We Wrote a Book!

Show Notes

Summary

In this conversation, Sara and Mathias discuss their journey of writing their upcoming book, “The Intentional Organization.” They reflect on the creative process, the challenges of collaboration across time zones, and the insights gained from their experiences as founders. They also share their favorite chapters and the intended audience for the book, emphasizing its relevance for leaders at various stages of their careers.

Keywords

Intentional Organization, book writing, collaboration, leadership, time zones, communication, feedback, delegation, founders, management

Takeaways

• The book writing journey began in 2020.
• The excitement of writing a book can quickly turn into doubt.
• Collaboration across time zones requires intentional communication.
• The book aims to address the struggles of founders and leaders.
• Feedback and communication are central themes in the book.
• The authors emphasize a non-prescriptive approach to leadership.
• Delegation styles are explored through relatable personas.
• The book is designed to be timeless and actionable.
• The authors hope to provide support and commiseration for fellow founders.
• The target audience includes leaders from startups to enterprise companies.

Chapters

00:00 The Journey Begins: Writing The Intentional Organization

10:14 Navigating Time Zones: Collaboration Across Continents

16:09 Favorite Chapters: Insights and Reflections

25:16 Target Audience: Who Is This Book For?

Transcript

Sara Hicks (00:05) Hey everyone, I'm Sara.

Mathias Meyer (00:08) Hi, I'm Mathias.

Sara Hicks (00:10) Well, hello, Mathias. So we thought, you know, with our book coming out, our book, The Intentional Organization, it's coming out this spring, spring of 2025. And we thought it would be fun to take a look back and talk about how we came about the idea of writing the book and kind of the process of writing the book. Can you remember back that far, Mathias?

Mathias Meyer (00:11) Hi Sara. Such a long time ago, I was just telling someone today that we started writing this in 2020 and they were surprised, slash, shocked, I will say. And it's been a long time and it's hard to remember that year. I mean, there's other stuff that happened in the world that year. But it's been a journey since then, especially the last couple of months.

Sara Hicks (01:00) That sure was. Heavy sigh, Heavy sigh

Mathias Meyer (01:02) Very heavy. What do you remember of that journey? Of the beginnings in particular?

Sara Hicks (01:09) The beginning, I mean, I remember the excitement. I do remember feeling like, wow, we're going to do this. We're going to write a book together and feeling really like, okay, this is a new thing. Like it was a new muscle, like beginner's mind. And that felt really cool to be back in that state of beginner's mind. I've never written a book before myself. And then quickly that shifted to like, no, I'm writing a book.

Can I do this? Am I qualified to do this? Like all this doubt of, well, I'm writing a leadership book. And then, you know, I think, I think what I'm describing is really the creative journey, because then it gets to overwhelm because it was like, wow, I have to write a book. Like, and we started coming up with these topics and it started to really become like work of having to sit down with a blank sheet of paper, so to speak, and having to write. Do you remember all that?

Mathias Meyer (02:05) I do, I do. I mean, it was a... I think 2020 reaction commerce where we met and worked together just got sold. And we were still meeting each week, even after that happened, just to stay connected, stay committed. I think... Remember even earlier than this 2019 something, or the vivid moment of walking into your front yard in LA where your partner Tess asked us, so what's the next thing you're going to be doing after this? And this was just a fun thing to think about. And I think it was in our podcast conversation with Jerry Colonna of Reboot, where he brought up the metaphor of the vessel and the contents where the vessel is what's, what, what stays stable, it stays constant. And the contents is what is dynamic, what changes over time. Our relationship or us working together is somewhat the vessel and it doesn't really matter that much what the contents is. And think at some point we just figured out, well, before we think about other things, about deeper things, let's focus on a book.

That's something where we can share our experiences, struggles starting and running businesses, our struggles in management roles. And that's how we got to 2020. It was for me very civilized. It's just writing something, writing anything and turning that into something that's coherent is a ginormous challenge as we now know at the tail end of it.

I think at some point we had 130,000 words in a document somewhere. And that was our starting point for, you know, then trying to turn it into something. Yeah. Those are my memories of the early, the early times.

Sara Hicks (04:18) So many good memories in there. I was just remembering 130,000 words and realizing that most books are what? 80,000, 90,000, 70,000 words. So we were well overachievers. But yeah, I remember. It really comes back to after selling the company, after selling Reaction Commerce, we just...wanted to stay connected. didn't feel like, we felt like there was still more that we had to do together. You know, the idea for a book just seemed like something we both had had in the back of our minds. And I don't know, we had more to say, more to say about what it's like to build a company. And I think also just, you know, it's important to note that we share so much of the same philosophies around building companies and building teams and, you know, we're basically the anti-hustle culture, anti-growth at all costs, anti-capitalism at all costs, and really trying to teams and companies that treat people like humans, right? I know. I think that's such a big part. I don't know. There's just no book out there. This might sound arrogant, but I feel like this is the book I wanted, you know, like this is the book that we wanted to exist that I just haven't seen out there. I think that was another reason, right?

Mathias Meyer (05:54) Yeah. I think there are some books that, you know, follow a similar philosophy as ours in the spirit of the book itself, but yeah, there aren't a lot where, at the time, at least where you felt like I'm, I'm stuck somewhere, you know, in my growth or in the work that I need to do on my organization, which is what our philosophy is big on. Like we focus a lot on the organization and the people in it with the idea that success revenue, all of that flows directly from that. That's the approach, right? And there was not, whatever we felt stuck, there was not a lot to turn to. Like we made a lot of stuff up ourselves. We, you know, got ideas from other founders and made those our own. But getting even to those ideas, it's like, here's a way to do something, right? That is simple, practical, approachable, and that I could even turn into my own thing. There was a lot like this or anything that I remember from management. I think we even started out wanting to write a memoir about our time as founders, right? It's like just to even just to talk about the struggle itself and, you know, offer commiseration and also support and help to other founders who are, you know, and as our clients are these days going through the same experience still. But over time it turned into, well, we could also share everything that we've learned to make this an actually useful book. I think that's what it turned out to be. Like that's what our, the early feedback that we've gotten has told us so far. You know, we share a lot of our own anecdotes, like a lot of our struggles about, you know, not good and bad. It's like this, things we thought had worked out, things we messed up and then talking about how we resolved them and always, you know, get to a certain level of depth in even our own anecdotes and also in the solutions that we offer. We'll also offer everyone who reads the book to take their own path with what we're offering them. There's no prescriptive framework that we have trademarks on. It's just here's what worked. Here's what worked for us. Here's what we used. It might work for you, but you know, you could start here. Start here, make the zero. Build the smallest thing you can to see if this is working and then iterate from there. That's funnily enough also becomes our approach or one of our company values is to focus on experimentation, right? Rather than it's still big processes, big frameworks, start with something really small and then iterate, see what's working, see if, if it is working at all and then go from there. And that's, I think that's what makes our book different. And that's what really, again, like there were, as you said, there weren't a lot of books or any books whatsoever out there that were helpful, right? Especially in this messy and relentless stuff that is thrown at you as a founder or as an executive for that matter, there, you just need to, you need to find a solution. And then I move on to the next thing.

Sara Hicks (09:20) Yeah, messy and relentless, love that. It's a really, really good way to put it. Yeah, I think you summarized so much really well. I know, I'm really proud of, you know, the book contains, it's part memoir. It's also, like you said, just has so many frameworks and different reflections where, you know, we hope that our readers will, you know, take those into account, take them into their heart and really contemplate and consider there's journaling lines, you know, right on the page to encourage, you know, someone to pause and to really think. So yeah, I mean, I think like that, that covers a lot of the, you know, why we wrote the book in kind of like the early days. One thing I think we should cover is, you know, we are geographically challenged. I'm in Los Angeles and Mathias is in Berlin. We're nine hours separated. And that's not easy. I thought, you know, maybe we should talk a little bit about how we, how we work together and kind of how we, how we resolved conflicts and tensions during, during the creative process, during the book writing process. Yeah. I don't know. Do you have any, any memories? Any flash?

Mathias Meyer (10:43) I have many memories when it comes to time zones. I was just talking to someone earlier, a coaching client, and we talked about time zones. And I remembered a conversation I had years ago with another founder. We talked about distributed teams, which I've been a part of for I think 12, 13 years now. They asked me, how did you solve the time zone problem? And my only answer was, you can solve it. It's an impossibility to solve the time zone problem. It's just there, there. And you either decide to work across this many time zones with whatever trade-offs and, you know, consequences it has and also benefits, or you don't. That's the solution to this time zone problem or a way to work with it. And I think we've come up with some quite interesting ways to solve that over time. the writing a book together. Over time, I've come to look at it a lot like working on a software project to get. I think we've adopted some of these techniques over time that were quite helpful. We, for a time, especially in the heavy editing phases, we paired on the document together, whenever we got edits back, we, in a Google doc, we went through them, discussed each of them and then assigned homework. It's like, I'm going to take care of this or do you want to take care of that one? Did whatever changes needed to happen and then came back the next day or the next next day and have this kind of nice cycle that also created a level of, well, a nice rhythm for one and just commitment and accountability to each other. And the chunks were never big. They were just always like, here's a paragraph that needs rewriting or here we need to add a paragraph to this thing or even remove one and still make the flow nicer. It was all manageable. And I like that flow in particular. Like it was quite productive. Like we still met like in a video call. But we, because we had this homework, we could keep that. It wasn't like a four hour pairing session. was like, let's get together in 45 minutes, review this, discuss this, and then move on to the next thing.

Sara Hicks (13:10) Yeah, a lot of good memories there. I too really liked that editing phase where we were getting the edits back from our editors and pairing on that, assigning each other, you do this, I'll do this, and tagging each other. Early days, when we only had kind of a list of topics, we kind of divided, like, I'll write about this, I'll take this chapter, I'll take this chapter.

You know, one of us would get busy. I, like, still had a full-time job while I was navigating and trying to write on the side and would feel bad that I wasn't writing as much. It just, I don't know, it kind of had an ebb and flow like almost all creative projects do, right? I'd get a creative spark and I'd be like, within a few hours, I'd crank out a whole chapter, you know, and feel great about it. Or, or then it would turn out to our editor and be like, this is not good.

And we'd have to redo it. But yeah, when one of us was busier than the other, kind of just natural handoffs or you could take something or I could take something, or if we were stuck on an area, we could talk about it in one of our video calls. Which I think is, like doing it across, doing any sort of project like this across cultures and across time zones makes it even harder. But it really forced us, I think, to even be more explicit and more intentional about the work.

Mathias Meyer (14:41) Yeah. I think in a way it is ebb and flow, not just in the creative process, also in the, when life happens, which, you know, this full-time job or, know, I we both went through renovation projects also over, over these years, which also took quite a lot of focus and sap an incredible amount of energy as we both can now attest to.

Mathias Meyer (15:11) Hey, to bring it back for me, that's still very fresh. But I mean, some things then just ended up taking longer. And also in, in a different lens, the book feels timeless in what we're talking about, right? It's not like talking about some new way of managing teams or structuring an organization. Just straightforward, actionable things.That you can use that you could have used 10 years ago and that you could probably very likely use five years or 10 years from now, maybe even longer. Yeah. But I like that. It's just some stuff just took longer. Like it just took also longer to get back to it. At some points we just had slumps and in a weird way, was a blessing and a curse that we didn't have, you know, somewhat breathing down our necks to get this done. It was just. It was ready when it was ready.

Sara Hicks (16:09) Yep. Yep. Very true. Okay. So, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm famous for asking this question, which is what's your favorite? But I'm curious to hear, like, if you have a favorite chapter or, you know, a favorite couple chapters. I certainly do, but I'll, I'll, you answer first. What's your favorite chapter, Mathias?

Mathias Meyer (16:31) Favorite chapter. I think my favorite chapter is our chapter on communication. And I think, and I also, I will list more favorites. I usually don't just have one. It is the last chapter that we added and this was already like as we were closing down the first round of edits. We went through one or two of our chapters and realized that there are patterns in there that we need to express in a different way. And so we started putting together an outline for a chapter in communication. And we did that together in the very room that you're now sitting in where all of the different pieces that we figured contributed to communication in the organization were neatly, you know, on neatly written down on sticky notes and stuck to the window that you're looking at. And, then we, it was a much shorter burst of like, everyone is picking a topic and we're just going to spend an hour or two, right at each writing this. And then we get to the next one. But it's also, it was almost illuminative in this, like, chapter seemed like a beautiful culmination of the book itself, where it came to the conclusion that, communication is that's a thing as you like to say, you know, all problems are people problems and all problems are communication problems. Or is it the other way around?

Sara Hicks (18:12) All problems are people problems and all people problems are communication problems.

Mathias Meyer (18:16) Right. That's, that's, I think this, this is very true. Like we, we, we came to describe it as communication being the, the fabric that's woven throughout an organization and that all that is, is really what accompanies culture is. And I think there's that, all of that is what makes this chapter so great. It's also very dense. Like it's probably the densest chapter that we have.

That's my favorite and I will just throw in two more. I think the, I like the chapter on feedback specifically because it's, it's so practical and yet the approach that we take to feedback, it's, it's very simple, but so counter to what, feedback is generally given and received.

Like I get that like all the time working with clients. The feedback processes are strange and sometimes just unnecessarily difficult or just too generic or abstract. I think we just found a beautiful approach to that. Again, it's simple, practical and easily adjusted to whatever your situation or organization is.

And I think the third one is one of the shorter ones, is about accountability. Where we just talk about a very different take, very non-conventional take on what accountability is and how it pushes responsibility, not to an individual and takes it away from thinking in terms of consequences, but really looks at it from an angle of support.

Right. Accountability works best. You can bring about accountability when, you know, say an individual is expected to do a thing, but they have, as a manager, they have your full support in that, in that work, right? And support meaning coaching, mentoring, active feedback, and they know what is expected of. Those are my three favorites. What are yours?

Sara Hicks (20:34) So many good choices, good choices. Yeah, I mean, as you know, I think my favorite is also our chapter on communication, intentional communication. Partly for everything you said, what's the only chapter that we worked on synchronously together here in Los Angeles, you know, and so that's really special because it was just, you know, really creative and fun.

I just remember us, like you said, sitting here and, you know, I'm writing this section, you're writing that, and you're okay, go to the next, you know, and like, it also, like, it took us a while to get to that stage. Like we had kind of written communication, we'd written a few versions and it just didn't feel right. and I know for me as a, as a, as a manager and former founder leader, I just got it all wrong. You know, I equated communication with like how many meetings I was having or check-ins and one-on-one, but not really with the outcomes. And I think once we shifted to really thinking about kind of the outcomes of how you communicate and how feedback is shared, how bad news is shared, how, you know, like all these things that we outlined in the chapter, it just really like clicked. So that's my number one. I love our chapter on delegation.

You know, and I think we've gotten some good feedback from some of our early reviewers. We have two sort of personas that we talked about in the delegation chapter, the hoarder, the hoarder and the minimalist. And so, it's so relatable cause like I've been both of these, both of these, these types, like I have hoarded tasks, like as, as almost like

You know, it's about power. Have all this responsibility. Horrid, you know. And I've also, you know, been Teflon and tried to like, you know, not have any taste, you know, and just things bounce off and I'm just pushing it, you know, to my team or elsewhere. And I don't know, I just like the detail we go into around, you know, different delegation styles. And then, you know, there's a very, I think, practical framework around, you know, how to.

How to delegate, when to delegate, how to notice patterns when it might be time for you to delegate something. So that one's a good one that is in my top three. So hard to choose the last one. I think I'll choose, I think it's the last chapter in the book. It's about focus. I was so lost in the early days of being a new first time, you know, founder and CEO of like, what do I do? Who, you know, who, what's my role? What should I be focusing on? And I think that's one of the, the, the stories that are shared in that chapter is just that, that feeling of like, gosh, you what do I do? it's also one of those things that in, the co, in my coaching practice, you know, when I say to, to, you know, executives and founders that I'm coaching, like,

You know, hey, like, why don't you take a day or even a half a day, a few hours and just, you go, go to a coffee shop, go do something and really like spend time focusing on specific areas of, of, the business. Like get out of the day to day. And it's so hard for them to let go and think like, no, I have to be, I can't, I can't have time for that. Well, if you don't have time for that, when do you have time for strategy? When do you have time? Anyway, I think it's.

Yeah, I think the focus chapter really, really stands out. And I think we've gotten a lot of good feedback from some of our testimonials and folks who have read the early books.

Mathias Meyer (24:41) Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a great chapter. Also just always seems hard to imagine for founders or whenever you're stuck in the weeds that you are the only person who can pull, you know, pull you out of it. And that it's also okay to take a little bit of time every week to focus on the bigger things. There's always this story behind there. So I want to be there for my team and there's just so much going on. But that's exactly also why there's no time.

Sara Hicks (25:16) Right. Yeah. We should talk before we wrap up, kind of maybe one of our last topics is, who was the book for? Like, who would we write the book for? I think we often say like, this is the book we always wanted. It's certainly, you know, with a focus towards founders and CEOs, early stage, you know, startups, folks beginning their careers in leadership. But it's really like, I think a book for leaders across early stage as well as later stage companies, enterprise stage companies as well. I know my background as a product leader, you know, Chief Product Officer, product person through and through. So I think that's an area where, you know, I think the book really resonates. Then, I don't know, Mathias, as an engineering leader and CTO.

But yeah, don't know, think about like, there, like, who did you write the book for, Mathias, when you were really thinking about who would want to pick this up?

Mathias Meyer (26:22) I think it's some way I also thought about, you know, fellow founders and, you know, our clients also were, you know, have many conversations where I was like, just, can I just hand you the book? You're going to read the chapter on what we talked about today, and then we'll discuss, you know, what you're going to do with it, uh, next time around. Uh, so I think from, you know, I, I, that's almost a success metric to me. It's like, whenever I could think about a conversation like this, or I'm in it and it's like,

I could just give you the book because it's like, okay. You know, this is a spot on topic. I've worked a lot with, as a middle man, more senior and middle managers, director levels and line managers over the years. And like today I worked with a product manager, for example, and the issues that they were having were about, you know, having difficult conversations almost, or how to make, how to make a productive meeting in some way.

Which we also talk about extensively in the book. And I think no matter what level you work on, you can find something in there. Like some parts of what we talk about require maybe more influence over the larger culture in the company. But other parts you could just start doing in your team. Like you could change the meeting culture in your, in your particular team at any point in time. Or the feedback culture, right? At least the, the call of the feedback culture within your team. Or how you structure your time, how you delegate, how your team makes decisions. All of those things are applicable to small teams, just as much as they are to early stage, later stage and really large companies. I think that's the beauty of this book and how it evolved almost over time.

Sara Hicks (28:12) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, so we should, we should probably wrap up. The book, like we said, will be coming out spring of 2025, spring of this year. And you can always go to our website, which is intentionalorganization.com to sign up for updates, to get notified when, uh, when it would be published and available for purchase. Um, and yeah, thank you, Mathias. Thank you.

Thank you everyone. Thank you so much. All right. Toodles.

Mathias Meyer (28:42) Thank you, Sara.

Bye bye.