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00:08:44 - The Collaborative Process in Troubled Companies
00:13:13 - Reflecting on Career Decisions
00:17:35 - Changing Minds through Graphic Novels
00:21:50 - The Changing Patterns of Social Interactions and Travel Habits
00:26:12 - Maps and Technology Advances
00:30:33 - Learning for Fun and Personal Growth
00:34:44 - Guilt and Finishing Things
When an investor considers investing in a tech company, we assume they are most interested in the technical part of the organization, primarily, the quality of solutions on offer. However, our guest, Hutton Henry, the CEO and founder of Beyond M&A, shares some interesting results.
Hutton uses a practice called technology due diligence. Despite the name, the goal is to place the people who build those solutions first and show investors the value behind such teams. Kolbe’s program is part of the process, and Hutton shares how taking the Kolbe assessment changed his and his clients’ business perspective. But, again, at the center of all those findings are people.
Aside from being an entrepreneur, Hutton is the author of two books: People First and Diversity of Action. We were curious about what inspired him to work on them and who they are for. Finally, Hutton encourages anyone who still doesn't feel they have reached their full potential to use tools like Kolbe and find a way to their true self.
Guest-at-a-Glance
Name: Hutton Henry
What he does: Hutton is the CEO and founder of Beyond M&A.
Company: Beyond M&A
Noteworthy: Hutton works with VC, private equity, and corporate investors, assessing tech teams on their behalf. The practice is called technology due diligence. So if we were to think of them like house surveyors, they come in, check things out, and go back to the investor and explain how that technology operates. A big part of Hutton's mission is to put the team that builds the solution in front of the solution itself, not the other way around.
Podcast Insights
🎙People with the same or similar vocation will likely get the same Kolbe result. Findings that confirm this argument result from a practice called technology due diligence, which despite the name, is focused on people. Kolbe's assessment is part of that process. ''When we look at the number of people we've assessed over the years, there is a common shape within the tech teams of high Fact Finders with Follow Thru. So we would say around 90% of tech teams are made up of people of that type. And so, working with that type of profile, we tend to find that those people go into so much detail, but they need to be able to summarize it and present it in a more engaging way.”
🎙️Grow your team first. It seems like a buzzword, although we still see companies struggle with becoming people-centric or employee-centric, especially now with all the advances in technology making the executives think that the business growth solely depends on the tech stack. However, according to our guest, it's People First (by the way, that's the name of his first book, too). So we were curious to find out what inspired him to work on this topic. ''I'd been to this conference, and Steve Ballmer, the head of Microsoft at the time, said it was like a cloud-first, mobile-first world. And in the back of my mind, I'm like, ‘No, it is about people.’ Interestingly, I wrote it five years ago. Still, the same things are happening because it's all about bringing groups of people together and making hard decisions about how to grow a business.''
🎙️You may still be on the path to discovering your strengths, and tools like Kolbe can help you choose the right direction. In other words, the report you'll get after taking the assessment will be like a map, guiding you toward your true self by understanding why you acted a certain way in the past and determining your natural way of engaging in certain situations and professional and personal interactions. ''I always thought I wasn't doing well at school because I'd had a weird upbringing, and no one was watching. So I was being quite delinquent at school. But what I got from the Kobe result is that I don't need that type of very structured academia. So it changed my story from somebody who could not do something because of a disadvantage in education to this quite suited me; I just didn't realize that. So you could have given me the best school in the world, and I still would've done the same,'' shares Hutton.