Martin Gonzalez - Why Teams Are Harder Than Tech

Martin Gonzalez is the creator of Google’s Effective Founders Project, a global research program that uses people analytics to uncover what makes the best startup founders succeed and shares their success formula with the world. He has run leadership courses for thousands of tech startup founders across seventy countries in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. He is a frequent lecturer on entrepreneurship, organization design, and people analytics at Stanford, Wharton, and INSEAD. He is also the author of the bestselling book, The Bonfire Moment: Bring Your Team Together to Solve the Hardest Issues Startups Face.

Martin is a principal of organization and leadership development at Google. He works with Google’s senior leaders to shape team culture, develop their people, and expand their leadership, so they can build cool things that matter. In his ten years there, he’s worked with leaders across Google Research, DeepMind, Technology & Society, Responsible AI, Pixel, Fitbit, YouTube, Search, Maps, Android, and Chrome, to name a few. 

In 2023, The Aspen Institute recognized him as a First Movers Fellow, honoring his pioneering work at Google. In 2024, he was featured on the Thinkers50 Radar List, a prestigious recognition dubbed the "Oscars of management thinking" by the Financial Times, highlighting emerging thinkers expected to significantly influence future management thinking.

Before Google, he was a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group and a product manager at Johnson & Johnson. 

Martin has studied organizational psychology and behavioral science at Columbia University and the London School of Economics. He’s a serial immigrant, having lived and worked in New York, Jakarta, Singapore, Taipei, and Manila, where he is originally from. Today, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Bea, and three kids: Noelle, Jaime, and Andrea.

A Quote From This Episode

• "Startups have a people problem."

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Website/Book - The Bonfire Moment 
• Book - Creative Construction by Gary Pisano

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Register for ILA's 26th Global Conference in Chicago, IL - November 7-10, 2024.

About  Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: The Leader's Edge
• Blog

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

Chapters

• 0:00 The People Problem in Startups
• 12:07 Building Startups
• 25:59 The Bonfire Moment Workshop and Culture

Transcript

Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.

Scott Allen  0:00 

Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis podcast. Thank you for checking in wherever you are in the world. We have a fun conversation today, and my guest, Martin Gonzalez, has been on some really, really cool adventures. I'm going to tell you a little bit about him first. Martin is the creator of Google's Effective Founders project, a global research program that uses people analytics to uncover what makes the best startup founders succeed, and shares the success formula with the world. He has run leadership courses for thousands of tech startup founders across 70 countries in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. He is a frequent lecturer on entrepreneurship, organization design, and people analytics at Stanford, Wharton, and INSEAD. He is also the author of the best-selling book ‘The Bonfire Moment: Bring Your Team Together to Solve the Hardest Problems Startups Face.’ Martin is a principal of organization and leadership development at Google. He works with Google's senior leaders to shape team culture, develop their people, and expand their leadership so they can build cool things that matter. I love that phrasing. In his 10 years there, he's worked with leaders across Google research, DeepMind, Technology and Society, Responsible AI, Pixel, Fitbit, YouTube, Search, Maps, Android, and Chrome, to name a few. That was more than a few, Martin. I love it. 

(Laughter)

Scott Allen  1:25

In 2023, the Aspen Institute recognized him as a First Movers fellow, honoring his pioneering work at Google. In 2024, he was featured on the Thinkers50 radar list, a prestigious recognition dubbed the Oscars of management thinking by the Financial Times, which highlights emerging thinkers expected to significantly influence future management thinking. Prior to Google, he was a management consultant for Boston Consulting Group and a product manager at Johnson & Johnson. Martin has studied organizational psychology and behavioral science at Columbia University and the London School of Economics. He is a serial immigrant, having lived and worked in New York, Jakarta, Singapore, Taipei, and Manila, where he is originally from. Today, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, B, and three kids; Noel, Jamie, and Andrea. Sir. I am so thankful for your time today. This is going to be a really, really fun conversation.

Martin Gonzalez  2:21  

It's so great to be here. Thank you.

Scott Allen  2:23 

Wonderful, incredible bio, as I said to you before we got on the air. What is something that's not on your bio that listeners might want to know about you? 

Martin Gonzalez  2:32  

My pandemic hobby was woodworking, and I may spend way too much time watching documentaries on cults and religious scandals. A good friend told me once, “I get it completely, Martin, this is not a strange hobby. You are an org psychologist, this is exactly what these shows are about.” I thought, “Yeah, that makes sense. yeah.” 

Scott Allen  2:55 

Okay. I just did a blog post a few weeks back now on Wild Wild Country.

Martin Gonzalez  3:01  

Yeah. It makes you wonder who was a true mastermind. Was it Sheila, or was it… What was the Guru's name, the main guy, right?

Scott Allen  3:10 

I don't remember. In class, I've used some of those documentaries, whether it's the documentary PBS on Jim Jones, which, oh…

Martin Gonzalez  3:19  

Yeah, heartbreaking.

Scott Allen  3:23 

Yes, 100%. I recently watched another one on Heaven's Gate. So, I'm with you in that. I don't like to exist in that space for a long time, but it's fascinating from an org psychology or from an influence, the fact that these individuals have this level of power over another group of humans. How does that happen? 

Martin Gonzalez  3:44  

In some ways, I think that's the greatest school of leadership. And not to say we should learn how to manipulate, but these individuals know exactly the human condition and how to get people to do things they otherwise, like a rational person, wouldn't quite do, right?

Scott Allen  3:59 

Oh, 100%. There was another one. I don't even remember this woman's name, but she was in Colorado, a tortured soul. And, all of a sudden, they amassed a little bit of a following, a band of people. And, yes, very interesting. And, to your point, they understand the human condition. I think it might have been a small group communication text. They gave the recipe for starting a cult. Some of the ingredients were the charismatic leader, a vision of some sort, whatever that vision was, a set of principles around that, seclusion, time, and then a lot of what would be called consciousness-raising talk. “I'm emerging my soul to you, Martin, and you're getting to me, and I'm sharing everything about me,” and then that creates this glue. But interesting.

Martin Gonzalez  4:54  

So interesting. The point on seclusion is extra interesting to me because I think, in some ways, the way that translates to more mainstream leadership is less about secluding but more about how you help your followers create meaning out of what they're observing. So, the business is tanking, is that a moment where we're headed towards failure, or is that a moment where we need to buckle up and get the best ideas on board, and we're going to succeed because we're going to try really hard? So, it’s things like that that one could really learn from these cult leaders.

Scott Allen  5:31 

(Laughs) For listeners, don't be a cult leader, but learn from them.

Martin Gonzalez  5:34  

No. Yes, that's right. That's the message.

Scott Allen  5:42 

We could title the episode ‘How to be a Cult Leader,’ which would probably get some hits. So, Martin, it's so exciting. You just said your work has become an international bestseller. And how exciting is that? Congratulations on that. 

Martin Gonzalez  5:59

Thank you. 

Scott Allen  6:00

And I was with a member of the Thinkers50, actually, this morning. So, this is my Thinkers50 morning. Absolutely, it's a great way to start my Friday. But you start off your book with this statement -- and I love the statement, it's intriguing and it draws you in -- “Startups have a people problem. ” So, talk about that. It's a great place to kind of… Oof, I'm intrigued. Tell me more.

Martin Gonzalez  6:26  

Yeah. It comes from this idea that a lot of people in the startup ecosystem think that the number one reason why startups fail has to do with the technology, the timing of the market, or running out of cash. And then you find this classic study from Harvard, which then gets replicated again many years later, that asks VCs, “Look at your portfolio, think of the last few companies that failed, and what were the top reasons for failure?” 65% of startups failed because of people issues. And it’s co-founder conflict. It's not creating the right team dynamic. It's making sloppy decisions on who to hire. Keeping the mediocre ones and seeing the excellent ones go because they don't find a home. It's all these many things, and so, in many ways, my life's work has been to raise awareness about all of these less, quote-unquote, ‘sexy’ parts of building a business. It's not something you would put on X or on LinkedIn that you spend time thinking about the people challenges of your company. No, no, we talk about the tech, the disruption, the fundraising, and all of that.

Scott Allen  7:36 

It makes perfect sense because I think, at times, yes, the bright and shiny object is the tech, the idea, and the potential path forward. And then, you get into this place where, if we don't have the right people in place if I'm not… And that's this interesting bind. You're in that ecosystem, living in that ecosystem in the Bay Area, a front-row seat, where just because someone has developed a very, very cool piece of technology or has a very clear vision of a better future in some way does not mean that that individual is skilled at the work of building a team, designing culture, motivating others. And so, it's interesting. So, I love the statement, “Startups have a people problem.” If we’re not bringing in the right people to design that, we're in trouble.

Martin Gonzalez  8:26  

I don't think it's for a lack of intelligence. In fact, if anything, these founders are probably the most intelligent people you'll find. It's really because they obsess over the product, as they should, and then they don't realize that soon after, they're gonna have to build a team around it. And then, in many ways, they think this people are just like code; we can find the bugs and debug this code. And many times, I tell founders, “This is the buggiest code you'll ever find. The human condition, the buggiest code.” And the problem with this kind of code is you can debug it, and normal code will function today, it will function tomorrow, if you debug that code, but with people, it's like these bugs just come up with some randomness. So, it's a tough job, and in many ways, it's the toughest part of the job, but it's just never given the same amount of brain space.

Scott Allen  9:15 

Yes. And so, in the first part of the book, you started talking about some of these traps. So, maybe what are a couple of those? Let's just intrigue listeners. What are a couple of those traps that you find particularly intriguing? These are traps that these organizations and these leaders find themselves in. So, go there for a moment.

Martin Gonzalez  9:39  

Yeah. Gosh, it's hard to choose from your children, from your darlings, as Stephen King will call it. I'd say there are two maybe that I'll highlight, especially knowing that your listeners are probably seeing a lot of this with their clients or with their students. The first one is a trap of speed. And in this chapter, we talk about how startups are under immense amounts of pressure, and it's very easy for them to see the short game and forget that there's a long game to also be won. What tends to happen in the short game is there are some decisions that they make that very predictably create pain, a world of pain down the road. Things like who you co-found with. The most expedient way to build a company when you have nothing but a vision and energy for it is usually with friends and family. And we know from the data that startups that have that configuration that began as friends and family are the most unstable partnerships. A big reason for that is that these relationships are the most expensive ones you will ever have. Not only is there a personal cost to this relationship, but there's also a professional cost now, this new professional cost of the relationship. And so, when the relationship is very expensive, it's very hard for you to put that relationship on the line for the sake of the business when it comes down to that. And so, the tough conversations don't happen nearly as often as they should. Other things, very inexperienced first-time founders will do the sloppy thing of splitting equity 50/50, and we know that that also is a very trick… Let me put it this way: there's some research out of Warden by actually a good friend, Jason Greenberg, who's now in Cornell, and he looks at static equity splits versus more dynamic splits, where you would say something like, “If we contribute this much, or if we go full time, or if one goes full time and not the other, if these skill sets become relevant, then this is how we will vest the equity.” And this is a classic mistake. So, that's the first one off, like, how do you think about being both a chief bricklayer, i.e., playing the short game, and then also being a chief architect, i.e., winning the long game? And, in the short game, you value being scrappy and quick. In the long game, you value keeping tech debt low; you value excellence. You need a really good product in the short game; you need a really good team in the long game. And how do you balance the two? We talk about this idea of hyperbolic discounting and how there's just a computational error we humans make where, when the benefits are in the present, you value it pretty accurately. When the benefits are in the future, you somehow apply a discount factor to it, and that's part of the big problem of the trap of speed. 

Scott Allen  12:24 

So, I love the conversation around. I'm sure you've read some Daniel Kahnemann -  cognitive Biases. Another phrasing that you have in this book is ‘teams are harder than tech.’ And I love the phrasing of ‘the bugs’ you can't decode, get rid of the bugs in the code of a human being at times because… A friend of mine, Mike Muscolo, who was on the podcast, said, “Look, each person is an infinity.” There's so much to each one of us, and in between the two of us, there's just an infinite number of variables that complexity is complex. So, that's really, really interesting, that whole cognitive bias kind of literature. I didn't know that about splitting equity from the very beginning; it's generally not a good idea.

Martin Gonzalez  13:07  

Yeah, no. And smart VCs know this. Smart investors know this. When you split the equity equally, really, what is a signal is that you have a team that's not mature enough to have the tough conversation around contribution and the value of each one's contribution. It also shows up in other ways, like power sharing, which is a very common thing in startups. “We'll call each other co-CEOs.” And they'll look at places like, I think, Salesforce had co-CEOs at some point, like Google. It's not quite right. There were never two CEOs, but they looked at the two founders as co-CEOs. Again, it's not exactly accurate, but they think, “Well, we could do that.” But really, what they're doing is they're trying to skirt around those hard conversations.

Scott Allen  13:53 

So, conflict, and oftentimes, conflict avoidance from the beginning is baked into the DNA. Does that make sense? 

Martin Gonzalez  14:02  

It's unspoken expectations that you inevitably will violate.

Scott Allen  14:06 

Okay. So, the trap of the inner circle? 

Martin Gonzalez  14:10  

Yeah. So, the trap of the inner circle, really, the jump-off point, is that it is so easy for you to build your company with friends, family, or usually with some co-workers. We know that actually finding a co-worker is actually generally a good idea. It's because you see these co-workers in a professional environment, you have an unspoken kind of baseline for the work ethic you expect of each other, and then you know each other's skill sets. The one downside of working with co-workers is your networks tend to maybe be a little bit too common. We know that diverse networks and diverse sources of future employees or capital are also important in a startup. But the trap of the inner circle, we talk about how these inner circles that are so particular in the startup world, but also very much in the corporate world, they resist disagreement. They resist dissent. It becomes a really great place to build groupthink and have very low quality disagreements. It's the question of whether you tend to correct each other's errors or amplify each other's errors when you come together as a group. And, at least, as far as the research is concerned, as far as I can see from my review of the literature, it's more the second; it's more that we amplify each other's errors. And so, we talk about it in that chapter. One of my favorite stories in the whole book is actually in that chapter. It's a story about this lab manager in a place called Xerox PARC. So, for your younger listeners who maybe don't know of Xerox PARC, Xerox PARC is probably the most innovative… The place where so much innovation thrived in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. It's the Bell Labs of the early 80s. It's what preceded Apple and Google, all the big innovative companies of today. The personal computer, there's this legendary story that Steve Jobs took, and even Bill Gates took from displays, the user interface, the mouse, and all that. It's where you get Pixar, Adobe, and 3COM. It's a prolific place for innovation. This lab manager, his name is Bob Taylor, and he says, “My number one job in this lab…” By the way, these were like PhDs, like world-renowned experts in that field. “My number one job was not to resolve disagreements; my number one job was to graduate Class One disagreements to Class Two disagreements.” But what did he mean by that? Class One disagreements are what I think today we would call a straw man argument, which is, “Scott, you have a point of view that I disagree with. Let me represent that point of view in the weakest way possible, making it easy for me to refute.” A Class Two disagreement is what you might call not a straw man but a strong man argument, where, “Scott, let me play back your argument about this topic in a way that you feel satisfied by, in a way that I highlight the strengths of your argument, and then, only then, when you're satisfied by that, do I then come in with my opposing point of view and debate it out.” He says that it's not my job to resolve any of these agreements; my job is to hunt down these Class One disagreements and graduate them to Class Two disagreements. And I think that's a really useful way to think about your role as a leader.

Scott Allen  17:20 

Yes, yes. Well, and if we go to the next one, and this is the last of these that we'll talk about, but the maverick, I'm wondering how these two play together. The inner circle, and now we've got the maverick going on; it's top speed, or she's working at top speed. So, how does this play out with the maverick?

Martin Gonzalez  17:40  

Yeah. So, the trap of the maverick mindset, in many ways, becomes relevant later on as company skills. That chapter talks about -- and what we've observed in founders and in these Maverick leaders is they think, “Let me point the same amount of innovative thinking, first principles thinking, onto the topic of people,” and then they make some really classic mistakes. There's tons of evidence that shows that these are myths, and yet they just try to push the button. Now, I am not an apologist for old-school management, and I think we should be pushing the boundaries around management thinking, but I would say check the evidence for it. So, here are a few of the things that we talk about in this chapter. So, one is the myth of scaling without hierarchy. The tech industry has a love-hate relationship with managers. I don't know if you remember this story in the early days of Google. Larry Page, who I think is really quite the incredible organizational genius, said, “Look, software engineers look at managers as evil. They create deadlines. They create busy work. They push me towards these deadlines. We don't need them.” So, they did this grand experiment where they actually took all the managers, turned them into individual contributors, and had about 2,000 engineers reporting to the head of engineering. Now, that experiment lasted for, I think, about two weeks, if I remember correctly, because this VP of engineering was busy approving expense reports and vacation leaves and resolving conflicts. And so, they concluded, in that initial moment, that, “Okay, at least, for these things, managers are useful.”Now, the people analytics team comes in, and Lazlo Bach and Prasad Saidi are coming in to try to study this more closely. Are managers actually valuable for other things? And the answer is yes, and there are all these upsides. When you look at some more recent research, there are some really fascinating studies out of Wharton where they look at gaming studios, and they try to understand there's a belief in the gaming industry that managerial layers create these silos and silos; therefore, limit cross-pollination of ideas. Therefore, originality and original thinking get hampered. What they do is they try to look at what is the upside or downside of an additional layer of management? And what they find is that, yes, it's true that, actually, with one additional layer of management, that tends to actually correlate with 1% decline in quality of the games. They measure that based on customers, like user gamer reviews. What they then find is that, yes, with a 1% decline in creativity, you actually find a 14% increase in commercial success. We don't know if you didn't have that 1% decline in creativity; perhaps you'd have magnitudes more commercial success. The point is the downside that I think we envision, or the unpopularity of management and hierarchy, which far exceeds its actual economic value. I think we all want to be egalitarian. We all want equality. That's our instinct as human beings. And yet, we know that there's value in a healthy hierarchy. They reduce operational ambiguity and help create focus within the organization. You need that when you're scaling. That's one of the things we talk about about heroics as being really a bad way to build a company on, and a few other things in that chapter.

Scott Allen  21:12 

Yes. Because each of these can be taken to an extreme. You might have confidence, which is incredibly important in some circles and in some contexts. And we need to model a level of confidence, and, at times, we need to model a little level of humility that we don't know it all, that maybe the approach we have taken isn't working. And so, I love how you're framing in the first part of the book, some of these traps that we see over and over. And, Martin, I want to say this now because I might forget later, but even listening to you speak now, something I very much appreciate about your work is that you're in this, really, for me, Goldilocks zone, where not only have you done the research, not only do you have the experience of living in that ecosystem, but you're also referencing other research. It's not just your opinion, “I'm kind of showing up, and here's what I know.” “We've done some research, this is what we've found. We've also looked at other research that we're going to highlight and bring to the forefront, but we're doing so in a digestible and accessible manner because teams are harder than tech.” I love that phrasing.

Martin Gonzalez  22:23  

Thank you, Scott. And a couple of thoughts on that. So, one is, you can't escape being in an engineering-first company without your data. So, I think being at Google has really trained me to really think in terms of evidence and data. I think, secondly, there's something about our field of leadership development and organizational development that I think really lends itself to a lot of life stories and data, as one would call it. And which is not a job in qualitative research. I am currently collaborating on some qualitative studies and ethnographic studies; I think there's real value in that. But I think that, in both leadership development and the startup ecosystem, we all fall prey to survivor bias quite a bit. There's a lot of this, “Who was the successful founder? What did they do? Let me replicate.” We should check if those who failed did the same and failed anyway. So, I think that's where there is more rigor. And I owe it to my readers to write a book that I feel I can confidently stand on evidence to say, “Look, this is good advice.” It helps that I'm not a founder myself, so I'm forced to look at the data, right? 

Scott Allen  23:33 

Yes. I know that you… And we're going to leave listeners with the fact that we've talked about some of the traps in a very, very, very cursory way. And I know that the second part of the book is about what to do about it. Is there anything that you just, in a general sense, want to bring to the attention of listeners? We have chapters six through 10 that really focus on what to do about it. Actually, chapters six through 12. 

Martin Gonzalez  24:01  

That's right. So, we wanted to write a book that was both rigorous but also incredibly practical. ‘The Bonfire Moment’ is actually the title of the book, but it's also the name of a workshop that was really the genesis of all this work. Nine years ago, Google was building its first accelerator program. They were targeting these Series A startups, for your audience who aren't familiar with that world, Series A startups are typically companies that already have a product that's running. They usually have about 30 to 50, sometimes depending on where in the world, maybe 100 employees. And so, they're actually scaling. They're at that point where there's some amount of scale that they're experiencing. Well, when they were building this accelerator, it was very much a technology-first accelerator. There were topics around machine learning back then, how AI is all the rage, a lot about UX design and internationalization, and all that. There was nothing about people and culture. And so, I go to Josh, who's my co-author; he was then in the leadership team of this accelerator program, and I said, “Look at this study,” that I mentioned earlier in the conversation. “Look at this study from Harvard; it says the number one reason for failure is people issues. Give me a small budget, let's pilot something simple,” and this is my 20% project, so Google allows you to work on these passion projects. We take what we believe to be the best ways to develop managers at Google, tweak it, tailor it a little bit, and then bring it to Jakarta for the first run. And it was a no-frills workshop. All your practitioner listeners will look at it and think, “Oh, there's nothing special here.” And I felt exactly that way when we put it together; it was very simple. And then, the founders in that workshop said, “Wow, this was the most useful part of this entire accelerator.” And the accelerator program was top-notch, and yet this was the most… And we said, “Okay, look, maybe an anomaly. There's probably nothing special here; let's try it again.” We bring it to Bangalore, and again, it's “Wow, this is the most important part of this accelerator, the most valuable part.” Bring it to Sao Paulo, to Warsaw, to Stockco… And eventually, it reaches 70 countries, and it takes a life of its own. At some point, founders are reaching out, saying, “Hey, I hope you don't mind. I took photos of your slides, and we ran our version of the Bonfire Moment with other founders.” And so, we thought, okay, we might as well help people and open source as much of these tools that we've road tested and refined over the years to people. So, part 2 is basically us open-sourcing that entire workshop, and we do it in a way where we… And startup ecosystems love to DIY everything, so we thought, “Look, we know you're going to do this anyway, let's just give you all the tools to do it.” So, it's a full day of a workshop that we encourage people to do. They can DIY it. If it's a more complex, like, high-conflict team environment, we say, “Look, you can get a facilitator. You can get maybe a mentor to study the approach and run it for you.” Each chapter in that part 2 is like each block of the day, there are four blocks. “This is how you do it. This is what the day should look like. Here, all the watchouts, here are all the tools you need.” To give your listeners a very quick sneak peek into it. Collected a lot of data on these founders as we've run this around the world, we summarize what we've seen in these 360 degree feedback surveys on founders. We've summarized it into a list of things that we've seen as a successful strategy that they employ, and we've turned it into a self-assessment, optionally, a 360-degree feedback survey that people can use, and it's all available on our website and in the book. We've summarized all the sources of conflict we've seen these startups fall into. We invite teams and leadership teams, not just founders when they're a little bit more progress, we invite them to look through this list and think about, “Which of these do we need to address, or talk about, anticipate, and work through.” We invite people to have what we very affectionately call ‘the bullshit circle,’ which is a time for people to talk about the biggest insecurities of the journey and how they tend to mask up and create toxic environments for their teams because they're trying to protect their insecurity. So, it's all these many things, and we try to pack it into a way that's accessible and where people can really draw a lot of value from it. 

Scott Allen  28:06 

Yes. Give listeners a quick snippet on why ‘The Bonfire Moment.’ What does that mean? 

Martin Gonzalez  28:11  

Ah, that's great. So, crucially, it's not a campfire moment. So, this day that they go into this workshop is actually not the warm and fuzzies. It's not just falls and ropes courses. The analogy, the visual we're going for is, in our work with founders, when you think of the experience that they have, like impossible goals, extremely tight timelines, and really not a lot of skill sets to pull a lot of these things off, it feels like they're constantly in the fire, like they're dancing in these flames and this intense pressure cooker environment. The Bonfire Moment is a day where we invite them to step outside of that fire and, together, examine it, bandage up relational wounds, figure out how we might want to play well or differently together, and then get back in touch with the mission and prepare for that next push. And so, that's why we call it The Bonfire Moment. We're not asking people to spend a tremendous amount on this, these are very time starved teams, but spend a day, make it a Friday after that big product launch where you can just talk about not the work, but talk about how you approach the work. And it's helped a lot of founders around the world.

Scott Allen  29:20 

I love that phrasing ‘not the work, but how we approach the work.’ I love the image of the bandages, too. It's almost like it's an after-action review, or it's a pause, and it's, “Let's get on the balcony, look down and see how we're doing this work, how we're working together.” And just incredibly valuable, absolutely valuable. Anything else you want to share with listeners, maybe how they can learn more, Martin?

Martin Gonzalez  29:46  

Yeah, thank you. So bonfiremoment.com is our website. The book is available wherever you buy books. I'm also pretty active on LinkedIn. So, if you want to ask a question, if you want to pour your heart out about this co-founder, you can get involved with, or if you want to run The Bonfire Moment for people, reach out. I try to be as responsive as I can. 

Scott Allen  30:04 

That's awesome. I always conclude these conversations by asking what's caught your attention lately? What have you been watching, streaming? What have you been listening to? Is there something that you think listeners might be interested that you have found intriguing in recent times?

Martin Gonzalez  30:19  

So, in my intellectual sandbox, I most recently discovered the work of Gary Pisano. He's a professor in Harvard Business School. And he wrote a book a few years ago now, actually I wish I discovered the book sooner. I wish I had written that book as well. It's a book called ‘Creative Construction.’ It's kind of a play on this idea of creative destruction, and he asks the question, could there be a scenario where the resources of a big company could actually be a real asset for the innovation process? I believe there's a chapter, I'm going to tease your audience a little bit, there's a chapter in there, I believe it's chapter eight, on culture. And he has this brilliant discussion about the hard parts of innovative cultures, where we usually think about the bunnies and cotton candies of culture, which is experimentation, freedom to fail, flat hierarchies, all the really… What he calls a version of the world where ice cream was good for you. And then, he asks, well, if this is so desirable, why don't we see more innovative companies? And then, he talks about because there's a hard part of this, which is, yes, you want to have tolerance for failure, but you need to have intolerance for incompetence. You want to have flat hierarchies, but you need to have strong leadership. Anyway, he talks about the paradoxes of innovative cultures, and it's been useful in my work as a practitioner within Google. I wish I had written that chapter myself.

(Laughter)

Scott Allen  31:44 

I'm intrigued. Have you watched ‘The Bear’ on Hulu?

Martin Gonzalez  31:47  

I have not, but I should have put it on my list.

Scott Allen  31:48 

Oh, Martin, please do. Please do. And watch that series through the lens of team dynamics. Watch that series through the lens of leadership and through culture. It is a fascinating show. I don't want to build it up too much, but it caught my attention.

Martin Gonzalez  32:09  

Smart. You're being smart. I do this a lot with restaurants. I get the group over, and as we're driving there, I tell them, “Manage your expectations.” They're like, “Martin, you do this all the time.”

Scott Allen  32:20 

Sir, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. And thank you for your great work. And, as I said probably 15 minutes ago, I just have real respect for how you've approached this work. It's just very wonderful. And, for listeners, I'm going to put a lot of links in the show notes so that you can learn more, connect with Martin on LinkedIn, and go ahead to Amazon or wherever it is you purchase your books and buy a copy. Use it in class. Use it with your students. Use it with your clients. He's given you the recipe to do that experimentation and help these organizations. It's not just for tech startups; this is an opportunity for all teams to pause, reflect, and have that process be a part of their growth and development, correct? 

Martin Gonzalez  33:07  

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Scott. I love this conversation, and I love what you're doing with your podcast.

[End Of Recording]