Sometimes It's Worth Doing Inefficient Things
Entrepreneur Office Hours - Issue #337
Inside the Office
Last week, I ran a design thinking workshop for the entire staff of the Fuqua School of Business. That’s 180 people.
I want to be clear about how ill-advised that is. Design thinking works because it’s intimate. Small groups, fast cycles, lots of back-and-forth. No one in their right mind runs one for the entire staff of a business school at once. But, the Dean (my boss) asked, and so how could I say no?
The topic was improving the student experience, and the room held just about everyone who makes Fuqua run. Building and maintenance. IT. Student services. Admissions. Marketing. People whose work shapes a student’s day in ways most of us never see. We mixed the tables on purpose, so that the people who sat together weren’t the people who already worked together. The Dean came to show she was invested in what the staff had to say. And then we asked everyone to dig into the same question from the wildly different vantage points of their actual jobs.
I went in thinking the value would be the ideas. And the ideas were good. The Dean and her team walked away with a real list worth acting on.
But that’s not the moment I remember.
The moment I remember is wandering between tables and overhearing things like “oh, I didn’t know that’s how classroom scheduling worked” and “wait, students are struggling with that?” People who had worked in the same building for years were learning, for the first time, how the other half of the operation actually functioned. They weren’t just generating ideas. They were building a map of the organization in real time, and building it together.
The next day, colleagues stopped me in the hall. Not to talk about the ideas. To tell me how much fun they’d had, and how nice it was to finally meet people they’d been emailing for years without ever sharing a table.
That’s when it clicked for me. While the workshop produced several interesting ideas, what it really produced was understanding, and connection, and a little more shared culture than we’d had the day before. While the excuse to come together may have been to generate new ideas, the real result was the community itself and our deeper understanding of each other and the organization.
If you are leading a team (especially founders, who are wired to optimize for output), you are likely obsessed with efficiently delivering a solution. And so the inefficient stuff, the part where people who don’t normally talk actually talk, the part where you stop “work” to come together for a half-day to connect and engage, gets cut first because it looks and feels like overhead.
But that inefficient stuff is often where the real value lives. A team that understands how the whole machine fits together makes better decisions for years. People who trust each other move faster when it counts. You can’t put that on a slide, which is exactly why it’s so easy to skip.
Sometimes the point isn’t the thing you set out to make. It’s everyone you made it with and the community and culture you built in the process.
-Jamie
Worth Your Time
This week, I found myself messaging with Jia Jiang, author of Rejection Proof. For those who don’t know the story, Rejection Proof is the story of Jia intentionally getting rejected for 100 straight days.
That conversation brought back a fun memory. Years ago, when I first started teaching Learning to Fail, I assigned Rejection Proof to my students. At some point, they discovered Jia was a Duke alum and decided they wanted him to guest speak in class. So they did something that felt appropriately on-theme: they reached out and asked.
To their delight, he said yes.
This was back in the pre-Zoom era, so Jia joined us via Skype and spent time discussing the central lesson of his book… that rejection isn’t nearly as dangerous as we imagine it to be.
That’s an especially important lesson for entrepreneurs because entrepreneurship is, at its core, a profession built around hearing “no.” Customers say no. Investors say no. Partners say no. Employees say no. Sometimes the market itself says no.
The founders who survive aren’t necessarily the ones who avoid rejection. They’re the ones who stop treating rejection as evidence they should quit. Instead, they learn to see it as information, feedback, and an unavoidable part of building anything meaningful.
If you’ve never read Rejection Proof, it’s worth your time. And if you’re currently sitting on an email, pitch, proposal, or request you’re afraid to send because someone might reject it, consider this a sign you should send it.
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