The Value of Studying Success with Fayez Mohamood

Speaker 1: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real- world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster, I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Fayez Mohamood. Fayez is the co- founder and CEO of Bluecore, which is an AI- driven retail marketing platform before AI was even a buzzword that he started about 10 years ago. Fayez, good to have you here.

Fayez Mohamood: Good to see you, Matt. And thanks for being a believer from when we met a decade ago.

Matt Blumberg: From triggermail. io.

Fayez Mohamood: That's right.

Matt Blumberg: All right, so my question for you today, one of the things that has always impressed me about you is how thoughtful you are about running the business and how much sort of learning you like to bring to management and leadership. And I know one of the things that you and I have talked about over the years is retrospectives and the value of learning. But one of the things that I think you do that not every CEO does is you really find value in doing retrospectives on wins and successes, not just failures. So there is definitely a little bit of a culture of move fast, break things in tech and learn from your mistakes. But I would love to talk about value you get out of studying successes. So can you talk about a few of the things that you find there?

Fayez Mohamood: Yeah, and I think we really learned that as a function of having been doing this for a decade, and I think it's common knowledge that failure humbles you. It brings people together. You do things like root cause analysis and retrospectives, but I find that in our industry, we don't do the same level of retrospectives when you succeed. And it really boils down to a few things. One is, are you really answering the question when you succeed as it relates to was it really because we were good or did you get lucky? That's kind of the same. I forget who said that. And I think it's really important to answer that question as a team. In our case, for example, when COVID hit, there was a lot of retail that went digital, and we happen to be in the right place and it shouldn't take away from that. But how do you separate that from the real decisions that went into product and go to market so that we can replicate it and double down on those things? So that's one of the things that keeps us up the most, which is do we really succeed because we were good or we got lucky?

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, I mean, there's no reason not to take the win if you got lucky, because if you got lucky or had right place, right time, but understanding that is pretty important. What else do you find value in from studying successes?

Fayez Mohamood: There's a couple other places where it becomes useful. I find that it's useful when you are recruiting, especially for leadership. Again, when you interview somebody, we mostly talk about successes. We've all been part of interviewing either individual contributors or leaders or executives that talk about all the great things that they did. And again, one way to really assess whether it was truly their decisions and whether they were a driver versus being a passenger is to kind of question that, which is, okay, how seriously do they do retrospectives on areas they did well in and not just the areas that they didn't do well in? Because, again, we're fortunate to be part of an industry that's been up and to the right holistically compared to a lot of other areas. So that's one area. The other one is thinking about learning how much of a growth mindset that individuals have, and are they really looking back on the decisions and going, " Okay, I learned something from it." We always talk about, well, if you won, could you have won twice as big if you did twice as much or took twice the risk? And somebody who knows the answer to that, it's a good indication of whether they've really thought about that success that they achieved versus kind of moving on to the next thing.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, I mean, certainly replicating or amplifying successes is a huge part of business. So being thoughtful at a punctuation mark, whether it's a period, an exclamation point, a comma in your business, and understanding why can help you figure out how to do that again, and as you say, do it twice as much.

Fayez Mohamood: And in fact, it's a area where we almost always, a lot of startups draw the wrong conclusion when you achieve early signs of success and either don't have product market fit or the right individuals on the team. So I think it's extremely important, especially as you age.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. There's another interesting point you made that I want to call out before we close, which is you said that failure can drive humility or teach humility. I actually think a deep understanding of success can do the same, because if you're willing to admit that you succeeded with help from others, if you can admit that you succeeded because you were in the right place at the right time, as you're thinking about how you assess talent, that's a pretty powerful thing too.

Fayez Mohamood: Yeah, that's really well said.

Matt Blumberg: All right, Fayez, thank you for being here today.

Fayez Mohamood: Thank you for having me.