Beth Viner

They had to hire in those people, the doers, from outside.

And they definitely did not come from the startup world, but they absolutely knew how to get that product into that retail store.

You can probably see where this is going.

So maybe to save you a little bit of anxiety, it didn't blow up in their faces.

Because Alex and Jordana, well, they're pretty smart.

They did all the things that you and I both know to manage that kind of change in tension.

Building respect, learning and development, internal communication.

But the thing that made it all work right away between the dreamers and the doers ...

money.

They tied the compensation, in this case in the form of shares and stock options, of that new retail sales team, not just to their ability to put product in retail stores, but to the full performance of the business, DTC and retail, and vice versa.

And that made all the other things, building relationships, cross-business line sharing, internal communications, happen.

just at a much more rapid rate.

So make sure to get buy-in and use money.

I'm also a fan of a corporate mosh pit.

Zero-to-one humans, the dreamers, they tend to move a little bit more quickly than those around them.

And it's often implicit that they are there to break existing norms, processes and paths to previous success.

But I've seen organizations forget

that on the other side of those norms, processes and paths are humans, the doers.

They tweak existing products.

They probably train whole parts of your organizations in new service protocols.