YouSaid · the spoken record

Ian Bassin

lines on the record: 39
first: 2024-03-19
most recent: 2024-03-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Is that we of the agency to change that outcome? And I look forward to being able to do that so that hopefully we can do one thing that a nonprofit should do that perhaps a for-profit should never do, which is put yourself out of business. We're ultimately successful, then we will no longer need to exist.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To add that 2% to tip us back to 51, is that within your control to do? And I remember thinking, absolutely, we absolutely have that agency. He said, then lead from there. And I bring that to the team and I encourage the team to think that way as well, which is that authoritarianism thrives on hopelessness, on despair, on a feeling of isolation and that nothing can possibly get better. In democracy, as a form of government, isn't just a set of laws or amendments and a constitution Alexis de Tocqueville referred to the habits of the heart in America that make us a democratic society. It is what we carry with us every day and what we do. It is that belief that we have the agency to chart our own future. And so even in a moment when members on our team or listeners to this podcast think we're trending towards a dark place, the truth.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It all rests upon that cultural foundation we talked about earlier. But there are moments that I have my doubts, as everyone on the team does, and I remember one of them came in the fall of 2020 as we were approaching the election. And as an optimist, I generally think that it is more likely than not that we will end up in a better place in the future. And I dipped into a place where I thought it was actually only a 49% chance that we would end up in a better place and that more likely than not we would end up in a very dark place. And I remember I reached out to a mentor of mine and I said, how do I lead a team if I actually have dipped into that place of pessimism? And he said to me, you may think there's only a 49% chance of success.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Entities in the nonprofit space and just have one and no duplication, you'd eliminate competition, you'd eliminate innovation, you'd actually create a less good customer experience and less advances. You want a little bit of competition because I will tell you the truth is because we as an organization have to compete for donors, we have to compete for talent, we have to compete for media attention, we have to compete for meetings with legislators, that drives us to do better. And so the nonprofit space has to compete and it has to cooperate. It has to have cooperation.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a word for it, we call it cooperation, which is one of the unique dynamics of the nonprofit sector. In the for-profit sector, it is assumed that companies will compete against each other. It is considered a good, a necessity, because as they compete, they force each other to outnovate one another and the entire sector moves forward. And the assumption in the nonprofit sector is that we should all just be cooperating with each other and that you'll hear this a lot from investors, from donors saying, well, are you guys duplicative of each other? You know, my response is, well, you do want us to cooperate with each other if we develop strategy to advance the ball of our democracy, we should share it with the entire sector. We do that in the nonprofit space. It's really important because we do have a shared mission. At the same time, the notion that we should collapse all of these.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Profit company that has a specific thing that we do, a widget that we sell, a mission that we try to serve. It is for us to prevent American democracy from declining into a more authoritarian government, just as for Pepsi, it's to sell soda, right?”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First off, we have to do this as a country. If we can't, in an organization committed to protecting democracy, bring people together across political differences, how do we expect the country to be able to do it? There are those things that are necessary and fundamental for a country to be democratic. Can you peacefully protest your government without being violently attacked by the government's military, without any accountability? Can you, if you're ineligible voter, easily access the ballot, have your vote counted when someone actually gets the most votes in the rules that exist at the time? Are they the person who gets inaugurated or is there an effort to thwart their inauguration? Those are things that are foundational to a democracy, and those are the things that we work on. That actually brings together a lot of Americans across a lot of political differences who fundamentally agree with that. The majority of Americans agree with that. And so we're able to bring people together who disagree, but we agree on the fundamental values of democracy. We're a company like any former.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You got to bring people together for multi day off sites multiple times a year. And what's important about those off sites is they're not about, let's come up with our strategic plan, right? What are our OKRs going to be for next year? That's not what you use them for. You could do that whenever everyone's back in their hometown. Those are for really building those deep connections with each other.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is really important no headquarters. If you want to be a distributed organization successfully, you can't have one place that the headquarters and everyone else is sort of somewhere else. There can be no headquarters because otherwise the people who are not in it, they feel second class. They feel like they're missing something and there's a locus of energy. It's got to be fully distributed.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In terms of the interstitial picking up on how people engage with each other, we've adopted a practice, I think originally came from Priya Parker, whose work you may know, talking about the art of belonging and how people get together, which we start every meeting with people sharing their state of mind 0, 1, 2, 3 on the positive side or 0, negative 1, negative 2, negative 3 on the negative side. And we go around everyone quickly says, where are they on that scale and what might be informing it? And that immediately gives people the signal that you know what, Jeff's a negative two today. At the end of this meeting, I might grab him and pull them aside and see what I can do to help them.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, this goes again to the point that you can do all of those things, and they're much more intentionally injected into what we do. So, for example, on the sort of learnings piece, right, what you observe and learn, we have a practice where midway through and at the end of every project, we do an after action session where we look at what's working, what's not working, what lessons can we draw from here for other things, and then we read those out to the entire team. So everyone benefits from those lessons.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's really hard to do in a phone and video conference environment. Two is the interstitial time. You're walking through the office and yes, someone's in flow, you don't want to erupt their flow, but you can see that something's off with them. And you'd say, hey, let's go take a walk. Let's go grab a coffee or whatever, and just check in. And how are you doing? Everything okay.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In probably about 26 states. And for us as an American democracy organization, that's also crucial because if we're going to play any role at trying to protect and ultimately strengthen and advance American democracy, we need the wisdom of people from all over this country. And if we were to confine ourselves to just the Thailand and Washington or just the talent in New York, we'd be limiting the talent pool enormously and who we'd be competing with would be challenging as well. Whereas once we brought into the entire country, we get access to all sorts of talent everywhere. I hear all those benefits and I love that you've leaned into what others might perceive as a challenge and turn it into a strength. There are two elements of this that I'm struggling with for the first time leading a distributed organization. And I'm curious how you deal with them. Number one, so much of my learning and my career is similar to that seat that you took on the backbench in the White House where you're listening and you're learning and you're seeing how it's done.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're a for profit or not for profit or other. Ian layered an extra challenge on top of the founding of Protect Democracy, the decision to be a remote organization from the outset. Now, this was back in 2017, three years before COVID would force companies to hastily pivot to remote working. I asked Ian why they made that choice. I had been at some remote organizations before, and some of the things I observed about them was I think distributed organizations are able to be much more intentional about setting the kind of culture that they want and were able to be a lot more efficient because people don't have the problem that you have in an in-person organization where you're in your zone, you're in your flow, and then someone walks up to your door and they come into your office and it's good for them to talk right now, but it's not so good for you to talk right now because you were in your flow, but now you're like, well, this is my colleague. So there's a lot of inefficiencies about the physical office space that you eliminate a lot when people are distributed. And so we have staff.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“3D printing. He said, Look, with your group of investors, just send them a quick 10 minute note every three weeks with what's going well and what you're worried about. Keep them invested in what's going on and solicit them for advice on what your problems are. You will create not just investors, but partners in doing that. I've done that for eight years. Every couple weeks, we send a really candid note to all of our key partners. Here's what we're working on. Here's what's going well. Here's what we're worried about, what we need help with. And what we've built is a community of investors and partners who are not just people who cut a check and then go away, but are intimately involved in the success or failure of the organization day to day. It's an incredible note. I think it's going to be helpful for a lot of people to think about how to engage investors and frankly other stakeholders because I think we often underestimate how much people want to help when they're aligned with the mission.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This venture seed funding also helped protect democracy secure a position that is coveted in the world of business, first mover advantage. We were first to market. People were incredibly disoriented, alarmed, concerned about what was happening in this country. We got to them first, and we had a proposed set of solutions that we thought we had a pretty good theory behind. And we had a network. Because we had all of those things, we were able to assemble the money, the talent, the partnerships, the media attention. There were a lot of organizations that came along months after us trying to do some similar types of things I think had a much tougher time because they didn't have that sort of perfect set of inputs that we had at that moment. Early on, Ian received key advice that ensured those early vital stakeholders would stay engaged with Protect Democracy. One of the best pieces of advice I got was from Brie Pettis, one of the godfathers of”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of, well, we don't know how to do this. Who knows how to do this? There must be an expert way to do this. And the answer was nobody really knows. And so we had to come up with, for example, a budget. Well, how do you build a nonprofit budget? I Googled it. I Googled. How do you build a nonprofit budget? And then we started mapping out what a nonprofit. And first off, just having the sense that there is no secret way. This brings to mind a favorite Masters of Scale metaphor, courtesy of Reed Hoffman. Entrepreneurship is like jumping off a cliff and building the plane on the way down. A lot of the time you make that jump without even knowing how to build the plane. And you also need to hope that you can somehow source the essential components, the wings, the engine, the fuselage all while you are in free fall. In this case, there were plenty of people who believed passionately and protect democracy's mission and were prepared to hand airplane parts to Ian and Justin. Those people included Reed Hoffman, who I introduced to Ian around this time. I knew of Reed's deep belief in the need to protect our democratic.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome back to Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman with our guest, Protect Democracy founder Ian Basson. If you want to hear our entire conversation, you can find that on our Masters of Scale YouTube channel. Before the break, we heard about Ian's rocky journey in the run-up to Founding Protect Democracy. I asked him about those early days, taking the idea from concept to actual scalable organization. You have this concept that you build out. You get this call from Karen Dunn. You identify the problem, but now you actually have to do the thing, right? Just like an entrepreneur in the private sector, you've got to raise some capital. You've got to figure out how you organize. So how did you actually get this organization off the ground? I think the first thing that a lot of people listening to this who either have built or are trying to build organizations either have learned or should learn now is that nobody quite knows exactly how to do it. And so the first thing we had to overcome was this notion.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember saying to myself, when you get on that call, you take charge. You sit at the head of the room and you tell everyone what we're going to do. You listen, but you definitely lead.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember vividly getting the call from them and flashing back to when I started in the White House Council's office as a baby lawyer in 2009. And I went into the White House Council's office and I thought, I don't know a lot about how this place works. I should really sit back and listen. And so I would go into every meeting in the West Wing or the executive office building. And the first thing I would do is I would take the seat furthest from the center of the room. I would go sit against the walls of Wallflower. And two of my colleagues who are pretty much the same vintage attorneys that I wear, they'd go sit at the head of the table. And you know what? People treated them like they ran the meeting. And it was a real lesson in people will treat you the way you act. And that doesn't mean that you have to be overconfident. It doesn't mean that there is an important place for humility and curiosity and listening and asking questions. But if you treat yourself as on the outskirts, then you'll be treated as on the outskirts.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a moment I'll never forget both for its people really think I can do this sense of it was humbling, it was flattering, but most importantly to the story, it was confidence building And maybe not just confidence building, but there was also a little bit of oh, people expect me to do something, right?”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They said that there had been a meeting in Washington, DC that day of a lot of beating lawyers in the district, people who had led the Department of Justice, also been in the White House Council's office, and that there was a discussion that there was a need for a new organization given the moment we were in. And my name was floated as someone who should lead it, and everybody agreed.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the time, not only did I have a broken foot, but I had my first child due in two months. I had a good job at another really wonderful nonprofit at the time called Give Directly. So this notion of like, are you going to start something new? We just didn't have that oomph to get over that hump that I'm sure a lot of founders know that moment.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nothing. About two or three weeks go by after the election. And are we really going to start a new organization? We just didn't have quite the confidence we needed to do that because it takes a lot of huts but to start a new organization.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We knew the Achilles' heels in government, but the actual products we were going to need to create was a little bit TBD. And so we had to build a pretty nimble company from the beginning.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We felt like we had some comparative advantages because having been the lawyers inside the White House, one thing we really understood was how actors outside of government could influence and impact actors inside of government because we'd been on the receiving end of that”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had a very clear mission statement from the get go, which was prevent American democracy from declining into a more authoritarian form of government.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Insight was that all those binders that I talked about, all those unwritten laws, all the ways in which presidents of both parties had understood that they were restraints on their office and on themselves and that they held a public trust, that we recognize that with the election in 2016, something fundamentally different was about to happen. And so the question was, what would happen if someone throughout those binders and said these rules are for suckers?”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was in voter protection headquarters in Philadelphia as law office. I was one of the earliest to see what was happening. There was an empty box on the floor and out of frustration. I wound up to kick the empty cardboard box into the wall and it wasn't empty. And so the box didn't budge. And I broke my foot. So I wake up the next morning with my broken foot. And there's an email from a friend and former partner in other projects who had also been in the White House counsel's office, although after me by the name of Justin Florence. And the email said, should we get the White House council alumni together and talk about what's coming and whether there's something we can do about it?”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Came into that organization as the COO, and within three months, I was at dinner with the founders. They said, this isn't working, you've lost the trust of the organization. We're going to have to demote you. And I had to appear in front of the entire organization to announce my demotion. I asked if I could announce it and they said, no, we're going to do it. So you can imagine how humbling an experienced that was.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Became kind of those principles on the wall or like on the website. But if you tapped anyone on the shoulder in the middle of a workday and said, name the values of the organization, they couldn't recite them. And certainly if you said, when was the last time that you invoke them with a colleague in the course of your work? Never, right? And so it was like a human A-B test for me. I was in two different organizations seeing what it was like to do intentional culture and seeing what it was like to put culture principles on a wall. And nothing could have been more powerful at proving the importance of doing that”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thing that was for me the most eye opening was not the substance of the work, which was fascinating and meaningful and important. It was how it was done. It was led by a management savant in how to think about intentional culture in a workplace that built the culture from the ground up from the beginning as the DNA of the organization and wove it into everything the organization did, how it tested and hiring, how it onboarded and trained people to operate within the organization, how it injected that culture into every team meeting, into every interaction so that ultimately as the organization scaled, that DNA replicated and even if the organization grew to be a thousand, ten thousand, however big you wanted to be in every meeting, even if the original team was not present, you could sort of assume that the way the people in that meeting would approach the problem would carry with it these sort of core principles.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So a little bit of both. So, one thing that's kind of staggering, and I remember this feeling vividly when we walk into the building, noon on January 20th, is the West Wing, the executive office building. The rooms are empty. The desks are clean. There are no papers. There's a computer there for us and nothing else. And this is the seat of the most powerful government in human history. And you walk in and it's just empty for the new group of people. And it was just a wild experience to realize that every four years, there's the opportunity to just swap out the old people and bring in the new and start afresh and a new group of people come in and they take the keys and they take over running the federal government. It's a remarkable thing that we've been able to do in this country for 247 years.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing that was so striking was that everyone understands from the president on down that we are temporary occupants of an office. We hold an incredibly precious and valuable public trust that we the people, the citizens, give to us temporarily only on the condition that we will exercise it in their best interest, on their behalf. And it was part of my job to drill that into the minds and the hearts every way that everyone operated in the building and in the executive branch. And that really did for the most part transcend parties and administrations.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd like them back, but ultimately they said no. And I was told if I wanted them, I could file a Freedom of Information Act request for them, which I did. And I was recently informed by the National Archives that they will process my request in 20 years. I all of a sudden realized Light Bulb went off. I see why someone might have just taken these in a plastic grocery bag and handed them off to the next administration.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I didn't understand quite why that was the handoff at the time, and I've come to understand it since. So I bring these binders in with me on noon, on January 20th of 2009. And then I serve for about three years, almost three years. I left the fall of 2011, and I left the binders for my successor so that my successor could use them. Well, flash forward to November of 2016. Donald Trump was elected. And I was concerned about what's going to happen to these binders and the incoming political movement that has essentially been organized in opposition to customs traditions, norms like that might disregard them entirely. And so I reached out to the White House Counsel's office at the end of the Obama administration. I said, hey, I know that you need to keep a copy of those binders because they are a presidential record under a federal law known as the Presidential Records Act. But the physical copies that you have were mine. I brought them into the administration with me. I carry them into the building on January 20, 2009.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally right. Like, it's like, you're looking for Jason Bourne, not me, right I bring them home that night and open these binders to look at what they were. And they contained memos going back to the Eisenhower administration that White House councils and chiefs of staff had sent to White House staff and executive branch officials explaining the rules, explaining what people were allowed to do and were not allowed to do in the performance of their duties. And what was striking about it and became so clear over the next three years where these binders became my Bible was that a lot of these rules are not legally binding. They were just traditions. They were customs that were passed down from administration to administration. And when people in the White House had questions about what was allowed, I'd consult the binders. And if they didn't contain the answer, I called Emmett Flood, who did my job for President Bush. And if Emmett and I couldn't answer it, we called Beth Nolan, who did it for President Clinton. And it didn't matter whether we were working for a Democratic president or a Republican president. The rules were consistent over decades.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I duck out of the ball. It's raining that night. I run across the district in the rain and I get to the building. As a doorman who hands me a plastic grocery bag bursting at the seams with three thick binders, like school binders, right? And it's got my name on the outside of the bag.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Night of January 19th, of course, is the famous inaugural balls A bunch of inaugural balls around DC, and so I get my tuxedo on, go to inaugural ball. I got a message. A Blackberry message saying, Go to this random address in DC and pick up a package.”
2024-03-19 · Masters of Scale · Leading across great divides: Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy Executive Director · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT