“He said, do you think we could try to run the organization on three sentence emails? First sentence is, here's my personal problem. Second sentence is: here's what I think the solution is. Third sentence is, here's my next step. And if I need resources or permission, ask in that sentence… The second key that he said all the time was, don't sit on bad news. Give me bad news as fast as you know about it… because bad news only gets worse with time.”

It has to be concise. And so we had this kind of fun. We had fun with our communication in the sense that we gave each other a challenge. I don't know who came up with it. And I think it was just his idea. He said, do you think we could try to run the organization on three sentence emails? First sentence is, here's my personal. Problem. Second sentence is: here's what I think the solution is. Third sentence is, here's my next step. And if I need resources or permission, ask in that sentence. And so we started to experiment with this. And it was really the key to communicating with him because he likes that sort of concise, get to the point. Have you super thought about the problem? Have you really thought about the solution? And you thought about the next steps. And that was kind of key to communicating with him. The second key that he said all the time was, don't sit on bad news. Give me bad news as fast as you know about it. And he said this to everybody because bad news only gets worse with time. So like, give me bad news fast. And the way that you could get on his bad side was saving bad news. And I watched that over time. And so those were the two keys to communication, like be concise and be rapid with bad news.