Ed Jaffe

When someone sees an underperformer, I ask what’s holding them back. When someone sees a difficult customer, I ask what we haven’t understood. And when someone sees a broken organization, I ask why good people get bad results. Tell me what you want someone to do, what you’re paying them to do, and what happens if they make a mistake or speak up, and I’ll tell you what they’ll actually do.

I start here: “Are we even asking the right question?” and “What assumptions are we making?” I figure out what matters before testing how I could be wrong. I see how the pieces fit, and what happens depending on which one you move. Then I explain it simply so people can act. Often by referencing Arrested Development or Succession.

I’ve built a business from scratch, won new logos, redesigned pipelines, forecast a software portfolio, coached thousands of sellers, and led teams managing hundreds of millions in revenue. I know what a deal looks like from every seat.

I treat the careers of the people who report to me as my personal responsibility. My job is to develop their judgment so they’re ready for their next role. Including mine.

The easiest way to explain how I think is with Star Wars, because I’m a giant nerd.

What happens when you change one thing

Think back to 1999. We were stockpiling canned goods for Y2K while downloading “Mambo No. 5” on Napster. If you were alive then, don’t pretend you didn’t do either.

That year gave us three big sci-fi movies. The Matrix, which taught us there is no spoon. Galaxy Quest, which taught us to never give up, never surrender. And The Phantom Menace, which taught us George Lucas needs adult supervision.

If you don’t remember that movie, or have simply put it out of your mind, here’s a quick recap: 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker, aka future Darth Vader, is enslaved. Jedi Master Qui-Gon wins his freedom in a bet, and they leave to make him a Jedi. Along the way, Anakin falls for Padmé. But for reasons the movie never really explains, Qui-Gon doesn’t find a way to free Anakin’s mother, and she lets her son go so he can have a better life.

Outside of the stereotype problems (Jar Jar and Watto), one of the biggest criticisms is that the age gap between Anakin and 14-year-old Padmé was weird. Making Anakin 12 or 13 solves that, but follow the thread, because that one choice fixes like… a lot of the movie.

• He’s old enough to challenge Qui-Gon, a literal space wizard, about why he couldn’t find a way to save his mom. Bonus: Liam Neeson gets to do something besides be a human opening crawl.
• He’s a kid raised as a slave, with adult technical skills and almost no time around other kids. When he meets someone his age, neither of them knows what to do with it. That makes the later “sand” conversation make a lot more sense: he’s technically a young adult, with the social-emotional development of a child. (Google the sand conversation. I’m too embarrassed to write it out.)
• The Jedi Council says he’s too old for training and too attached to his mom. Um… he’s nine and has never not been around his mom. That objection makes a lot more sense if he’s an adolescent.
• When his mother dies, it isn’t just a plot point. It’s “I told you so,” and that’s exactly what makes him vulnerable to Palpatine.

This single choice keeps the plot basically the same but completely changes its meaning. We go from “this happened because the plot needed it to” to a coherent arc.

That’s what I do as a leader. I see the entire system and can map out what happens when you change one thing. Except instead of using it for nerd debates, I use it to build better sales teams.

For example, say leadership wants everyone using the latest materials in customer meetings. So they reward people for becoming power users of the system where those materials live. What do people do? They click around until they’re power users. The metric goes up, and the old deck still shows up in the meeting. They hit the requirement and missed the outcome.

Ask me about NPS. I have thoughts.