How did you approach your first 100 days?

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

How did you approach your first 100 days?

- So the first 100 days was a lot of listening. So I had a chance to meet with essentially every employee of the company. Certainly every team. Either through one-on-ones or brown bag lunches. Then we did a series of deep dives for every product line and business line. And was just trying to learn as much as I possibly could about the company, the team, the direction it had been heading, the direction where people wanted it to go. So there was a lot of listening. Rather than develop a 100 day plan, it was make sure I had a chance to understand where the people who knew the company best thought it was going and where it had been.

At that point I thought we were in a position where we needed to make some choices and decisions about defining the core. And based on my previous experience at a company like Yahoo, which was involved in a lot of different business, by design, I mean, Yahoo helped organize the internet for the masses. That was one of the reasons Yahoo was able to generate so much value to quickly. But in the later years, I think that same advantage, that same value proposition that Yahoo had established became an Achilles heel.

Because it was involved in so many different business lines, it invites a lot of competition within each of those verticals, and a company that could focus exclusively on one thing within that vertical, say Google in search or Amazon in E-commerce, for example, I think has a much higher likelihood of being successful. So that was one of the most valuable lessons I learned while I was at Yahoo, and LinkedIn was the next company I had a chance to be a part of. I did an EIR stint in-between. And I wanted to make sure that we had a very clear sense of what our core was, and what it was we were trying to accomplish.

And so one of the first things I did with the leadership team was codify our mission, our vision, our addressable opportunity, our strategy, our priorities, our measurable objectives, our culture and our values. And while that may sound like a lot, it's basically how a company defines its narrative. And it fits all on one page. And you don't have to limit yourself to one page, but it's an excellent forcing mechanism to be able to very clearly and simply articulate what a company, is about, what it's trying to accomplish, how it wants to accomplish it.

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/jeff-weiner-on-establishing-a-culture-and-a-plan-for-scaling/how-did-you-approach-your-first-100-days