Maintain Your Humanity: Interview with David Dodson, Co-Founder of Sanku

I recently went one on one with David Dodson, co-founder of Sanku. Dave is the author of the new book The Manager's Handbook: Five Simple Steps to Build a Team, Stay Focused, Make Better Decisions, and Crush Your Competition.

Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?

Dave: At first, I appear the most unlikely of entrepreneurs. My father had a farm equipment manufacturing business that went under as farming practices changed, and my grandfather owned an anthracite coal mine that went out of business when lignite coal replaced anthracite coal. Oddly, though, I think their experiences taught me about the power of market forces.

As such, I was never drawn to inventing the next big idea or seeing around corners. I didn’t want my success to be undermined by the discovery of a hotter burning form of coal in Wyoming, but instead by my own abilities—put another way, my capacity to execute. As a result, my entrepreneurial successes and failures have principally been determined by my success—or failure—at “getting things done.”

More recently, since joining the faculty at Stanford School of Business I’ve furthered this interest through a focus on the question of why certain leaders are so much better at getting things done.

Adam: What do you hope readers take away from your new book?

Dave: Leading an organization can be learned by almost anyone. 

Great managers, a category that includes entrepreneurs as well as middle school principals, have been misunderstood. There’s the common attribute theory that you have to have certain personality traits such as flamboyant, risk-tolerant, or inspirational in order to succeed as a manager or leader. But in fact, that is not the characteristic that unites effective managers. In my research, I found great leaders shared five common skills. There were no exceptions. 

Further, in diving deeper into these Five Skills, I was able to see how the generalized skill could be broken into a series of sub-skills. Take for example learning the piano. To play the piano you need to learn a series of sub-skills in order to learn the primary skill of playing the piano: the difference between a sharp and a flat, how to position your hands across 88 keys, or how to operate the pedals. Master each sub-skill and you’ll learn the master skill.

In the first of the five skills in The Manager’s Handbook: Commitment to Building a Team, you need to learn a set of sub-skills as well—such as how to conduct an exit interview, how to onboard a new employee or the best way to ask a question in a reference check. Learn those sub-skills to master the primary skill of building a team.

By the way, there is no shortcut. Just like you can’t learn to play the piano without knowing how to read a sharp or a flat, you can’t build a team if you don’t know how to do a reference check well.

Adam: In your experience, what are the key steps to growing and scaling your business?

Dave: Unsurprisingly, learn and practice the Five Essential Skills of Management. I realize how that might come off, given I just wrote a book on this, but keep in mind I did not develop these primary skills, or the underlying sub-skills. I simply observed them among those people who were far better managers than me, and found a way to communicate those behaviors in a “how-to” format, which I then describe in The Manager’s Handbook.

Put another way, the answer to your question is to study and copy the day-to-day habits and practices of those leaders who know how to get things done.

If you don’t believe me, let me challenge you with this: When Sam Walton started Walmart he was surrounded by Target, JCPenney, and Kmart. He didn’t invent a thing. He had no profound insights into the future, did not reinvent retail. But he was masterful at five skills, and with that he crushed his competitors. He’s a well-known example, but there are plenty of other examples such as how Facebook clobbered Myspace or why Jet Blue thrives while none of my daughters recognize the names of Pan Am or TWA.

Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?

Dave: I work primarily with managers early in their careers, making the transition from being an individual contributor to leading. They often mistake the primary leap as that of becoming a manager, but that’s not so. This was the lesson I learned from Kevin Landry, who built TA Associates into one of the most respected private equity firms in the world. He told me early in my career that becoming a manager is not that hard, because you can generally survive by hitting the “more button” (an expression I got from my Stanford colleague Graham Weaver). If someone who works for you stumbles, stay late in the office and just do it yourself—press the more button.

But the more button is not scalable. As soon as you are “managing managers,” the more button does not work. Your span of control is too large, and you can’t routinely reach over your direct reports and cover for others. You have to truly manage.

The marvelous aspect of all this, though, is that learning to “manage managers” is 100 percent scalable. It’s why people with the same hours in the day can manage an organization of 10,000 people across multiple countries.

Adam: What are the most important trends in technology that leaders should be aware of and understand? What should they understand about them?

Dave: The one I care most about is remote and hybrid work. Many of the old guardrails protecting us from mediocre management have been removed. It’s harder to create a personal bond with your employees; they don’t know each other as well; and there are fewer natural formats for ideation and creativity. As well, the number one reason people stay with an employer is because they feel connected to the organization. Which means that if you do a poor job onboarding your employees, beware the next time a recruiter contacts them on LinkedIn. 

And yet, not all the frameworks and practices are the same. Meetings are often remote—the best practices for running a face-to-face meeting are not the same as one on Zoom. If your rival’s meetings are sloppy—half the attendees are reading email instead of contributing—while you run tight and effective remote meetings, picture the competitive advantage you’ll have in the marketplace. But you have to learn the new tricks. 

While it’s hip these days to talk about AI, the impact of AI for most businesses will be slower and less certain. Yet right in front of all of us is how the heck do we manage a software development team where not one of them lives together in the same city?

Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?

Dave: I’m not a one-trick pony, but the answer to your question does come down to what I learned after 30 years of being a CEO and a decade on the faculty of the Stanford School of Business. Effective leaders harness a set of tactical skills to get things done.

I’m now going to use a remarkable example to make my case: Steve Jobs of Apple. He’s commonly known for having almost x-ray vision in his ability to combine technology with a view toward what consumers will want. And yet, that was not his primary superpower. See, he didn’t invent the portable computer—that honor falls to an unknown entrepreneur named Andrew Kay, whose company (Kaypro) went bankrupt. The computer mouse was invented by the also unknown inventor Douglas Engelbart, who at the time was working at the Stanford Research Institute. Sony invented portable music, not Apple. IBM invented the smartphone.

Jobs invented very little, and uncovered few new markets. But he was masterful at building a team, maintained a relentless focus, had an obsession with quality, surrounded himself with smart advisors, and managed his time with precision—and that’s why I frequently cite him not as a savant or genius, but as a best example (alongside Sam Walton) of a manager who brought together the five skills as a way to lead an organization.

Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?

Dave: First, hard work. I know that’s not what a lot of aspiring leaders want to hear, initially. But it should be reassuring. If the answer to taking leadership skills to the next level is hard work, that means it’s available to almost anyone. If you don’t have to be born a certain way, or have a special string of DNA, then being a great leader is available to you.

Second, and this is related, don’t pick and choose which management best practices you want to do, and ignore the others. In my book, The Manager’s Handbook, I conclude by making this point. If you view the sub-skills of leadership as optional, as if you can select some but not others to implement, then you’ll choose to do the easy ones and forgo those that are less fun, less interesting, and leave you less popular.

But they go together. This is not my insight. It came from Harvard professor Michael Porter, perhaps the most prolific and influential business professor in history. It was my friend Michael who pointed out to me, after reading an early draft of the book, that I had created a unifying theory of execution. He told me that you can’t set and adhere to priorities (skill #4) if you are not good at managing your own time (skill #2), or that you cannot achieve maximum quality (skill #5) without a good team (skill #1), and that the best people only want to work for companies that sell a high-quality product.

If you want to be great, you have to do it all. Just like you’ll never get past “Chopsticks” if you don’t learn how the pedals of a piano work, you won’t be a great manager if you don’t practice all of the sub-skills, not just the ones you enjoy.

Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?

Dave: First, take your time in learning the trade. You don’t get to play Beethoven by trying to learn everything all at once. Select a sub-skill, master it, then go to the next one. This takes years, not months.

Second, once you learn them yourself, build an organization by teaching the skills to your whole team. It’s of some value for you to be masterful at running a management meeting, but transformative when your whole organization does so.

Third, maintain your humanity. I talk and write about these skills and sub-skills, but behind them all is a requirement for decent humanity. Colin Powell is a management hero of mine. He’s not known for his battlefield genus or his encyclopedic knowledge of diplomatic history. What caused him to have people willing to walk through walls for him—as the current Secretary of State Anthony Blinken once said—was his decent humanity. 

Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?

Dave: This would come from Irv Grousbeck, one of the finest American entrepreneurs, who later became the co-founder of Stanford’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. Using his own words, he cites Deuteronomy in saying: We all drink from wells we did not dig. We are warmed by fires we did not build.

It’s a foundational belief that success comes by standing on the generous shoulders of others—our parents, teachers, bosses, and mentors. Recognizing this, we are humble and modest in successes, and certain to leave warming fires for the next traveler.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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