Aviatrix Blog 
“There is no failure. There is no suffering.” Recently, Aviatrix CEO Doug Merritt sat down with Dr. Jessica Kriegel of the Culture Leaders podcast to talk about his approach to leadership, growth, and development. In discussing his philosophy and where it came from, Doug outlined his perspective on the concepts of failure and suffering, and how he’s used that approach in his former role at Splunk and his current role at Aviatrix.
Doug’s “Why”: Learning, Growth, and Development
Jessica Kriegel began with her usual interview question: “What is your ‘why’?” Doug explained that his “why” is “all about learning, growth, and development.”
“I’ve worked my entire life on this by the way, and I’ve failed at this a lot,” he said. “But there is no failure. There is no success either . . . There’s only learning. We’re here to learn and to experience and to grow.”
Doug explained how this learning-first mindset helps people live more in the moment, focusing on the process, the daily habits, and attending to small details. He added something even more surprising: “there is no suffering . . . God put us here so that we could learn, grow, and experience. We’re all perfect the way we are perfectly imperfect.”
According to Doug, this mindset includes understanding that the only way to learn is to get feedback. Focusing too much on the satisfaction of success robs you of that learning; having too much regret from failure robs you of learning.
“If every moment is just an opportunity to learn and to improve and to connect with others and to again try and be present, then failure is beautiful,” Doug said. “It’s a feedback loop. How else are you going to learn?”
A Contrarian Approach: Growth Mindset at Aviatrix
Doug acknowledged that this no-failure, no-suffering, learning-focused approach is “contrarian” and takes a while to get used to. He explained his leadership effort at Aviatrix to release people from outcomes and goals and focus on the rigor of daily habits and daily processes. Part of that shift is staying in the moment.
“That is insanely controversial,” he said. Doug described the reaction of many employees, such as sales execs, who are focused on goals, outcomes, and meeting quotas. “I want the company to progress also,” Doug said. “But if you over rotate on the outcome, you miss the daily learnings. And right now we’re in daily learning phase.”
He compared the mindset shift to climbing a mountain: “If you want to climb a mountain, you can’t just stare at the peak the entire time. You’re going to fall and never achieve your objective. You’ve got to focus on the steps in front of you.”
This is not a matter of ignoring objectives. “Of course the mountain’s there and you want to eventually get up the mountain,” Doug said, “but the mountain is an outcome of the daily rigor and the focus in that daily process. It doesn’t happen without that daily rigor . . . And if you don’t achieve it, you didn’t achieve it, but that doesn’t mean you won’t achieve it next time.”
Doug described what happens if you only focus on the failure or success of an outcome: you rob yourself of the opportunity of what you were supposed to learn. If you do achieve that particular outcome, you’ve robbed yourself of your reason for continuing to show up. “Of course we have goals, we’ve got a board, we build a plan, we’re trying to hit the plan, so we got a plan, but then as soon as you launch, the plan is kind of useless because everything changes so quickly anyway,” he said. “And how do you focus back down on the process and the daily habits? And if you do that rigorously enough, you’ll get to . . . an effective outcome. But if learning is the goal, you’ll for sure learn.”
Learning as the Goal: Aviatrix’s Go-to-Market Approach
When Jessica asks how Doug “scales” this philosophy at Aviatrix, Doug pointed to Aviatrix’s go-to-market approach. “We’ve got this really interesting software-defined, cloud-architected networking platform,” he said. He explained how Aviatrix’s comprehensive approach rethinks traditional networking constructs. Instead of using multiple different boxes to construct up a network, like a routing box, a network address translation box, a DNS box, a VPN box, and so on, Aviatrix’s cloud fabric offers a holistic and unified networking solution.
Doug explained how Aviatrix radically transformed our go-to-market approach after finding some difficulties. Aviatrix had tried to sell its whole, comprehensive platform to replace everything a potential buyer was doing in AWS, Azure, Oracle, or Google Cloud, and were not meeting great success. “It was such a big ask of people, and there was so much risk involved,” Doug said. “It’s so complex because the cloud vendors, for better or worse, took a box metaphor for the services they exposed. So they went back to the old data centers with the way that they are creating their offerings.”
Aviatrix changed our approach based on the feedback: “We’ve refactored the entire go-to-market to be use-case-oriented that brings our platform. So instead of, say, asking a customer to rethink your entire networking architecture, we’re now trying to insert in very specific business driven and cybersecurity driven use cases. We don’t know how to do that. We haven’t done that in four or five years. So it’s a complete relearning orientation within the company.”
Doug explained how he implements this learning-focused mindset:
- Daily learnings – Aviatrix implemented daily standups. Our account executives each have a pod with a business development rep, a systems engineer, and a channel partner attached.
- Reviews of what worked and what didn’t – These daily standups include reviews of what worked and what didn’t, which each pod meeting with a plan at the beginning of the day and a review at the end of the day.
“It’s just about learning,” Doug said. “If we learn together, we will get a great outcome, but we have to focus on the daily learning.” He explained how the distractions of today’s society, the news cycle, and constant shifts make it difficult to take the time to reflect, but that makes attention and learning all the more important.
Meeting the Resistance with a Low Ego and a Team
Doug explained what it takes to implement this growth mindset: rigor, a low ego, and admitting that you don’t know the answers. The only way to learn is listen to your entire team and get enough “repeat insights” to see a pattern and adjust. It’s not about focusing on individual monthly and quarterly goals and personal success. It’s about teamwork.
“We’re all shareholders,” Doug said. “We’ve got to work together as a team to understand what is the decoder ring for a velocity motion that we haven’t had in a long time.”