A LOOK INSIDETHE NEXTGENERATION

BOARDROOMby Josh James, CEO and Founder, Domo and Glenn Solomon, Managing Partner, GGV Capital

Reprinted with permission from

Several years ago, I had an idea about how to change the way we work with our board. I noticed big chunks of time in our board meetings were taken up by review-ing data that we knew inside and out as an executive team, but the board was hearing for the first time. That face-to-face time is extremely valuable, and I wanted to make the most of every minute. That’s when I asked myself the question: if our entire company had direct access to real-time data about our business, why shouldn’t our board have the same? If the board already had the numbers when they walked into the door for a meeting, I’d hope we could spend our time together in more valuable ways. Technology made it completely possible, but the idea was something entirely new. And, to be honest, it was a bit unnerving.

Giving the board direct access to real-time data around our entire business—where would that lead? No-body was doing that. Were we ready? Could we be com-fortable with that level of transparency?

It took us a while to move from idea to action, but we made the leap a few years ago. We knew the board was in our court—and by having the board’s eyes on our business at all times, we’d have even more mo-tivation to quickly fix those things that weren’t yet where they needed to be. I’d hoped we could get the board even more connected into the business, and not by throwing a mountain of data over the wall once a month—but by giving members the chance to live in our company’s world through a consistent feed of real-time data.

The CEO PerspectiveJosh James, CEO and Founder of Domo

We started to see some positive impacts the next quarter, after giving the board access. Board members didn’t need a deck the week before the board meeting to review num-bers. Instead, we found they’d been following the data all quarter long. They weren’t waiting on the quarter’s closing bell to give input. The board now had the ability to advise how to pivot, hit the gas, or hit the brakes when it mat-tered most. We’d not only engaged them deeper into the business, we’d made it easier for them to make a mean-ingful impact.

Since we no longer needed a significant portion of the board meeting for reviewing numbers, we could now fo-cus our valuable group time collaborating and strategiz-ing on action plans for growth, based on the information they had seen.

One board member told us the transparency made him feel more emotionally connected to our business, while another was thrilled he could spontaneously answer questions from his team about our business, because the data was always updated and available on his phone. For another board mem-ber, access to real-time data has made the end of the quar-ter feel more like an NBA playoff game. A few days before our last board meeting, I gave him a call. When he picked up the phone, I asked him what he was doing and he told me had just popped some popcorn and opened Domo to watch the month close in real time. True story.

In 20 years, I believe all boards will have real-time data visibility in their companies. In 10 years’ time, boards will demand it.

The Board PerspectiveGlenn Solomon, Managing Partner, GGV Capital

As a Domo board member, how has real-time data access changed how you engage with the execu-tive team?

I can drill down on many areas of the business in real time. As a board member, I have the responsibility to track and drill down on performance. But now, once I’ve looked at the numbers, I’m able to ask better questions and give more informed suggestions to the executive team. As a result, my interactions with the executive team have evolved from Q&As about per-formance metrics, to discussing the why and how be-hind the numbers. We get right to the drivers, which are sometimes found in additional metrics that are right at our fingertips. We also talk much more about the future based on what we know about the inputs and outputs today. The data parity lets me work as part of the team.

How has the new visibility changed your role?

I ’m much more connected going into the end of each quarter. I don’t need to waste time with phone calls to ask for updates. Rather, since I have a real-time view of the business, I can lend a hand or offer encourage-ment where warranted.

Are you seeing any drawbacks to having a more con-nected board?

Only a caution: data doesn’t necessarily equal informa-tion. Both sides need to make sure there’s context in the data so no one number is over-interpreted. Josh and the Domo team do a great job describing the story behind each metric, but there’s a definite risk of too much data if you’re not careful with the execution.

Would you recommend this to other companies and boards?

Absolutely. The less a team has to update the board members, and the more a board can be used for advice and guidance once they have the right information, the more useful a board will become. After working in a data-connected environment, it now seems like a no-brainer.

What’s your prediction on the future of connected boards?

This is an inexorable trend. My life would be much better if all my companies used real-time data extensively and gave the board access to the same numbers they’re see-ing. I believe companies that accept this as the new reality will see improved performance as a result.

The CuriosityMachine

by Shane Atchison, CMO, Domo

Reprinted with permission from

“Data is the answer you’ve been searching for. Data’s here to save you. All you need is more—more information, more vendors,

more licenses. Once we get you set up, everything’s going to click right into place, and your business will soar. Just watch your

people align, watch the profit roll in. If your business isn’t data-driven, it’ll be left behind, like a dinosaur stuck in a tar pit.”

Any of this sounding familiar?

I’ve heard the pitches: the promise of big data, the transformative power of the newest piece of tech-nology on the block. And, while I can’t say I disagree with all of the opinions—and I’m guilty of repeating a few of them myself—I think we all get skeptical when anything is plopped down in front of us as a panacea, promising to change our world as we know it. I’m a huge believer in what data can do for an organization, but I’m enough of a realist to know that change doesn’t come from logging in to a tool and reading a chart. It doesn’t come from a monthly dashboard.

For data to change the way you work, there needs to be something else.

For that, I’m reminded of a story that I heard years ago. One that comes from a wildly different time and place. A story about a bunch of rock stars killing time in a NYC hotel between shows. A story that makes me think that, as business leaders, we’ve been missing a key ingredient in our data strategies.

“I v́e got to figure out how

he makes that

sound.”

ELECTRIC DATALAND.

As a kid growing up in the Seattle area, it was impossible to not know the legend of Jimi Hendrix. He wasn’t just a native son, he was a musical titan amongst men. For me and my group of friends, there was no contest—he was the best guitar player in the world—full stop. His skills were untouchable, as if a lightning bolt had come down from the clouds, struck his right arm, and the rest was rock and roll history. “He was born to play the guitar,” some of my friends would insist. “No one will ever be as good as Hendrix, dude, he was just hardwired that way,” others argued.

But a few years ago, a story I heard about Hendrix made me won-der if there was another force at play in how he got to be so damn good.

The story was told by Billy Gibbons, a rock star famous for his long beard and Texas drawl—a legend in his own right as the front man for ZZ Top. Back in the 1960s, Gibbons’ band, The Moving Sidewalks, was lucky enough to tour with Hendrix. After every show and dur-ing every off day, Gibbons spent as much time as he could with the guitar legend, as any musician in his right mind would.

One lazy afternoon, before a show in New York, while the band members were lounging in their hotel rooms, Gibbons heard a strange sound coming from down the hall. As he approached, he realized what he was hearing—a clip of the same song, playing over and over again—and where it was coming from: Hendrix’s room. Gibbons stuck his head past the doorway to find Hendrix sitting in front of a record player. He wasn’t leaning back and enjoying the music. No, Jimi had his ear leaned in close to the speaker, pulling the phonograph needle back every few seconds, replaying the same segment of a Jeff Beck song over and over again. Pieces of Hendrix’s guitar littered the floor, the back of the Stratocaster open, its springs, switches, and other hard-ware actively being toyed with by the guitar legend with each replay of the tune.

Hendrix, the story goes, saw Gibbons in the doorway and looked up at him in wonder, pointing over to the record player. “How do you think he does that?” Hendrix asked as he moved the needle back one more time, leaning back to soak in the music. “I’ve got to figure out how he makes that sound.”

THE CURIOSITY MACHINE.

After hearing the Hendrix story for the first time, I realized that while the man was an undeniable force of talent, the music he made wasn’t just based on a superhuman ability to play an in-strument. There was more than just talent in Hendrix—there was a hunger, a curiosity. A twinge of wondering how something works, and diving in head first to find the answer.

And that’s when it dawned on me: the thing that’s missing in organi-zations where things just aren’t clicking, where people have all the data in the world, but still don’t know what to do next: it’s curiosity.

I’ll make you a promise: the best people you’ll ever hire aren’t the ones working weekends or that get to meetings on time. The best people are curious about your business, about your industry, and about how things work. They’ll ask questions not just to hear their own voice, but to figure out how your world operates. They’ll ask questions that make you uncomfortable. They’ll make you smarter. They’ll make you better.

When someone starts a new gig, the first thing many of them ask is, “How will I be measured in this job? How do we measure success around here? How do we know we’re working on the right thing?” And then we, as business leaders, tell them exactly what we shouldn’t: the answer. But that’s not why we hire smart peo-ple, right? We don’t hire people to follow orders, or to do what we did yesterday. At least, that’s not what we should be doing.

Organizations are at their best when we hire curious people and arm them with the right data. We need to be building organizations fil led with people that just have to know the answer to the question they just asked themselves at 3 am, and power them with data that wil l point them in the right direction. Not static data hiding in three-month-old PowerPoints—real-time data that can be explored, shared, and reconfigured.

I believe that data isn’t what we’ve been promised. It isn’t always an answer. It’s a spark. It’s a beginning. It’s a curiosity machine.

“LET’S FIND OUT.”

I saw this happen in a meeting the other day: I asked a ques-tion about our current open headcount. Now, without access to the right data, that question would usually have been scribbled down in a notebook as a to-do, with a whisper of, “I’ll email that to you.” Then the meeting comes to a halt and no decisions get made. We would then spend hours looking up the data, putting it into a deck, emailing a full descriptive narrative of what’s in the number and what’s not—because the data only gets compiled the first week of the month by Carl, and Carl was out this week—all explained in self-preserving detail in the body of an email that I may or may not actually read.

Or maybe the data is added to a scorecard. One that’s updated and shared each month. A scorecard that was created because we, as an organization, didn’t know what else to do with all the data. We figured it should live somewhere and putting it in a scorecard felt like we were doing something with it. But score-cards age, fast. They are static and cold. They’re created from someone’s point-of-view and include, deep down in between the lines, someone else’s agenda determining what you are and are not seeing.

But none of those things happened. What happened instead was pretty damn cool.

She turned to me and said, “I don’t know, let’s find out.” She opened a real-time dashboard, and we dove into that number, plus all inputs feeding the results. Two people, asking quick questions and getting quick answers, sitting side by side. We explored the data, figuring out the factors impacting our hiring, seasonal trends we should an-ticipate, and the decisions we should get ahead of. It wasn’t “my number is better than your number” or “we’ll have to have someone pull this data.” It was collaborative, it was useful, and it was, at least in that room on that particular day, a small little slice of the future we’ve been promised.

THE NEW LEADERSHIP GOAL: FUEL CURIOSITY.

Data, at its best, answers questions for your business. But it does something else—it sparks new questions within your people. It allows them to test new ideas, to fail and to suc-ceed (and actually know the difference between the two.) But for data to push the curious side of your people, it needs to be real-time, it needs to be accessible, and you need technology that allows your people to explore what’s behind an answer, not just get an answer.

We’ve been told that the wave of data is the future, but the pundits have missed the other half of the equation. Yes, you need access to real-time data, and so do your people. But more than that, we need to evolve our thinking. To evolve how we hire and how we develop our teams. To encourage more questions. To build less scorecards. To let our people show us where we’re wrong. To have the confidence to hire people that will think of things we, as leaders, never thought of before.

Data fuels people—the right kind of people. And when you com-bine data with a certain mindset, you’re in the zone. You’re build-ing a business that’s making the most of what it has. Instead of saying “I don’t know,” you’re saying, “let’s find out.” You’ve suddenly becomes Jimi Hendrix, huddled in front of that record player in that NYC hotel room—confident in your chops, but still curious enough to know you can always be better.

TheTrust Gap

Maybe Machiavelli was right.

The thought crept into my head as I sat at my tiny desk overlooking Wall Street. It was a bright fall afternoon, but doubt and the ancient

advice of that nearly 500-year-old treatise began to cloud my optimism. The project I’d been working on was a simple chat tool to

connect ideas and people across a global bank. My team had tamed the technology and regulatory challenges, and we were looking forward to

the final stage of the project.

by Chris Willis, Chief of Design, Domo

Reprinted with permission from

Encouraged by our progress, I took it upon myself to test the latest working prototype and interview a half-dozen or so employees. My optimism quickly faded as the user feedback began to tell a story I wasn’t expecting. No one—from the traders, to the VPs, to the pricing managers, to the quants—was going to use this app.

Undaunted, I responded like a doctor with a critical patient and went into triage mode, chasing other symptoms and possible solutions until it became clear that the real disease remained undisturbed—like a cancer, lurking deep below. The problem wasn’t the tool. It was the organization.

At best, people across the company could see little opportunity for self-enrichment. But more importantly, I learned the truth I hadn’t considered during the concept and design: the tool had the potential to expose them to new vulnerabilities. Each day, employees across the bank saw themselves as playing a zero-sum game where only individuals won. Like the Old World, Fortune was for those willing to take it. Fate was what happened to everyone else. At the time, I walked away demoralized—and to be honest, a bit ashamed. I concluded that this was a cultural problem. Team structures, incentives, and management’s communication skills needed to be fixed. But in the years since, I’ve seen similar situations play out dozens of times. And each time, culture seemed to be at most complicit, but ultimately not the culprit. I began to seek out a unified theory of why collaboration works—or doesn’t—across organizations. And my realization is that it’s not just about the technology at your fingertips or mandates from the C-suite. Collaboration comes down to one thing, a force that’s complex, essential and invisible: Trust.

WHY TRUST MATTERS Trust eats strategy, technology, roles, and incentives for break-fast. But let’s acknowledge that trust comes in many flavors:

Reciprocity: That unspoken trust between strangers, that can have monumental impacts. Think of that the next time speeding headlights pass you on a dark highway with nothing but a yellow strip of paint to protect you.

Predictability: When you’re certain that your house won’t collapse on you because it was built on a solid foundation – plus it hasn’t collapsed before. Value Exchange: The confidence that the $5 bill in your wallet will still be able to buy that latte tomorrow. Trust in Institutions: Faith that groups will do what they’re tasked with, which has been waning for years. (I’m looking at you, US Congress, at 12%—the lowest of them all.) The rise of Airbnb and of Uber show that trust can become a disruptive advantage. (I distinctly remember my parents telling me not to get rides from strangers—advice that has kept me $68 billion poorer than I should be.)

But the trust I’m talking about is the connections between co-workers, your boss, your boss’s boss, et al. It’s the faith we put in others to lis-ten, respect, reciprocate, forgive, and communicate openly. It’s a big

effort just to picture and manage the direct relationships of people we work with every day. The bigger, frankly impossible challenge happens at the edge of our network. As Karen Stephenson, a pioneer in social network analysis and principal of NetForm Resources, observed: The relationships over which you have no direct control, but only influence, “is where all politics begins.”

POLITICS. THE DIRTY WORD

Ah, politics. Ah, Machiavelli. And now it’s as if the courts of the old Italian princes may have simply been replaced by our conference rooms and corporate cafeterias. Here’s where the skeptics among us might suggest giving up. It’s tempting to feel that many of our collaborative endeavors are innately susceptible to infection by power and politics. While it’s true that that happens more than it should, it ignores the fact that humans are very capable at creating magnificent things to-gether: Spacecraft, the internet, self-driving cars, Dubai, and duct tape. Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Human-kind, pointed it out best: “Sapiens rule the world, because we are the only animal that can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. We can cre-ate mass cooperation networks, in which thousands and millions of complete strangers work together towards common goals.” And trust is a key ingredient in that success. Without it, productive collaboration is impossible.

A GLOBAL SHORTAGE OF TRUST

Eroded trust inevitably hurts the bottom line. According to research-ers at Bain & Company, 94 percent of companies with revenues over $5 billion a year see internal dysfunction as their greatest obstacle to growth—not competitors or opportunity.More specifically, an EY survey found that less than half of global pro-fessionals trust their employer, boss, or even people on their team.

Clearly, there is work to be done. Where do you start?

WAYS TO BUILD TRUST

Start at the topOrganizations are hierarchies, not democracies. So, the responsibility begins with leadership. Focus on being clear with your communication, be visible, embrace accountability, and create an environ-ment where promotions are well-deserved and the pay is fair. Leading by example is the best way to build the strongest social contract between em-ployees and management.

Promote trustworthy peopleThis is the most obvious and clearest signal you can send the troops. But trustworthiness is not always high on the list of considerations for promotion. While its impact can be significant, it’s usually outshone by just about every other trait—like performance, skill, and yes, even an ability to play office politics.

Flatten your org—encourage autonomyHeavily siloed organizational structures encourage siloed thinking. When data and information remain in the hands of a few, innovation will be stymied. Look to companies like Facebook, where reorgs are initiated to remove emerging hierarchy rather than to add layers.

Small talk can have big effectsYou may be surprised to learn that those brief, mundane utterances you make passing in the hall (“hey,” “what’s up,” etc.) are actually important. There’s even a name for it: phatic communion. You might notice it a lot more online the next time you click “thumbs up” on a post. The key point is that we engage in these seemingly trivial messages because they hold our social fabric together. They keep communication channels alive even if there is nothing important to say.

Believe in a big visionTurn your strategic vision into a shared story that connects emotionally with teams. This will ignite imaginations, encourage collaborations, and bring greater meaning to day-to-day work. According to one report published in Harvard Business Review, an inspired employee is 125% more productive.

So, are we destined to toil in a Machiavellian workplace?

I don’t think so. History shows that our better nature leads us to greater cooperation. And trust just makes better business sense.

with Dr. Karen Stephenson

Bio: Dr. Karen Stephenson—hailed in Business 2.0 as “The Organization Woman”—is a Harvard-trained an-thropologist and lauded as a pioneer and “leader in the growing field of social-network business consultants.” Stephenson had earned praises for innovatively solving a variety of complex problems which have been featured in The Economist, Forbes, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company and Wired.

Q: Given your research and expertise in anthropol-ogy, how would you define trust in an organization?A: Trust is the reciprocal exchange of information with others over time. Q: Can you give a few reasons why you think trust is critical in the success of an organization?A: Where there is trust, information moves circuitously and speedily. When there is betrayal of trust, then infor-mation abruptly stops. It is difficult, if not impossible, to restore trust once it has been betrayed. Therefore, in the “trust-light” world of organizations, increased transparency lowers the inherent risk in sharing infor-mation and allows trust to grow. Q: Are larger hierarchies more susceptible to trust and collaboration issues than flatter organizations? Are politics inevitable in the workplace?A: Politics are inevitable with scale. Two-person rela-tionships are a partnership, but three-person relation-ships and beyond are networks. A network is character-ized by at least one indirect link, and it’s in these indirect links where all politics begins. Culture is a network of trust relationships; hierarchy is merely the hanger on which it is draped. Q: What suggestions do you have for managers who want to cultivate a more trusting environment?A: In modern organizations, it’s almost impossible to be both beloved and trusted. The best you can do is to be consistent and lead with trust. Others will follow.

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