The hype of Theranos scandal and its founder Elizabeth Holmes drove me to the reading of this book, Bad Blood.
It was a book about how this smart young lady who dropped out from Stanford founded a company that aimed to fundamentally change the way people draw bloods, which later turned out to be a total lie; and about how she worked her ass off to cover the lies with more new beautiful lies. Her success in raising the funds and gathering people’s attention were not purely out of luck. She was able to always stay at the spotlight – she always wore a black turtle neck just like Steve Jobs did, and her voice was as low and thick as a grown-up man, which gave people a nice perception that this lady was just different in a start-up world where female presence was already low. Additionally, she was really good at networking and getting people (well, more specifically, those extremely important people) to like her.
I don’t want to reveal too many of her stories in the book. Those details, the way she tried to cover the lies, the way she grabbed upon those important people to give her a hand, would only be beautiful after we spend the time reading the book throughout.
I’d like to share some of the key learnings I got from the read:
- Money can buy most, if not all, the things that a business person want: brand image, perceptions, useful network…Therefore, it’s necessary to accumulate the wealth along the life journey if we really want to achieve something big. Even if some of us are into charity or non profit work, we still need money to make things work.
- This may seem too practical, but do intentionally build the network. Spend substantial time with the folks that are important and helpful to the business. Don’t do it ad-hoc when we really need help, because the investment takes time.
- Although Holmes didn’t set up a good role model, it’s still a good practice to learn from the legendary people in the past, on how they started the business, how they handled the challenges, and how they managed the people as well as the growth of the business. Having read this book, I instantly bought a book about Steve Jobs. Holmes copied almost everything Steve Jobs wore and did – not to say her look and working style, she even hired the same company Jobs used to design the ads for her “fake product”.
- Sometimes we just need to be ruthless at work to push some decisions forward and make the fellows respect and follow our leads. But don’t do it all the time, and that’s why the carrot and stick approach still lives now.
- Don’t evaluate the performance of the employees purely based on their loyalty and length of working hours. In a world where iteration and efficiency become the key success factors, we need to pay more attention to the employees’ productivity, creativity, and integrity.
- Be apologetic if we do things wrong in the company especially if we are higher up in the management team. By doing so, we will be able to gain more respect from the employees and build personal connections with them as well. Don’t do that all the time, but acknowledging what we did wrong at some critical points would significantly enhance the employees’ engagement and loyalty to the company.
- Last but not least, get a good law firm. I was so amazed by how the law firm that Holmes hired flipped the black and white when the public started to question the genuinity of the stories she told. As long as we pay, they could do all the dirty things just to win the case. I’m not blaming the lawyers. It’s just it’s always the case that the smartest folks do the dirtiest things (because they know how to cover it nicely).
Several weeks after I finished the book, the HBO documentary that captured the whole stories was also put online. The visual one could be a good complement of the book, though I enjoyed the paper version more because it gave us more space for imagination.
SweetS 