Jeremy Webb | Surviving a Plane Crash, Cancer, and the Nation’s Fastest Growing Company

John Corcoran 10:19

So you get the diagnosis. And then did you have chemo? What was the experience like for you? Did you have to, you know, stop going to college for a little while.

Jeremy Webb 10:29

I did, I did actually stop college, the doctors told me I needed to drop out. It was actually a very interesting experience. I didn’t know that I needed to drop out. But I was kind of happy I did. It gave me freedom and time to not stress about other things. I did a year of chemo. I was either inpatient for five days or three days, every third week. So it alternated. And so you know, one out of every three weeks, I’m in a hospital basically, or at least three days or five days out of every three weeks. And I got a staph infection. When I went in to get, they had to put a central line up into my chest, around the collarbone and down into my heart because the chemo was so strong that it would have burned through the veins in my arms said they injected into my arms, they were giving me some serious stuff, because this was an extremely aggressive cancer. They sent it out, had it for about two months, and it was the size of a softball.

John Corcoran 11:28

Did you think you’d seen it but you hadn’t noticed it? Or you’ve ignored it? No, you know,

Jeremy Webb 11:34

I, there were probably some signs I could have picked up on a little bit earlier. But where it was, it was underneath the muscle in my thigh. And I was pretty well in shape. I’ve been playing college hockey and all that. So you know, I didn’t really notice the, you know, the mass difference, because I had a lot of muscle back there. Yeah, you know,

John Corcoran 11:57

yeah. So you survived that. And then what sorts of life changes did you make? Did you go back to New Hampshire? Or did you decide to not go back to that program?

Jeremy Webb 12:10

No. So I had actually left New Hampshire, and I had transferred into VCU down in the Richmond area. And that’s why I had to drop out of VCU a few weeks into the semester. But when I went back, I ended up going to JMU. In Harrisonburg, a fantastic choice, I switched majors, I went into business, business management and entrepreneurship.

John Corcoran 12:34

Yeah, yeah. And so you join a company that at the time was the fastest growing company in the United States. Tell us a little about how you ended up with that company. And, and what that experience is like,

Jeremy Webb 12:48

yeah, you know, it’s, I didn’t even know it was the fastest growing company when I joined. Then, you know, right out of college, I was looking for a job. And it’s hard to find that first job out of college unless you’re, you know, well networked. And who is I mean, unless you have this, that family connections and understand that stuff, I mean, you know, I didn’t know you know, my family ran a convenience store growing up, they didn’t run that kind of business. So I didn’t know that I needed to network. I didn’t know I needed to do this thing. So I was just looking on you know, all the old job sites monster wherever that existed back then trying to find a job. And I came across this assistant project manager at Video Gaming Technologies. I like video games. And it’s, you know, something that says management in the title right out of college, even if it says assistant, you know, assistant project manager. So I, you know, signed up for that guy and finally got an interview after struggling for a few months to try to find an interview. And then I got the job. So what was crazy, that was my first day, I interviewed somebody else. Somebody said, Hey, I need a second person for his interview. So we hired that person. That week later, she started, I pulled her in for a second on another interview. And we hired that person. You know, that’s how quick the growth was at this place. It was just out of this world. And it was exciting. You know, that’s one of the most exciting places I’ve ever worked. Wow,

John Corcoran 14:21

talk a little bit about agile approach for those who don’t know what it is and where you came across it and how it became a part of what you do.

Jeremy Webb 14:31

Yeah, so if you’re in the software world, you know about agile, but you also know that a lot of a lot of Agile transformation stuff doesn’t work as well as it should. So that fbg team a few years and I had worked my way up through the management ranks, and I actually had been given the top priority project at the company. And that’s brand new for me it was pretty cool because, you know, 25 years old, were 26 at that point, and there’s, you know, people that are 40 50 years old, running the projects and, you know, they picked me. So I was like, Alright, I’m doing something, right. But there was a lot of stuff that wasn’t working so well at our company. As we grew, we started adding more processes as we added more processes, change control, and you know, project lists, and you know, all these management things. And we added change control boards, and the list goes on and on and on all the traditional things that you do. And the more we did, the more things slowed down, and the less fun. It got to do work, right. I mean, doing your work every day felt more like, you know, the bureaucracy, and it felt like a chore. And so I knew something was wrong. And I was actually part of the team that was putting this stuff together. But I didn’t know any better. I hadn’t been exposed to anything else. I just knew something wasn’t right. And so I started hearing these rumblings about Scrum and Agile, I said, but what is this? I don’t understand what these weird terms that people are putting out there. Nobody taught me about this stuff in college. And so I wouldn’t read the scrum handbook. It was like a free PDF online, I was like, Oh, my gosh, this sounds like the thing that fixes all these problems that we’re having, because it’s about learning from your company. It’s about giving your team the power to make their own decisions given but not just the power, but giving them support for the framework. And, you know, everything that they need really to succeed. And it’s, it’s about team structure, it’s about communication, it’s about your processes. It’s about how you prioritize your work. It’s about the role structure. And, you know, a lot of people don’t even understand that this is a thing that you should, you should think about. So anyway, in VGT, I signed up, I got my teams to sign up to be part of the pilot program. And the first thing I didn’t want to do is, I don’t know, I said, Listen, I have some beers, let’s talk about it. And they said, well, we’ll try it. And so six months later, our productivity was up, 500% of our people were happy. And this is where I started to make this connection that I made with life back with cancer, you know, that life is about happiness will also happiness is something you need at work, too. And what I realized is that, as you get happier at work, you’re doing all the right things that are gonna make you successful. So happiness is actually that leading indicator to productivity and company’s success.

John Corcoran 17:32

Hmm. So explain for those who don’t aren’t familiar with Scrum and Agile? What were you doing? What did you do with those teams? How did they run their meetings in a way that was different from produced happiness that produced this massive increase in productivity?

Jeremy Webb 17:47

Yeah, well, it’s, it’s, it’s there’s a lot of subtleties involved in it. But essentially, you know, Scrum, which is the there’s, there’s different frameworks under the Agile umbrella, right? agile is a mindset, it’s a way to think about things. It’s about, you know, empowering your teams, you know, minimizing the amount of work you’re doing to get lean, it’s all these principles. And in Scrum is a set of rules. So Scrum says, you know, every sprint, and you can pick your sprint length one to one to four weeks, right. But whatever it is, you pick it, you repeat it, and you have a planning session, you have a sprint review, where you do a demo of whatever you build. And then you have a retrospective, where you make changes to your process and how your team is operating. But your team has the freedom to do that. And those that are really kind of the difference is in the traditional environment, you have to get approvals for anything. We got rid of so many of the approvals, we got rid of so much of the overhead, we actually started doing less, and in a lot of ways we did less work. But we got so much more done. And the team had the freedom to do it. And so here’s the thing, if I asked you to solve a problem, and then I gave you the answer to it, there’s no fulfillment. It just doesn’t feel good. And so now the teams have the ability and the freedom to solve their own problems. So for instance, one of the things that we did, there was a infrastructure group, and they did our build process, it was taking eight hours to take our software from code to something we could put into a slot machine, because that’s what we made it VGT when the team’s got control over their own processes in about three sprints, they took that down to eight minutes. Wow. You know, and so the frustrations just start to melt away because people can solve their own problems. Hmm.

John Corcoran 19:40

Wow. You spent almost six years at VGT from 2007 to the end of 2012. And what was the growth trajectory, like, well, how big was a company when you started? How big was it when

Jeremy Webb 19:54

you left? Gosh, I think when I started Organizational Engineering there were maybe 50 people and 250 people, when I left, we actually kind of ramped up and then plateaued for the last couple of years. And part of that was that, even though we added all these people, we weren’t really getting more done. In fact, there was a period there for almost two years where we didn’t even ship a product, that we should have been shipping products, you know, every two to three months at bare minimum, you know, other than some, you know, little updates, we didn’t release a new product to the field. When we left, I actually shot a team of two that I was working on this new project. We launched a new product to a new market, we started out and we had six months to hit the deadline. And that shifted because it was a new market. But you know, we hit it, we got to that point where we could just, we could whip stuff out and we could crank again, we got back to that entrepreneurial culture. But yeah, the overall company, I want to say maybe, maybe it was, you know, 100 150 people when I started, it was close to 600. I think when I left.

John Corcoran 21:02

Wow. Talk a little bit about the work that you do now. Organizational Engineering is the term that you use gray and how do you bring that experience to the work that you do now?

Jeremy Webb 21:15

Yeah, appreciate that. Good question. So, you know, I took that system that I learned VGT you know, that was, it was incredibly well done. transformation, the guy named Rao actually led that transformation there. And I learned a whole lot from him about how to do it and how to make that implementation successful. So after I left, I started doing that at other places. And what I started realizing was that a lot of people didn’t, they were missing a lot of the key bits and pieces about how to actually successfully transform, you know, there’s a lot of little pieces about starting small. But when I, I can’t tell you how many places I’ve gone in and into the middle of a transformation, they started with, hey, let’s transform 1000 people at once? Well, it’s, it’s going to create a mess, it’s just too massive, it’s too big. So what we do, you know, I have a process started, I used to call it the highway to high performance. And I’ve evolved that into something called a sauce now, but you know, we start with a small pocket of people, we get them running just absolutely cranking on all cylinders. And we make it a privilege to be part of that that makes people want to come in. And what you see is the people outside of the transformation actually start doing things better. So you start getting these free benefits of people making these improvements, because they get excited about it, it eliminates a lot of the change management. And you know what, what can we do now? I mean, I can go into companies, I have a 100% success rate now. And my average performance improvement was like 407%. And typically we do that and, you know, three to six months.

John Corcoran 22:57

Wow. And what are some of the typical objections you get when you’re talking to a new company? That’s, well hold on a second. This is a new way of operating. We haven’t done this before. How do we know it’s going to work? What types of objections do you get?

Jeremy Webb 23:09

Yeah, what’s interesting, one of the biggest things is actually people just don’t understand that you even need to think about these things. I think that’s one of my biggest challenges getting through to people. It’s like, well, I don’t understand you just, you know, tell people what to do. And they do it. They don’t understand that management. There’s a lot of management techniques that systems matter, thinking about your organization in terms of a system. But as far as objections go, you know, I hear people say, Well, my team’s already performing well. I hear people say, let’s see what else. This won’t work here. We’ve got too many regulations. You know, everybody thinks they’re special. And the truth is, everybody is special. Everybody is unique, but not generally in the way that you think. You know, the regulations don’t really matter. I’ve never worked with an organization that wasn’t highly regulated. I mean, slot machines banking? Well, I guess I’ve worked a couple that aren’t as highly regulated, but the bulk of my work has been in highly regulated industries.

John Corcoran 24:10

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I want to wrap things up with the question. You know, I’m a big fan of gratitude. So if you look around at your peers, you look at others in your industry, however you want to define your peers and your contemporaries. Who do you respect? Who do you admire is doing good work out there?

Jeremy Webb 24:29

You know, there are so many people that I see doing good work, my buddy of mine, Andrew Bennett, he’s, he’s doing some great work. Trying to further the research on the Agile side of things. You know, I also respect some of the big Facebook folks like Ilan, you know, but, you know, that’s probably not the kind of answer you want. I love people that are pushing things forward. You know, but honestly, a lot of the smaller companies out there are more The ones that I respect a lot of the bigger companies, especially in the transformation side of things, they, they, they go after the money, and they have really good systems to get more money out of your pocket. But I appreciate the small companies trying to rise up and do this because I realized how, how difficult it is, you know, in this space to try to make a name for yourself in the consulting world.

John Corcoran 25:20

Yeah, yeah. I remember since you mentioned it, Ilan Musk. I remember when Tesla was just a little startup of many different electric vehicle startups, around the 2008 -2009 time period. I was working in Silicon Valley at the time and admired the company greatly. And they had probably 50 or 100 people working for them at the time. Oh, what is it about the way that he runs his companies that you respect or admire?

Jeremy Webb 25:48

Well, you know, I think one he seems to live by the principles that he says, and you know, that there’s some things with Eli man with the salons management style that I don’t like as much as well, I think he maybe drives people too hard in some places, but I think he’s genuinely trying to do something good for the world and not just out to make money. Yes, he’s making a ton of money, I don’t have a problem with that if you’re doing something that’s good for the world. And when you get to that level, you know, there’s always going to be some things that, you know, make you look selfish, and all that, but I think he’s doing a great job of just doing him and being willing to break the mold to break that status quo, to go out and do your own thing. And that’s been a huge inspiration for me as well. 

John Corcoran 26:32

That’s great. Jeremy. Organizational Engineering is the name of your company, where can people go to learn more about you?

Jeremy Webb 26:39

Yeah, I mean, I’ve got organizationalengineering.com. And also, I’m on YouTube, youtube.com/organizationalengineering. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn as Jeremywebb1, I think is the profile name. But I’m sure you can find me there. So yeah, those would be great opportunities to reach out.

John Corcoran 26:57

All right, Jeremy, thanks so much. All right. Thanks, John.

Outro 27:01

Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast.