From the February 23, 2014 New
York Times and the Corner
Office column by Adam Bryant and his interview with David
Rosenblatt, the Chief Executive of 1stdibs, an online marketplace
for high-end goods including art, antiques, jewelry and furniture.
(Tell Us About) Other
important lessons you’ve learned over your career?
When I was first
promoted to C.E.O., the hardest thing to figure out was, how do I spend my
time? On any given day, a C.E.O. could do almost anything or nothing, and it
would likely have little or no impact on the company, at least in the short
term. So I had to develop a set of rules to figure out how to manage my time.
I learned Rule
No. 1 from Irv Grousbeck, who teaches an entrepreneurship class at Stanford
Business School. And that is, very simply, “You can hire people to do
everything but hire people.” Rule No. 2 that I think about every day is, “Only
do the things that only I can do.” So if it’s someone else’s job to do it, I
try not to do it. If I find myself doing too many of those things that are
actually someone else’s job, then it relates back to Rule No. 1 — I probably
don’t have the right person in that role.
But just like
anyone in any role, it’s important to understand, where is my comparative
advantage? What am I better at than almost anyone else? To the extent that
there is something you’re better at than most other people, you should do it,
and then you should just make sure that your team complements you. The hard
thing for many C.E.O.’s, because this job requires a certain level of
confidence, is to figure out what you’re not good at and acknowledge that, and
then hire to offset your own limitations.
What else
about your leadership approach?
I
try to invest quite a bit of time in developing chemistry and sense of team
among my direct reports. Generally my feeling is that companies are like
families, in the sense that if the parents get along, then it’s likely that the
rest of the family will be relatively harmonious. But if the parents don’t get
along, it’s highly likely that there’s going to be conflict in the rest of the
family that, to some degree, mirrors the conflict between the parents.
And if the
executive team is talented and unified in their approach, treats each other
with respect and communicates openly, their behavior will be mirrored by
everybody in the company.
How do you
hire? What questions do you ask?
My approach is
pretty straightforward. I like to ask people to walk me through their lives
from the time they were young through the present. I pay particular attention
to transitions, because I think that says a lot about people’s values and
judgment, and the basis on which they make decisions.
Why did you pick
this school instead of that school? Why was this the right first job? Why did
you take two years off? When you left that company, what choices did you have,
and why did you pick Door No. 1 instead of Door No. 4?
I find that if
you listen to the narrative of people’s lives, you get a better sense of them
as people and as professionals than any other approach I’ve taken. It can also
uncover whether there might be problems. People are creatures of habit, and
they tend to repeat patterns, even in different contexts. Do they have a
pattern of job-hopping? That is a particularly deadly characteristic, in my
point of view.
It’s O.K. — in
fact, it’s a positive — to make mistakes in judgment at some point in your
life. But did the person understand it? Did they take the time to figure it
out? Did they then repeat it? It’s not really what they did that is important
to me. It’s how they reached those decisions.
