When leadership is struggling with organizational dysfunction that stems from resource constraints, they tend to see teams in conflict: product versus engineering, sales versus operations, etc. They might assume the solution involves coaching, restructuring reporting lines, adjusting compensation models, or hiring more diplomacy-minded managers. But as EPSD’s Nicko Goncharoff and Nick Selby have learned through years of organizational interventions, the biggest threat to mid-stage technology companies isn’t functional disagreement. It’s the personal resentment that calcifies when strategic pivots in the business force zero-sum resource allocation.

The difference between companies that navigate growth challenges successfully and those that fracture into warring factions isn’t primarily about having better processes or more mature leadership. It’s about recognizing when strategic disagreements have crossed into interpersonal territory—and having the courage to address the human conflict directly rather than pretending it’s purely about roadmap priorities or budget distribution. Because when resources become scarce, it’s political skill, not engineering merit, that determines how they are allocated.

“The people who are the best at what they do are not necessarily the same people who are good at politicking to get the resources that they need,” Nick says. This creates resentment and discord between leaders, and while their teams might not know the details, they’re keenly aware of the power dynamics. They take sides. Pretty soon, you have factions and internecine warfare.

Factionalism doesn’t announce itself through org chart battles. It emerges quietly, through maneuvering, betrayal, pocket vetoes, and uncommitted commitments; it is cemented by managers who say “yes” in meetings then don’t follow through. By the time leaders recognize the pattern, teams have stopped collaborating entirely—and the interpersonal damage compounds the business consequences.

In the season one finale of the Velocity’s Edge podcast, Nick and Nicko explore how mid-life technology companies can slide into factionalism and, more important, how to pull them back from the brink. They tackle essential questions: How do you distinguish between healthy functional tension and destructive personal conflict? What are the ground rules that enable successful mediation when key leaders have stopped working together? How do you translate personal grievances into organizational imperatives that both parties can commit to solving?

The conversation reveals a fundamental truth: the companies that survive growth challenges aren’t those with conflict-free cultures. They’re the ones willing to confront interpersonal breakdowns directly, establish clear rules and objective metrics for collaboration, and recognize that the most passionate disagreements often signal the deepest commitment to the mission.

Nick Selby is the founder and Managing Partner of EPSD, with a career spanning cybersecurity, law enforcement, and technology leadership. He has held key executive roles at tech companies, and created the information security practice at 451 Research (now S&P Global Intelligence). He served as Director of Cyber Intelligence and Investigations at the NYPD, and as both a paid and reserve Texas police detective specializing in investigations of child sexual abuse material and online investigations. He serves on the board of directors of the National Child Protection Task Force, and the advisory board of Sightline Security.

As in all our episodes, we speak in plain, executive-summary business terms, framing complex business and technology strategic challenges in context, using language that makes them more accessible and actionable.

Listen here, download it from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or find it wherever you get your podcasts.

Episode Information
Season 1, Episode 9 - Season Finale
Length: 31 minutes, 43 seconds
Host: Nicko Goncharoff
Guest: Nick Selby
Recorded: VOXPOD Podcast Studios, Parsons Green, London
Engineer: Dayna Ruka
Editor: Dayna Ruka, Jeet Vasani

Episode Transcript

Nicko Goncharoff: This is Velocity’s Edge podcast. I’m Nicko Goncharoff, COO at EPSD, and joining me is EPSD managing partner Nick Selby.

Nick Selby: Hey, Nicko.

NG: Hi, Nick.

NS: It’s so awkward when you work together every day…

NG: You pretend you haven’t seen each other. Yeah!

NS: Like, ‘Oh, it’s you here’. All right.

NG: But what isn’t awkward is actually, we’re talking about a topic that we both have strong feelings about, and I think most listeners will have witnessed, gnashed their teeth over, and will find resonant: that of factionalism within organizations. We’re going to focus on technology organizations, but the lessons can apply to a wide range of corporate, and even governmental, environments. So, Nick, tell us about factionalism.

NS: You almost got me on a tangent, because I’m thinking about how it’s in government… it’s actually a little bit different, but you’re right. It exists. And it’s just…

NG: Even more pernicious.

NS: Yeah, yeah it is. So the general scenario is: take a tech company that’s midlife. These tend to be founded by people who are subject matter experts in some field, and they’ve been working in the field for a while. And the tools out there, the technology out there, didn’t do it for them. It didn’t meet their needs. After they stopped cursing the darkness, they decided that the best way forward was, “Hey, you know what? We could probably build that thing that we’re liking. Why can’t I just drag and drop something?”

This vision, and this passion, for solving a rather niche problem… it puts them into a situation where they’re building what’s called an “expert system.” If you’re not in that field, maybe you wouldn’t understand what the UX is just by looking at it. But people who are in the field say, “Oh, that’s what I’ve needed for the longest time!”

What I’m describing is a pretty niche situation, but this is a broadly applicable set of scenarios. I’m just trying to make it obvious of how you get here. And so they start doing it, and it usually takes off, and they’re doing very well.

At the time that they start to do really well, a few years into this, they’ve got customers who are very loyal who are really liking the direction that the vision is going and the services that they get. It’s usually at this point that they decide that it’s time to add fuel… they’ve got product market fit, and now they need to add fuel, which is money. Enter the suits. And they’re here to help.

This usually comes with venture investors, private equity, a professional leadership team, and they start to get serious about it. And these have very good effects, like a lot more money. You can see amazing growth: two, three, five times over the course of just a couple of years. But you can also start to get—once you’ve had that scale up, that initial burst of growth—you can start to get some problems when that model stops working as well. It’s not that it doesn’t work, but it’s not working as well.

Now, in the old days, before you expanded, before you took this money and brought in all these people, you would be growing a little bit slower. But now a reduction in revenues, a reduction in your margins, increased time to get things done… these things actually have very, very significant impacts.

It’s usually around this time that executives will start to look for plans to goose this again to get the machine going the way it was last year. This typically involves a departure from the vision-driven push of “this is where we think the industry should go,” and we start to listen to the sales people’s intelligence about what their competitors are offering in terms of features, and what the customers are asking for in deals, and “I could have landed customer X if only I had feature Y.”

And at some point you end up making some decisions at the executive level that you want to start pushing out more of these features to be more competitive, to bring in more money, to bring in more customers. That is always a zero-sum cost, right? You’re changing the way you actually do things, and this can have really, really deleterious effects on the entire company.

NG: I just want to pause right here. If you think about it… what you’ve said, listening to salespeople, listening to customers, responding to their needs, looking at the competition… there are probably very few MBA courses that would tell you those are bad things to do.

NS: You’re totally right.

NG: It’s more about the stage that you’re at and also how much weight you give to those inputs. I think what happens a lot of times is that those inputs from the customers, from the market, override the original strategy that got you to where you are.

NS: Yes, that’s exactly right. Saying no is a very, very powerful thing. EPSD is negotiating right now with a company on something, and we asked them to change one of their terms—we asked them to change a few—and then they said yes to everything except for one. They’re like, “No, we’re not changing our data retention. We’re not going to extend it for you. We’re not going to change the way we do that, because that would have an effect on the entire company.”

That’s a really great sign to me that a company is actually keeping their eye on what is important, and that they’re not going to cut side deals that can undermine the stability of their entire platform just for the benefit of one sale. That’s really, really great. You’ve got to be listening to these people the whole time.

There’s a balance in the curation of a roadmap as you create it. Everybody knows that customers have features that you haven’t thought of, and you do want to get them worked in, but this should be a continuous gardening effort. This should be a continuous grooming effort to make sure that you’re doing the things that you know you have to do, plus the things that are being requested, in an orderly fashion. And what I’m discussing, and I think you’re right to point it out… I’m not saying don’t listen to the customers. What I’m saying is, if you only listen to the customers, now you’ve shifted the way you do business. You’ve shifted your value proposition.

NG: Yeah. That’s a subject for another podcast, perhaps. I just want to say we’re at this point, and point out that what we’re talking about, in terms of keeping to your vision and saying no, is not an easy thing. It’s easier to fall into than you might think.

NS: Yeah, it’s that warm bathtub that you’re sliding into. Because remember, the stakes are really high here, right? If you’re not bringing in enough new customers, you’re not hitting the revenues, you’re not getting the ARR numbers, your margins are down… you’re not hitting your goals. Those goals are now more important to the people who are actually investing in the company and leading the company, than a lot of other things.

And it also has very serious effects on the people who are selling your product. The bonuses, the way people make money who work at the company… it all depends on getting this balance right. Already people get a little bit cranky just in having to make this change. What you start getting is an erosion of the trust between the people who are building the stuff and the people who are directing the stuff. And you start to get sort of a logarithmically increasing lack of trust that the vision that we have is the vision that we’ll have in a quarter, in two quarters, but you also get into things that make everything worse.

Once you start pivoting, and you pivot away from what you’re doing now to do something to score a deal, for example, you tend to make decisions that are geared only to meeting the feature requirements and not to, for example, not accruing more tech debt, not allowing security issues to happen. “We’ll fix that later.” Right? And so you end up making bad decisions that are based purely on getting the feature out the door, which ironically slow down your ability to get features out the door.

NG: Yes. That’s right. And you’re diverging from the vision even if you think you’re adhering to it.

NS: Yes. And now another thing that starts to happen is… the first thing that happens as soon as margins start not doing what you want them to do, and money starts doing what you do not want it to do, is that you stop spending money. You start cutting budgets. There is where your internecine warfare can begin, because it becomes a battle of politics.

The old saying that you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate, means that the people who are the best at what they do are not necessarily the same people who are good at politicking to get the resources that they need.

You can see, and frequently do see, situations in which this zero-sum budget gets divided not just unevenly, but actually unfairly. People who are tasked with creating certain things find themselves unable to do it because they simply don’t have the resources. And the people from whom they would expect to get those resources? They’re running their own zero-sum calculation, and they’re realizing that if they help you, they can’t do what they need to do. So you end up getting increasingly entrenched sides.

NG: So here we are at the “Lord of the Flies” stage.

NS: There we are. Yes. And then this is the factionalism part, because over time this ends up being personal. And this is a really, really difficult thing. It leaves the realm of business very quickly, because typically what happens is the astounding pocket veto, right? One manager goes to another manager and says, “Hey, I need to do X,” and the other manager is like, “Oh yeah, X sounds like a great idea.” And then they start talking about this. And at the end of the meeting, the manager who’s coming and asking for resources, believes that they have a meeting of the minds.

They believe that they have a commitment from the other person, when in fact, they don’t. And the other person to succeed here has to do one thing: nothing. It can sometimes take months for the person asking for these resources to realize that not only haven’t they come, but they’re not coming. And as soon as that happens, you end up in a really bad situation, because now that person feels tricked, they feel lied to, and they feel that it’s personal, not business.

Now you have an actual conflict. In addition to a budgetary conflict, you have an interpersonal conflict. And over time, if these things are not addressed, they can fester, and they can get to the point where these people will do their very best not to work with one another as much as they can. This is actually a little bit easier in remote companies, but I’ve seen it happen in on-prem, where Bob doesn’t talk to Mary. Mary will not talk to Bob. And they work two offices… two cubicles down from one another. They’re not talking. And when they don’t talk, their teams know it, their teams see it, and their teams actually will start to mirror this behavior, and they will start to distrust one another. And then you’ve really got Lord of the Flies.

NG: Yep. And it’s not exclusive to just factionalism, but one of the outcomes of this type of behavior is you have people who are making decisions and looking for resources based on their needs or the needs of their role, rather than the needs of the organization. So the personal trumps the organizational and…

NS: Optimizing for their benefit, not for the company’s benefit.

NG: Yeah. And people who also do this type of Lord of the Flies—successful Lord of the Flies negotiators often are more inclined to have that worldview.

NS: Yeah. And so when this all comes to a head—and look, it’s not always, but when it does, and we’ve been in several of these over the years. When these things hit their apex, usually related to something like a new product launch, a new company strategy, a new round of funding, a decision to go public… Right? Something where it requires all hands on deck for a concerted effort over many months to get from where we are to where we need to be. And that means that we all have to work together. But Bob and Mary aren’t having it. They’re there. They’re just not… they don’t… they’re not going to commit to this, mainly because they’re both afraid that the other one is going to impact them badly. At this point, action is required.

There’s a lot of ways to approach this. And, first of all, you’ve got to have the courage of your convictions, because the only way to handle this is to grab the bull by the horns and do it. You’ve got to commit and have the courage of your convictions. This has to be a formalized plan. You can’t just wing it.

I’m going to set out just a few of the things that we do and we’ve had success with, because you don’t actually need outsiders to help you do this. You can do this yourself. The hardest thing is to find, and you can normally find this, is that you’ve got to find a mediator who will be trusted by both parties. Not “liked.” That’s not the prerequisite at all. It doesn’t matter. But this person has to be seen as somebody who has integrity, who has objectivity, and who will be an honest broker.

NG: And has domain expertise, too, so they’re respected.

NS: They have to at least understand some of the issues at stake from a technical perspective. But they also have to understand, and I think it’s much more important that they understand things from an organizational and budgetary perspective. That expertise is absolutely essential, but if they have technical expertise, that is also very, very good.

I would recommend that this is not your lawyer. I would recommend that this mediator is not in HR. They shouldn’t be in the reporting chain of either of the people. You want to really try to avoid bias as much as you possibly can. There should be somebody. Maybe it’s somebody on the board of directors. Maybe it’s somebody who’s an emeritus kind of, you know, the long trusted veteran who’s been there for a while, but they’ve backed away from their role. Maybe want to bring them back.

NG: Or some other trusted outsider.

NS: Right? Yeah. And then, of course, people like us will, “Like, sure!”

There’s a lot of people who will say, “Yeah, we can do this,” but I would look internally first, because that’s the very best course.

There’s three real ground rules that we’re trying to set, or expectations that we’re trying to set.

The first one is not really a ground rule, but just from a structural perspective: this is going to take a week. This is going to take one business week to solve this, so you should clear the decks. And I understand that that’s really, really a lot. But you’re not going anywhere right now. So, canceling all the meetings that are accomplishing nothing is really not as damaging as you might think. Clearing those calendars is actually very important… and give them a solid week.

It’s best to meet in a neutral location. Maybe it’s a WeWork private office, or something like that, but if you’ve got a conference room, that’s fine. Three days is kind of the magic number to get to a transition point.

The first rule is that you’ve got to have pre-conversations with both of the people who will be in this meeting with you. And I’m saying “you” as though you’re the person who’s mediating, and what you’re looking for… you’re looking for common ground, and that’s going to be one of the rules. You want to find common ground as early as possible—and that means even before the meetings start.

We’ve described a midlife startup, so I’m going to assume… and the likelihood of this is higher the longer the incumbency is of people who work in your company… most people are not actually just there for the money. Most people are not just there for a job. They’re there because they believe in the mission. They’re there because they like the company, they like the vision, they like the way things are going.

That typically means that when they realize it, they will try to do the right thing for the company. Get a sense of that. How much can I lean on the mission here to try to get you to see the forest for the trees. What you’re eliciting is the information about what things are very important, but to do that you get to ground rule number one: you have to be honest without rancor. You have to be blunt, without being… without attacking.

NG: Without making it personal.

NS: Right. It can’t be personal. So it’s perfectly good to say: “Two months ago we had a meeting and I told you that I needed some help, and you said that you supported what I was doing. I heard you tell me that you agreed with what I was doing, and I told you the things that I needed. It sounded to me very much like you agreed. Later I found out that you didn’t agree. We never got that project off the ground. And I have to tell you, I felt tricked. I felt I was lied to, and this doesn’t make me feel good.” That’s fine. Just focus on yourself.

NG: You haven’t told me what I’ve done wrong, per se. You’ve just told me how what I’ve done has made you feel.

NS: Yes. Yes. And that can be very powerful.

NG: I’m already feeling apologetic.

NS: Right? Yeah, exactly. And the trick now is to, on that first day—and this is the second of the ground rules, the expectations…

What you’re looking for on day one is you’re going to need an airing. You are going to need to have “Cards on the table. This is what’s going on.” You’re going to have to get through that. You can’t avoid it. Because both sides are going to feel burned and distrustful.

You should have a big whiteboard in this room. This room should be private, so that people can’t see it, and this stuff is all confidential.

NG: Soundproofed…

NS: Yeah. If possible. And really, what you’re looking to do is three columns on a whiteboard.

The first column is: things we agree on.

The second column is: things that we don’t agree on but will do anyway. We will disagree and commit.

And the third column is: things that we disagree on, and I will die on this hill. We’re not going to agree on this.

It would be astonishing to me if your experience is different from mine. You will find that the vast majority of the findings through the next two days, and I know I said three, but the next two days, the vast majority of the things that you write down are going to be in column one: things we agree on.

Makes sense, right? They have a shared mission. Get those as early as you can. Start writing them down. Get the lowest hanging fruit. It doesn’t even matter. “I agree that we’re in the X business.” Great! “We agree on that. We agree that we agree that the budgets have been cut.”

NG: Yeah. We’re drawing the forest now.

NS: You want to get as many of those things in there as you can. Where you are trying to get by the end of the first day is to find the thing, and there’s usually only one or two—I’ve never seen more than two, that goes in column three. That’s the biggest bone of contention.

The way to get to that, then, is throughout the day, as you’re looking for the things and you’re sort of hashing out what’s happened, you will find it. Don’t worry. You won’t have to look very hard. You’ll get there. And once that thing is on the board, that’s also very, very powerful, right? Because it tells you: “Here’s a continuum of things that we agree on to things that we don’t agree on,” and it frames the whole conversation.

By the end of day one, don’t expect anything other than… if you are able to maintain cautious optimism and trust the plan, that’s really good, because it’s going to be hard. Because it’s going to feel, at the end of day one, you’re not getting anywhere. But on day two, something starts to happen where people have thought about this overnight, and they’re thinking about the things that they agree on, and they’re also remembering what got them in the room in the first place when they said, “I need to do this. There is an interdependency. There is a symbiosis that goes on.” Where they realize that they do actually need each other, and they start to recognize, “Actually, professionally, the best thing would be if we were able to work this out.”

They come usually, day two, to get to the table with a new set of commitment to trying to find a way through. And that is when you can tentatively start to revisit that thing that they don’t agree on and find the actual edges of that envelope, because that’s going to be super important. “Okay, you don’t agree on this, but let’s actually define what those things are. And can we find some things in that general topic of the thing that we won’t agree to, that we can either disagree and commit or we can agree?”

And you usually can. You’re trying to reduce the scope of the “I’ll die on this hill” disagreement.

NG: And also probably tease out the fact that the source of the disagreement is usually cultural or personal rather than technical.

NS: That’s the secret rule that you don’t tell them. It is always… the thing that they disagree on will always be cultural, inter-operational, some kind of… it’s based on that thing that got you in the room in the first place. “You made me feel stupid. You made me feel tricked, and I don’t like that. You hurt me,” is really where we’re going.

NG: Yeah. And “my decision making since then is influenced or based on…”

NS: Yeah. Where you’d like to get by the end of day two is a commitment to try things up to, but not including, the thing that they won’t agree on. And the real point here is to get, by the end of day two, where you’re going with the commitment is, that tomorrow we will start planning how we can get this to work. We can get them thinking about the future.

That planning is the key. Because as soon as you get them planning, they’re going to remember why they liked each other before they didn’t like each other. Why they got along before they didn’t get along. Those. And planning is… especially if we’re talking about engineering or product engineering or even just product and engineering, where they understand and appreciate what the other one does and they understand the relationship… it is a collaborative thing. And that will encourage them to try a little bit harder.

Maybe you’re at the point at the end of day two that you can bring in one other trusted person for day three. If not, you can wait until the mid-day of day three to sort of work out any remaining things, but that’s generally the direction that you’re going. Bringing in that other person is a trust fall. This really is.

Don’t kid yourself that you’ve solved the problem. What you’ve done is you’ve got them talking, which is the route to solving the problem, but the problem is not solved yet. It will only get solved with… a couple of things will push them.

Where you’re trying to get them is to a position where they will believe one another on small execution steps that can be demonstrated very, very quickly. The problem started because things didn’t get executed, and they got out of hand. So what you’re looking for, again, is small wins, easy wins, low hanging fruit—things that we can jointly accomplish.

Where you’re trying to also get them is to the planning stage, where their ability to make these small executions can be measured, and use those as the metrics of success for their rekindled relationship, so that on a weekly basis they can actually talk to one another and say, “Yes, here are the four major indicators that we’ve agreed on, the KPIs that we’ve agreed on. Number one is green. Number two is red. Number three is amber. Number four is green. Here’s why number two is red, and here is my plan to get it back to amber and then to green.” And you can track that on a regular basis so that people don’t have to trust. They can…

NG: It’s objective.

NS: It’s objective. Yeah. And funnily enough, that’s often part of the problem was that they didn’t have that before.

NG: So let’s just talk about this person that you’re bringing in. Because that’s pretty important. When you bring in the third party, all of a sudden, to use a phrase that I don’t actually like, they have to “walk the walk.” They have to reveal their compromise to a third party, and that makes it more real. So selecting that third party requires a bit of thought as well.

NS: Not as much as you’d think. The third person who’s coming into the room, they have to be respected by both. They have to be professional. They have to be known to be a problem solver, that kind of stuff. Whether they’re all bought in doesn’t really matter. What matters actually the most is: success here is based on other people seeing that these two agree. Something’s changing. They’ve come up with this together. This is why every time they start to tell the story and talk about what’s happening, they have to say, “We are doing this. We have agreed. We are going to do this. My team will do this part. Their team will do this part. Our teams together will collaborate and work together. There’ll be ride-alongs…” It has to be seen as a joint commitment.

The more that happens over time… and we’re talking, you know, four to six months before this actually starts to become normal again. During the initial couple of months, people are going to be really, really skeptical. Rightly so. Once both sides see that the other one is actually living up to their end of the bargain, more and more trust can happen. So you end up, by bringing in that third person and sharing, exactly as you just said, now on days four and five, you can bring in a much larger group. And this is the rubber meets the road.

“We’ve agreed on some high level principles about how we will work together. We need to plan how we will work together on this project, which means we have to actually start to do the project. Let’s first make ground rules of how we will talk to one another. Ground rules of… the rules of engagement between us, between our teams, and metrics. These are the metrics that will drive our understanding and our ability to measure and report, individually and collectively on progress toward the goal.”

NG: Right. So basically, you had a roadmap before, but it was not possible to execute it because of this factionalism, this conflict. And you emerge from this possibly with an altered roadmap, but a roadmap that everybody can trust. I imagine the first time that “Mary” says “we” it’s going to be like Gollum speaking. It’s just very hard to get out.

NS: Yeah. And it will ring out. It will be heard. Because it ain’t a secret. The idea that these people are ready to go… it will actually inspire a lot of people.

And remember, the conditions required for these people to get into these conflicts in the first place are all around cultural distrust. They’re all around broken promises and limited resources, and last piece of bread in the stores. These are very, very complex human challenges that… notice this has nothing to do with the actual technology that you’re building, or what it is that you’re doing. These are all interpersonal things. But that’s that third ground rule. Your goal from the very beginning must be to abstract and elevate a personal conflict into an organizational imperative.

NG: Right. So to recap, we have three ground rules, because we want to give a takeaway.

• The first one is: honesty without rancor.
• The second one is: Find Common Ground.
• 2.5, which you don’t tell them, is that the areas of disagreement will be cultural, not technical.
• And then three is that we have to translate personal conflicts into organizational imperatives.

Now let’s talk about what happens when this doesn’t work. It’s a great framework, and I have seen it work as well, but there are situations where the parties are not amenable to the process, to put it tactfully.

NS: So it succeeds much more often than it fails. And it really succeeds, ironically, because of the commitment of the people who are actually arguing, the people who you think can’t get together. Actually, they’re the ones who are going to bring it together. Because they wouldn’t… let’s just understand human nature for a minute… they’re not going to be this angry if they don’t care. They’re not going to be this committed to the argument if they don’t have a goal to improve things. And it’s a passionately held belief. So when you have that, things can be fixed.

Now, some people are just obdurate. Some people are Oblomov. Some people are impossible, faceless bureaucrats who will not commit to change… to the necessary change. It does require some self-reflection, some self-awareness, and it requires an ability to compromise. Some people don’t have that. It is possible.

You’ve heard me say this before. Whenever we go into an organizational crisis, an organizational conflict, I warn the CEO and the COO and the board: people will get sad, people will get mad, and people will quit. And often that’s good. Even the people you think you can’t live without, those are actually the people who, it turns out, those are the people who are hurting you the most. It’s hard to see because of the systems that you have in place that are allowing that person, for example, to become the single point of failure. I have seen it happen where one of those two people actually leaves. That’s actually okay.

NG: And the merit of this process is that having gone through this reconciliation, these peace talks, you now have objective metrics to measure progress. So you can actually say you both committed to delivering on these goals. Mary, you have. Bob, you’re going to need to step up your game. Six months later, “Bob, game has not been stepped up. Let’s have a chat.”

NS: Yeah. And then that brings us… You know, Chris Swan is always talking about decision records, like, taking copious and scrupulous notes of what is discussed in that meeting is actually seriously important. In a worst case scenario, what you want to have is a very, very clear record. You don’t want to embarrass anybody. You don’t want to have personal admissions or things like that in these notes. But you do want to talk about the direction of the conversation and the nature of the commitments in specific detail.

The reason that you’re doing that is you are making it indisputable that the company and the disputing parties came together for an extended period of time, with the calendar cleared and no other things on the table, and a concerted and structured effort was undertaken to get to the bottom of and solve this problem. Programs and plans were put into place in order to get there, and it didn’t work. What you’re trying to do is if somebody says, “I quit,” that’s one thing. But if they say, “I quit because you forced me out of this, and I was constructively terminated,” you want to at least be able to say, “No, no, look right here at these notes,” right? I’ve never seen it come anything close to that. But you always want to prepare.

NG: Yeah. You have to extract the objective from the subjective. Well, I think we’ve solved that problem.

NS: Well. We’re done. Yes. What’s for lunch?

NG: This has been Velocity’s Edge. I’m Nicko Goncharoff.

NS: I’m Nick Selby.