Confident and utterly incompetent

Confident and utterly incompetent. That was me in the board meeting. And over the course of two hours, it dawned on me that it was everyone else too.

I spent two to three weeks turning over every stone before walking in. Every number. Every power dynamic in the room. Every assumption the previous leadership team had baked into the slide deck.

What I found did not help.

The CFO who’d been there forever was gone. The board pushed me to promote his replacement — who had precisely zero finance experience and couldn’t build a budget.

The week before the board meeting, she’d told me: “If there’s money in the bank, you can spend it.”

Are you serious. You’re f*****g killing me.

When I asked her to walk me through the model, she said: “I don’t know. All I know is you don’t touch this part of the model, but you can touch this part.”

When I asked how they came up with the numbers, she said: “We make them up and hope we reach them.”

On top of it all, we were still dealing with the fallout of a recent data breach.

This was the company I’d just stepped into four months earlier as VP of Product.

And I had three weeks to prepare for the first board meeting of my life as interim CEO.

Before I walked in, I could already feel how those meetings were supposed to go. There was a shape to them. What got shown. What didn’t. What you were expected to say and what you weren’t.

I wasn’t going to do that. I was the only one left who could say what was real.

So I decided I would.

“I’ll get back to you.”

I said it. Said it again. Kept saying it.

There’s a ceiling to that sentence. You can only spend it so many times before it starts costing you credibility. I was learning exactly where that ceiling was, in real time, in front of a board.

The board members were saying it too.

Nobody in that room was comfortable saying “I don’t know.” Including the people who’d been there for years.

These were supposed to be experienced operators. Investors. People who’d been around this company for years. Making decisions based on information nobody had verified, because verifying it would mean admitting they didn’t have it.

Maybe it wasn’t a gap in my preparation at all.

The previous CEO, and the CEO before her, had scripted the board meetings.

Explicitly.

“We are not going to talk about this. Not going to talk about that.”

The team had been hiding information. Not always maliciously. But deliberately, and for a long time.

Truth in that company had been heavily “managed” before I arrived. And the decisions that had been made inside that architecture were still running.

I can get up to speed on a financial model I don’t understand. I cannot get up to speed on a model that was never allowed to exist.

The board members, the team, the previous CEO: all of us had agreed that certain questions didn’t get answered in that room.

I’d just arrived late to the agreement.

Once I understood that, I stopped.

Someone was supposed to tell the story. That was the CEO’s job. My job — the operator’s job — was to present facts.

Let them paint the picture however they want. I lay the facts.

Someone has to operate from what’s real. Whoever stops performing first becomes that person.

There’s a specific tactic I used to hold both versions at the same time: the version I was supposed to present, and the version I could actually make decisions from.

Next week I go into depth on that.