Axios and Politico cofounder Jim VandeHei discusses the origin of his smart-brevity methodology, and why he decided to write his new book "Just the Good Stuff."

2 hacks that keep Axios CEO Jim VandeHei balanced and productive

Photo illustration by Fortune. Photo provided by Axios.

Leadership

2 hacks that keep Axios CEO Jim VandeHei balanced and productive


Jim, I have a really important last question here. I have not read your new book. Uh It's still on preorder and you didn't send me a review copy, but I need to sell books. But I'm looking at the table of contents here and there are a lot of chapters. But I know they're very short chapter 48 and 49 are called Bad Bosses and Good Bosses. Which chapter am I in? You know, you know, Alice Allen was a great boss. He hired me, he hired me when I was a young kid. Nobody else would have hired me to do that job. Welcome to leadership. Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Alan Murray and I'm Mia, I wanna talk about the, the your second start up axios because you started it on. The concept was a simple two words, smart, brevity. And I think about that all the time because it really goes against the grain of journalistic culture. I mean, we're here at Mahal knows this. Well, we're here at Fortune which has had a hard time, the transition from a magazine to digital. We've done it now. But it took a long time. And that was partly because the reporters and writers here thought that the highest form of journalism was a 11,000 word magazine story. And the notion that you can be brief and, and feed people information that they need in a very smart way at the same time, uh may sound pretty straightforward to people, but it's not, it's not in our business at all. One of the things I taught myself to do is stop writing or thinking about journalism the way that I want it to be and start listening to the customer. And I was watching what was happening in terms of consumption with people in positions of power or just ordinary consumers. And I noticed that almost no one was reading anything and they were, they were hunting and pecking and they were often reading the first couple of paragraphs or they were gravitating towards newsletters instead of stories even when they were paying a premium to buy that product. And so by the time we started, we said, listen, like there is like there's an efficiency revolution. People want their information tighter. Uh But they also are going to need to know more across more topics. If they want to be really successful professionally, they need to, they're gonna have to understand technology and information consumption and politics and cultural trends. And so that's where the smart brevity came up with. We need really intelligent coverage on on important topics but delivered as efficiently as humanly possible. And we were pretty confident that that was gonna work almost instantly. It did like it, it, it, it instantly kind of just hit the sweet spot of where especially people who are in the professional class, who are consuming content. It just met the moment and I remember like knowing that we like we were on to something bigger than I realized in the first couple of months, I was getting hundreds of emails from readers saying thank you, you're saving me time. You're respecting my intelligence trying to make me smarter faster. I was like, damn, those are the exact same words we're using internally. I never communicated that externally. And it showed that we, we had product market fit and you know, that blossomed into, you know, a book on smart brevity. It blossomed into a company that we split off where we, we, we train companies to be able to communicate internally using smart brevity. And we now use A I to power that. And so like that, one kind of fundamental observation led to a lot of different kinds of enterprises which has been like really fun and and adventurous having worked with you 25 years ago. I'm not at all surprised that you went on to uh to found two successful media companies, but I am a little surprised to see you become a self help guru. Uh you know, and it's not just leadership. It's like life hacks, diets, meditation, what's going on there. Uh You're not the only one who's surprised. I'm kind of surprised by that. To be honest, it's, it started with, we were trying to figure out a way to work with our audience on things that weren't so heavy. So we started ending the night with this thing called Finish line where it's like something fun, something uplifting because you're doom scrolling all day. As part of that is, I started to write a couple of columns about lessons learned, being a, being a manager and having kept those notes and the response was just humbling. It was like overwhelming. It, it was clear people were interested in it. And so I just sort of kept going with that. And most of it is about how to get ahead of work, how to get ahead in your profession, how to be a better manager, how to be a better leader. But like the older I get, um, you know, Alan, you and I aren't spring chickens anymore, right? You start to think of a lot younger that surround it, right? That like I'm only really good as a CEO if I've got my crap together with my wife and my family and my, my health and my diet. So I, I have started to write a little bit more about that. I, you know, again, part of it is because like I'm a writer to your question. Earlier, the, you know, I have this weird spinal disorder where over time my spine is gonna turn into one, one fused brick. It's run in my family for generations. And so I've had to become maniacal about, about fitness. And so I've used that to be, you know, whatever, that kind of sucks. But here's the things that, like, I've been able to do that aren't medicinal that are able to, like, help, continue to be really healthy uh at my age. So I'll pass that along, seems to resonate. I pass a little bit more along. And so, yeah, that, that wasn't a twist that I expected and, and, and, you know, I didn't expect to write a book on all this stuff. But given that it does seem to be helpful to some people and like in, in all seriousness, like the high school college stuff, like having been such a bad student, having come from kind of just a normal small town in the Midwest. I part of writing the book is to hopefully get it to people that aren't in New York and Washington and to say, hey, listen, you could be wherever the hell you are going to a community college because of how awesome this country is. Like, you could go on to start companies or be a CEO or interview a president. Like if I could, I guarantee you, you're more impressive as an 18 year old than I was. And so like, it's possible and that's a, that's a big theme of the book. Can you talk a little bit more about some of the packs that, that have worked for you and just maintaining that, uh, wellness, I guess, and, and the kind of, um, you know, balance that you need to do your job as a CEO. Well, I mean, I think all this stuff is particular to your passions and your own habits and your own circumstance. But like, for me, I've realized like, listen, if I'm gonna run a company and I'm going to be the chairman of another technology company and I'm gonna try to write books. I can only do that if I'm performing optimally. And so like, for me personally, I created what my, my wife always rolls her eyes when I say this. But like my happiness matrix, which is I have this idea of, ok, I work best if like my relationship with my wife is good. My relationship with my kids is attentive. My relationship with my parents is strong. If I'm working out, I'm getting enough time to fly fish. If I'm spending enough time on my face and whenever I'm off, I know that if I, one of those buckets is off and so I'm constantly in my mind doing an inventory if I feel off. Like, oh man, I guess I haven't like, paid enough attention to the kids or I haven't paid enough attention to going off and golf or fly fish or whatever it is that gives me, uh, sanity. And so I think that more than anything has really helped. Uh, and then two is just who you surround yourself with. Like, we've all been at companies where you work with people who just suck the life out of you. And if there's one thing I'm most proud of about axios is at 550 people, we don't have any of those people. I've become really good at being able to sniff out even high achievers who are bad people and, and, and executing them, like getting them out of the company as quickly as possible. And it has this weird effect where like when your energy is all positive and you're dealing with smart people who are high achieving, but they're in it for the right reasons. It just has a psychic effect on you because you're not spending your time going like God, why was that person? A jerk or man, that person is a drag or I don't want to be anywhere near that person. And when you don't have that, I think the combination of those two things has helped me, like, really enjoy the work that I do. But I think be better at the work that I do.