bottom goal, my floor goal, and then I have my stretch goal. And then I also do an anti-goal. Meaning, what are some traps that I could fall into along the way? That would like make this whole thing, even if I hit my goals, I would feel bad at the end of it, because I like did this other thing, right? Like, for example, we all have these in life, like, you know, I would love to be successful, but I don't want to, you know, screw over people along the way and carry that guilt with me, right? So that's like... Being successful financially would be your goal.

• 21:23Shaan Puri?

  I mean, you put some numbers around it, but then your anti-goal would be, I don't want to do this in a way that makes me feel unethical or ashamed in any way of what I did. I'd like to feel proud of it. Right? So those become your anti-goals. Or like, you know, I'd like to be successful, but I want to be able to make sure I'm home with my kids every day at five because that's really important to me. So an anti-goal would be, yeah, I made it happen, but I'm never home. Right? So my anti-goal would be, you know, never getting home before, you know, X time. And so it's important to identify your anti-goals. They're very clarifying for you.

• 21:56Shaan Puri?

  And the kickoff doc ends with one hour, your power hour. Basically like, what's something I could do in the next hour? That would just get like, create like momentum. Get me to a win. And so this is not like do some research or make a list. It's like get momentum towards the actual outcome. So if I want to, you know, increase sales, that's like make a sale. Make one sale. Or like, if I wanted to grow my list, my email list, it's like, I don't know, post a thread on Twitter in the next hour that will get some subscribers to my list. Just something to get the ball rolling that's action oriented. So you're not just always in planning mode. So those are nine different little tips and tricks that really work for me. That I don't think you'll learn most of those in, I don't know, business school or, you know, at your job that, you know, even if people try to do management training,

• 22:41Shaan Puri?

  it's usually not things like this. These are my kind of like, you know, unorthodox pet tricks that I like to do that help me, you know, with my companies. And so I hope that's helpful for you. If it is, let me know. You could tweet it at me, at Sean VP. If it's not helpful, tweet it at me saying, hey, you know, wasn't that helpful? Honest feedback. I love honest feedback. So either way, it works for me. I'm at Sean VP, which is S H A A N VP on Twitter. All right.