How to Work Well on the Most Satisfying Things in the World –Insights from the Interview with Michael Fergusson

“People don't love the things they do because they're easy; they actually love them because they're hard. Taking on hard, challenging, and meaningful work is one of the most satisfying things in the world.”

In this article:

• My purpose for the interview
• A Day in the Life of a CEO and the Importance of Human Attention
• Back of a Napkin Planning and Failing Well
• Avid Reader - What and Why
• About Remote Working and Opportunities at Ayogo

My purpose for the interview

Gathering knowledge from books and the internet is great, but nothing beats collaborating with people who have direct experience in the real world. Those individuals bring a tremendous amount of value to us due to their insight and first-hand familiarity with certain situations.

I had an opportunity to chat with Michael Fergusson and I’m deeply appreciative of his generosity and wisdom.

Michael Fergusson is the CEO of Ayogo , a considerate Entrepreneur, and a benevolent Philanthropist. As an esteemed keynote speaker and panelist, Michael captivates audiences with topics ranging from technology, to mHealth, behavioral economics, patient engagement, startups, gamification, and social networking. He is a trusted member of the Board of Directors for Innovate BC, a provincial Crown Agency as well as an invited member of the Technology and Innovation Leadership Program Planning Circle of the First Nations Technology Council, while also being an advisor to many organizations in and outside the tech world.?

For over 25 years, he’s been captivated by the power of technology to aid connection and empower people. His expertise spans public speaking, entrepreneurship, product innovation, team building, user experience (UX), mobile applications, patient engagement, gamification, and more.

Ayogo: Twice recognized as one of top 100 innovative digital health companies, Ayogo is focused on improving patients' health outcomes. Ayogo's digital tools improve engagement, adherence to program, and ultimately health outcomes for patients across a variety of conditions. Their product, Empower, has been successfully deployed for patients around the world to increase activation, adherence, and persistence to therapy.

Thanks to Michael for his thoughtful and candid answers! I sincerely hope that they would help and inspire anyone who’s starting and running a company or building a team or developing software or delivering projects –to do their best work.

Following are the answers from the interview. I hope you find them helpful as I do. Enjoy!

A Day in the Life of a CEO and the Importance of Human Attention

Q: What does a regular day or week look like for someone in an executive position like you? It may be easy to assume that those in positions of leadership and power have an easy life, but what are the stressful moments versus the enjoyable ones? :)

A: As the CEO, I have a highly variable daily schedule. In addition to the things I do that are obviously part of my job here at the company such as managing board meetings, checking financial performance, hiring, and that sort of thing, anything that doesn't fall obviously into somebody else's area of responsibility is by default my responsibility. When there's something that no one else knows how to handle, it tends to come to me. There’s more of it early on in the life of a company, in my experience.

When a company is still in its early stages of development, it is beneficial to have people that have a generalist attitude and take initiative to get things done. Even if you're not really good at it, that's okay. You should just do it. It is highly valued to be a person who just jumps in and does something in the early stages of a company, when velocity tends to be your main competitive advantage.?

As your company matures, you want less and less of that. And at a certain point, people jumping in on things that are not directly in their area of expertise becomes a problem. And actually what you want is highly specialized people doing all the important things. What’s true through that whole period is that, anything that’s not obviously somebody’s job in the end, it’s going to end up on your (CEO’s) plate. [chuckles]. You end up dealing with different kinds of problems, – scale and complexity of the problem changes, but it always has this nature of being something unusual that other people don’t know how to deal with.

So, what does my typical day look like? With everything that is going on in the world economy and the digital health industry rapidly transforming, my days are pretty highly variable:

In the early morning, I try to get some exercise and eat something small and healthy, and then, jump into my work. A big part of my morning is usually answering emails from the East Coast or from Europe that have piled up in my inbox, taking the time around mid-morning to read up on the latest trends and developments within my field –things that are going on outside the four walls of the business. And then in the afternoons, I'm focused on what is going on within the four walls of the business. So that's the time I tend to use for meeting with the staff and talking with our board and investors and one-on-one meetings and that sort of thing. By keeping up with what's going on outside and within my business, I ensure that I'm always well-versed and prepared for whatever comes my way.

Q: What would you say to the folks who might think that they’re working too hard while the executives and upper management have it easy?

A: Well, I don't know… I mean, I don't want to speak for other businesses. I've seen instances where corporate executives weren't putting in their best effort. It's true that there are companies in which hard labor is mostly done by those at the bottom rung, for example working in a warehouse, and this has the effect of making it look like the edX snare slacking off. This definitely isn't the case for the companies that I start and build—on day one, the founders do every single job in the business because we’re the only people in it – we just founded it, so we’re doing everything.

As the CEO, my role is to assign tasks to those who are more qualified than me. It's essential to delegate, as it gives you more space for creativity and allows for others’ expertise to grow. Additionally, handing responsibilities off to others lets me move on to new projects and explore ventures with a fresh perspective. I find this dynamic quite appealing and always try to be part of the team throughout the process. Nevertheless, I acknowledge not every company has the same mindset.

To comment on this thought that “we (the employees) are working super hard and the executives are not” – there are several things wrong with that line of thinking. They indicate to me a bit of a toxic work culture. First of all, nobody should be working so hard that they're burning themselves up. That is just bad. That is bad management. You know, it's bad management at the company level, and it’s bad management at the individual level. You should not be working that way as an individual person. If you're thinking “I'm working so hard, the management is not working very hard.” Well, okay, there's a couple things that could be happening there – One is your management could be slacking off. It’s important that you trust the leadership of your company, and if you don’t, you should be looking for other work regardless of how hard people are or are not working. The other is that you could be working way too hard. My experience is that there are definitely diminishing returns to working really, really, really, hard all the time, and these certainly accelerate as you get older. When I was young, I didn't need to sleep as much. I could drink a double espresso at nine o'clock at night and sleep like a baby. But now, my physiology has changed, and the contents of my life have changed. The things that I need in order to be highly productive in my work are different now than when I was twenty.?

At age twenty, you may not know what it takes to build a successful and productive career, but that does not mean success is out of reach. With the support of your organization's management, you have the potential to find the best way forward for you. This includes avoiding burnout from long work hours and being too exhausted to focus when reporting to work each morning. Ensure that you are focusing on meaningful tasks and manage your rest times carefully so that when you show up for work, you are energized and ready for the day ahead. Results are what matter.?

Human attention is the most valuable thing in the universe. There's nothing more valuable than human attention. And so you want to treat it very carefully. You want to treat it appropriately as how valuable it is. You can easily dilute it by spreading it out over too many hours. There's a lot of things you can do to diminish the value of the attention that's being applied in your business. In my own work, paying close attention is essential. My work needs to be high-quality and focused, so I don't want to make a habit of under or overspending my attention. Having the right kind of attention from others is likewise essential. No one wants to be micromanaged, but too little attention can lead to mistakes of inexperience in individuals and companies. So, one of the things that I think of as being important for a CEO/Leader is managing this flow of attention within your company. That is a core role for a senior executive in any organization.

Back of a Napkin Planning and Failing Well

Q: When it comes to building an early stage tech company, what can you tell me about your experience with detailed planning v/s planning on the back of a napkin? Did you have everything laid out before beginning, or did you take a more trial-and-error approach? How did you handle changes and surprises along the way?

A: It always starts with a napkin. And it always ends with detailed specifications. That’s the journey you’re taking. And all along the way, you’re trying to get to a product as early as possible. You wanna get to your MVP as early as you can, your initial product release. So the less detailed your initial specifications, at the time when you have your first version of the product, that's generally a sign that you're moving quickly. All other things being equal, that’s a good thing for an early-stage company.

There’s obviously caveats to that. Certain kinds of products require a lot of engineering or taking care of safety issues, etc. But in the world that I largely work in, which is largely software, and largely, not delivering direct healthcare–we’re not building bridges or making tanks or anti-lock brake systems, right? We are building user interfaces or patient support systems. It is good to iterate quickly and to let the detailed work flow downstream if you can. So I love working in software, I love to take a very agile iterative approach to building. I prefer to avoid the detailed waterfall oriented sort of design-build-deploy model, if I can. You can’t always, but to the extent you can, I try to do that.

Q: What are your thoughts on a saying like- “fail fast and fail often”?

A; I think that’s actually very well said, but it’s not just about failing fast and failing often, it’s also about failing well. When you’re failing well, you understand why you are failing and what it is that is failing. So that you can feed that knowledge back into the system and do better the next time. To build something and have it blow up in your face and you have no idea why, that is a bad failure, right? Although we have encountered an initial setback, it is important to remember that this is only a small part of the system and will serve as a good learning experience. It is essential to take this opportunity to iterate and improve upon the specific measure that isn't functioning properly and leave the rest of the system intact.

So it’s about starting small and iteratively building, making sure you understand all of the pieces that you have built and where they are in their life cycle. From being just napkin drawings to all the way to really well-specified, well-articulated, well-maintained pieces of software. And, you know, things fail differently at different stages in their life cycle.

So, my advice is: make sure to instrument your system effectively. Every design is a hypothesis, and you should construct the system in a way that it can track its own performance (KPI) so that you can monitor how it performs and make further optimizations if needed. Incorporate experimentation into the system to ensure ongoing success.

Avid Reader - What and Why

Q: You mentioned that one of your morning routines is to read. So may I know a few of your reading topics?

A: I have a diverse range of reading interests at the moment. I read a lot of materials related to my industry, such as scientific journals, industry magazines and articles. Currently, I am reading economics textbooks, which I find particularly interesting, with a focus on macroeconomics. Additionally, I am interested in epistemology and metaethics, thinking about how we can determine what is true and good and how we can organize ourselves to promote these values. I am reading a lot of books on these topics and am particularly interested in taking a rational approach to ethics that is easy to understand and teach, rather than relying on things like blind faith and so on. How do we know what is true and how do we know what is good, and how can we organize ourselves to maximize truth and goodness? Um, and why should we organize ourselves to maximize truth and goodness? Those are all really interesting questions to me. So there's a lot of books to read about that.

My reading list may look like a strange assortment of topics. And that’s partly because I read a lot of things that I don’t necessarily agree with. I read to change my mind. :)

About Remote Working and Opportunities at Ayogo

Q: I see that you're very proud of the corporate culture you've developed at Ayogo. What opportunities and remote work possibilities you may have?

A: A remote working setup was something our team embraced wholeheartedly when the pandemic began, and while we understand that it might not be the most effective form of collaboration for everyone, our people are benefitting in many ways. We've got remote developers, designers, and those in other roles who are carrying out their work efficiently away from the office. In fact, I'm now functioning at least half the time remotely myself. We think this arrangement is a great way to maximize performance - so that's what we'll focus on.

At the moment, we are not hiring for any new positions. However, in the second quarter, we expect to add to our team. If you're interested in learning more about our company, you can visit our careers page on our website . There, you'll find information about our culture, as well as our Ayogo manifesto which explains our philosophy and values. We believe that profits and social value should go hand in hand, and this is reflected in the way we've organized our company. People who share this philosophy tend to enjoy working here, while those who don't may not find it a good fit.

There are not many things in the world that we can control. We can't control what happens in the global economy, it's hard to predict what customers will do, and it's hard to control what our suppliers will do. But, we do have control over who we work with. I am always surprised that people don't take advantage of this more. I always like to say, life is too short to not be working on things that really matter, but it is also too long to be working with jerks.?

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes– “If you want to build a ship, you don't gather people and give them tasks and work. You just teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea” –quoting Antoine de Saint Exupéry. You know, people do things because they care about them. Generally speaking, people don't love the things they do because they're easy; they actually love them because they're hard. And so, taking on hard, challenging, meaningful work is one of the most satisfying things in the world.