If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right. Right?

Fans of the greatest sitcom ever made (and perhaps that will ever be) might have recognised my opening line. It’s from one of the episodes of Seinfeld: “The Opposite”. To be honest, when I started the First Principles newsletter, I didn’t foresee leading with a Seinfeld reference. And yet, here we are.

It began with a breakfast meeting a few weeks ago. I was meeting Shan Kadavil, the co-founder and CEO of online fresh fish and meat store Freshtohome. I was a full half-hour late due to some unusually heavy Monday-morning traffic, but since the hotel was walking distance from Shan’s office, I caught him relaxedly reading a business newspaper.

Over the spiciest Eggs Akuri and toast I’ve had in my life, we chatted a bit about fish varieties. After a lifetime of “hardcore” meat-loving, I’d turned pescetarian in late July as a six-month experiment.

A bottle of water and a coffee later, as I felt the heat from the Eggs Akuri start to recede, I asked Shan for the mental model or first principle he relied upon most frequently at Freshtohome for making big decisions.

“When things are good, I tell my team to kill things that are working. And when things are bad, I tell them to imagine if everything went right, what would you do? That’s my job as CEO,” he said.

Image credit: Sardenacarlo/Pixabay

What was that? When things are good, he told his team to kill things? Why?

Because, he said, as CEO, it was his job to break the default habits and dominant mindsets inside his organisation. When times are good (for example, when companies are flush with funding or the economy is booming), teams within organisations tend to coast along. They take good times for granted. “Killing things” during such times forced his organisation to rethink from the ground up, for the better.

And when things were already bad? What did he mean by “imagine if everything went right”?

Shan replied that it was a concept he learnt from Mark Pincus when he worked at Zynga (Pincus is the founder of the online social gaming company).