Bob Pozen thinks you’re the CEO of your own Business of One

Xfund is blessed with a group of distinguished faculty advisors, including Robert C. Pozen, who is also a venture partner with the fund.

Bob is the former executive chairman of MFS Investment Management, vice chairman of Fidelity Investments, and president of Fidelity Management & Research Company. He is currently a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Bob is also the author of the 2012 bestseller Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours. This spring, he and co-author Alexandra Samuel received praise for their new book,Remote, Inc.: How to Thrive at Work…Wherever You Are. The book offers timely, pragmatic advice for anyone seeking to make remote work more productive and satisfying.

Incorporating research, profiles of real professionals, and helpful chapter takeaways, it’s an easy-to-read guide with powerful tips — whether you started remote work during the pandemic or you’ve been working from home for years.

Below, Bob shares some highlights of the book, including tips for organizations creating remote work policies, why we should move away from inputs-based accountability systems, and how an entrepreneurial mindset benefits remote workers.

A major premise of the book is that remote workers should think like a “business of one.” What does that mean?

That’s the central concept of the book — when working remotely, you ought not to think of yourself as an employee taking directions and instructions from your boss. Instead, think of yourself as a small business owner who owns their own time and resources. This implies a very different relationship with your boss. Your boss becomes your client. Your client has the right to tell you what he or she wants you to deliver, but it’s up to you how, when, and where you do the work to deliver it.

The key behind this approach is results, not inputs. If you can agree with your boss on the results, you can have greater autonomy to work when, where, and how you please. We had surveys done for us that make it clear that autonomy, when you’re working remotely, is the key to both your productivity and job satisfaction. The more autonomy you have, the more efficient and happier you are.

What makes this “business of one” concept operational is what we call success metrics. Success metrics let you know when you’ve succeeded with a project. It’s our notion of what a results-oriented system ought to look like.

Success metrics are critical for three reasons:

1. They clarify between you and your boss what you want to achieve, and what these general objectives really mean.
2. Once you’ve developed success metrics, you should be able to work whenever you want as long as you hit those success metrics.
3. They keep your boss from having to micro-manage — your boss doesn’t care, as long as you are meeting the success metrics, about what hours of the day you’re working, or what days of the week.

It’s the concept of the “business of one” that leads you to treat your boss as your client, and that concept is operationalized in success metrics.

Many organizations are rethinking their approach to remote work. How can they design the best remote work model for their needs?

There have been thousands of surveys showing that most professionals don’t want to be all remote or all in person. They want some kind of hybrid — that could mean two, three, or four days a week at the office. Each organization should strive to find its “Goldilocks plan” — not too much remote work and not too little. To determine the right balance, we argue you have to look at five factors that together we call FLOCS:

• F is function: How much of a particular job requires brainstorming and collaborating, or alternatively individual concentration? If it’s the latter, that militates toward being at home. But if you need a lot of collaboration and brainstorming, that militates toward in person.
• L is location: If you’re located in a place where everybody is easily able to get to one central headquarters, it’s easy to see that suggests more time in the office. But, for example, if you’re all located in certain parts of California, where you have to commute more than an hour and a half each way, you want to be careful about having too many days in the office.
• O is organization: I think this is the most critical point. We see a lot of CEOs of various organizations saying everybody needs to be in the office three days a week or more. Even JPMorgan Chase chairman Jamie Dimon recently said he thinks everyone should be back in the office this fall. My strong view is that an organization is a compilation of different teams, and it doesn’t make sense to use the same rules for optimal hybrid design across all teams. Think of financial services. You have an investment team, technology team, marketing team, customer service team, and so on. You have to understand your organization and how it is broken down into teams.
• C is culture: Similarly, we see that many senior executives feel it’s really important that people come back to the office to maintain the company’s culture. I think that’s partially right, but I don’t think it requires you to be in the office five days a week. I think it does mean you have to be in the office some days a week. And if you’re a national remote organization, you need to get together two or three times a year in person. Onboarding in person is also important.
• S is scheduling: There are practical questions, like how should we utilize office space? Companies want to reduce their commercial office space, and I think they can. I’m in favor of rotating two teams through the same office space. I’m not in favor of hoteling, where people just pick whichever desk is available. I think people want to have some sense of permanence.

Organizations can analyze these five factors to create an optimal remote work hybrid model — which will differ team by team within the organization.

How does accountability change in your “business of one” remote work model?

In my view, it’s crazy in a knowledge-based economy to be counting inputs like hours worked.

A lot of people say to me, what if my boss is afraid to get off hours? These bosses are thinking that maybe hours are a bit arbitrary and artificial, but at least we can count on them, we know that people are working, and maybe we can even put software on their computers to ensure they’re working their hours. They’re not willing to get off hours without a different system of accountability. To me, success metrics is that system of accountability — when you agree on outputs, you can be held accountable for them.

For example, you could spend two weeks on a project and produce something that isn’t very good. Do you think your boss would say, “well, she spent a lot of time on it, so it’s good”? And if you spent two days on a project and it turns out great, would your boss then say “well, it only took a few days, so I’m not that keen on it.” Of course not — your output is what’s important.

We need to move away from an hours-worked, input-based system, which has what I view as artificial accountability, and instead get to a more functional accountability system based on outputs. Success metrics can operationalize this.

Your book has a great chapter on meetings and time management. Can you share some guiding principles for this?

One guiding principle is to not have back-to-back online meetings! That’s a guiding principle that’s violated all the time. Some people are going from 8 in the morning to 6 in the evening, one meeting after another, and that’s crazy. I’m strongly of the view that you need to have a 15-minute break between meetings plus a free hour in the morning and a free hour in the afternoon for thinking.

A second thing is learning how to avoid meetings. Ask for an agenda. If you receive an agenda, you’ll find that a lot of meetings aren’t worth attending. Don’t go to a meeting if it doesn’t serve your priorities.

Then, third, it’s the just the basics. Keep meetings short — no more than 45 minutes and hopefully less.

Finally, there’s what I call good meeting structure — have a good beginning, where the issues are stated, have a lot of debate and discussion, and have good closure, so people can walk away and actually know what was decided and what the next steps are.

These simple rules are violated all the time. That’s why people’s lives are cluttered with meetings they really shouldn’t be going to.

Besides meetings, the other time-sink is being flooded with messages. We suggest strongly that you use filters for your messages. Second, look at the sender and subject and skip over the messages that aren’t really worth reading.

We use an approach called OHIO — Only Handle It Once. If you have a really important message from an important person, answer it right then and there if you can. It will feel good and you won’t lose it, and it won’t pile up on your to-do list.

You’re a venture partner and faculty advisor with Xfund. How did you come to the company?

Patrick was my research assistant when I was teaching at Harvard Business School. For a few years, I taught there while I was executive chairman at MFS. He worked with me on putting together a new course I was teaching, and we remained friends afterwards.

I encouraged him as he started his own operation. I’m an advisor to the fund and I’m personally invested in the fund. I really think that makes a difference.

I’m a big fan of Patrick — I’ve known him for years and he was a brilliant student at Harvard, where he got his law degree and business degree together.

Lastly, what advice do you have for founders?

My advice to founders is to understand the difference between a great technology and a great business. Being at MIT, I’ve talked to lots of founders. I hear about every great new technology, and many of them are great technologies — but that doesn’t make them a great business. You’ve really got to think a lot harder about how you translate a great technology to become a great business. You’ve got to figure out where your comparative advantage is as a business, where your starting point should be, and how you can get a customer base. That’s a very different process.

Second of all, be flexible. Every successful company I’ve seen has started off in one direction but quickly learned that certain things were successful and certain things weren’t. They’ve adapted and re-oriented, and that’s been critical to their success. It’s okay to make a mistake, but it’s not okay to make the same mistake over and over.

Originally published at https://blog.xfund.com on January 9, 2022.