Twenty minutes about a button

He called me from a beach in Spain, in the middle of a family holiday, and for twenty minutes the two of us discussed where a button should sit on a screen in his new ERP system. I'm not especially proud of those twenty minutes. I went along with it.

Back at the office, one of his people was working out how to connect three separate databases, which was the thing the entire implementation depended on. He had given that person ownership of the project from start to finish, and the team was cracking it without him.

Nobody had asked him about the button. The owner hadn't called with a question and nobody had flagged the layout as a problem. He had looked at a screen, decided on his own that the button was in the wrong place, and decided on his own that it was worth a phone call from the beach. The question only existed in his head, and the answer got delivered anyway.

He wasn't a control freak, by the way. Ask him and he would have told you he trusted his team completely, and he'd have meant it. That's the trouble with buttons: they never feel like interference, they feel like caring about the details.

Now picture Monday morning at that office. The founder rang from his holiday about a button, so the button must matter. Someone mocks up a few alternatives, it goes on the agenda, and the databases can wait until that's sorted. Teams follow the founder's attention, and his attention was on a button. One phone call reshuffled their whole week, and nobody ever decided it should.

The owner of the project pays for it as well. They were handed the implementation, and now they've been overruled on a detail they never asked anyone about. Everyone else sees it happen, so the next question about the system skips the owner and goes straight to the founder. The bottleneck you spent months getting out of gets rebuilt through small calls like this one, and nobody notices it happening.

So go back over last week and find your button. Look for something in an area you'd already handed over where you had an opinion you couldn't keep to yourself. Then ask yourself one thing: did anyone ask me? If they did, help. If they didn't, keep it to yourself for a week and see what they come up with.

After we hung up, I sat with it for a while. Then I called him back. What I told him, the answer he gave me (I suspect you'll recognise it), and the code word his team now uses whenever he drifts back in are all in chapter one of The CEO Parent.

It's free. Read it here: theceoparent.eu/chapter-one

P.S. The same chapter has the parenting version of this story: the morning I stopped tying my son's shoelaces for him. It took thirty minutes instead of four seconds, and it was worth every one of them.