Daydream Playbook Entry #19
"Internal Collaboration" an excerpt (pages 32-33) from Off-Centered Leadership: The Dogfish Head Guide to Motivation, Collaboration & Smart Growth, in which Sam discusses how an injury caused him to refocus and create a new path forward for Dogfish Head in the quickly changing beer landscape.
"I kept soldiering on for the next months. I owe a lot to the leadership team at Dogfish for their efforts during this era. They saw my pain, they saw me laid out with ice packs, but they never asked me to give up the chairmanship of the Brewers Association. I didn’t deceive myself, however. A severe blow to your health forces you to pay attention to things you used to take for granted. No need to overdramatize, but I couldn’t pretend anymore that I was young and could immediately bounce back from this injury. I wasn’t invulnerable. Or immortal.
Nor could we keep delaying the fundamental changes we needed to make. The industry was rapidly transforming, and Dogfish needed to keep moving quickly. The company was suffering because I hadn’t been fully present in my focus, and nobody else was empowered to act on major strategic decisions without my involvement. We were too big, at about $90 million a year in revenue, to operate according to one man’s directives (and, I admit, at times mercurial enthusiasms). Over 200 coworkers had staked their livelihoods and families’ welfare to accompany me on our journey. They deserved stability and a future in which they had confidence. I owed it to them to be the best I could be by surrounding myself with other great leaders and giving them the opportunity to more fully participate in leading our company.
The moment had come to stop focusing so much energy on external collaboration at Dogfish Head and start putting more internal collaboration into practice.
Mariah and I spent much of the summer of 2014 thinking about what we should do. I always felt that because I was a combination of brewer/founder/entrepreneur, I had the final say on all important high-level decisions within the operational chain of command. Our conversations, however, finally convinced me that this was no longer the way to go.
That fall, at the annual meeting with distributors, in the presence of my coworkers, I announced that henceforth Nick Benz would be chief executive officer. He first came to Dogfish Head as a chief financial officer and subsequently served as chief operating officer. Until Nick’s appointment, we had never had a CEO. I hadn’t thought we needed one. I always had the title of president and founder. But I wanted to get our company more operational leadership bandwidth beneath Nick, and I thought this promotion was a good step in that direction. It was."