Filip Fingl (Dáme jídlo): Groupthink is the biggest plague of today’s companies

In this episode of the CEO na ostří nože podcast, we talk to Filip Fingl, then CEO of Dáme jídlo, the Czech food delivery platform. Within three years, the company grew from CZK 250 million to CZK 1 billion in revenue, and in a single year, mostly during remote work under Covid, it hired 130 new people. Fingl was also leading regional and international expansion while changing the company from within. He described it as having “the chaos of a start-up but the complexity of a corporation”.

When the company had a few dozen people, everyone knew each other and each person was responsible for a broad range of things. As it grows, processes have to partly replace personal relationships. Fingl and his team are therefore turning things people used to do out of habit or intuition into a clear, written form. New joiners can quickly understand how the company works, and when something goes wrong, it’s easier to trace the problem. The goal is ambitious: leadership should be able to go away for a month or two and the company should run on its own. For now, Fingl says, it can manage about two weeks.

Intuition plays a big role in hiring. Fingl looks at whether a candidate answers not just correctly in technical terms but also in the right human way, whether they’re proactive and whether they’ll fit the team. He doesn’t compromise on key roles, which is why he spent a whole year looking for a COO. The company combined the return from home office with a town hall and an informal get-together so that people who had joined remotely could meet in person. Fingl admits he isn’t a big fan of remote work. Routine and tactical matters can be handled online, he says, but deeper discussions, brainstorming and working out concepts need face-to-face meetings, drawing and non-verbal communication.

Fingl sums up Dáme jídlo’s values in a few principles. Teamwork and trust that people will see things through, instead of micromanagement. High quality, because “it’s OK to make a mistake, but it’s not OK to keep making mistakes”. And the company isn’t a “sweatshop”: people should work to live, not live to work. But teamwork, he says, mustn’t mean everyone nodding along. “The biggest plague of companies today is groupthink,” he says. People have to collaborate, but also think for themselves and constructively challenge others’ ideas when they have data or a good hypothesis. Not just to look active in a meeting.

The company takes the same approach to its competitors. It watches them and learns from what they do, but during Covid, when everyone was doing everything, Fingl calmed the team down: “Let’s stop looking at others and stick to our own line.” The biggest competitor, he says, is the company itself. It has to keep pushing forward and stay at the cutting edge of innovation. Much of the impression customers take away comes from couriers. The company trains them, collects feedback from customers, restaurants and couriers themselves, and tries to keep the best ones.

What else will you learn in the podcast?

• How to hire 130 people in a year while working remotely

• How to turn a company’s unwritten rules into clear processes

• Why brainstorming and concept work can’t be done remotely

• Why Fingl doesn’t compromise when filling key roles

• Why groupthink is dangerous and how to break it

• How company culture changes when a company grows from 150 to 500 people

According to Filip Fingl, the culture of a 150-person company is different from that of a company with 400 or 500 people. A growing company therefore has to update its culture regularly and think about how to carry it all the way to the last person, including the couriers who represent the brand to customers every day.