* CEO/founder should engage directly at multiple levels rather than only interact with the company through their direct reports. (Same applies at every management level, btw)
* Delegation is good, and it should happen in proportion with trust.
* The dominant culture at many tech companies is flawed and sub-optimal.
Bad points:
* "Founders feel like they're being gaslit from both sides". The two supporting points could both be true: "VCs who haven't been founders themselves don't know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world." However, it does not follow that the only option left is "Steve Jobs Style."
* "an annual retreat for [...] the 100 most important people"... I have trouble envisioning an effective org chart with lots of people at the top who would not also be in the "top 100" list. If your department heads are not your most skilled operators, then... maybe that's a good problem to fix.
* Assuming that the skills and intuition that make a founder successful will 100% apply to the very different job of being the chief of a 2000-person tribe. We should not assume that.
On average, everyone has an equal chance of needing to learn something new to succeed in a new situation-- founders included. Don't let pg's founder flattery go to your head.
Many of the people at the retreat last year were happy exactly where they were, because they were contributing the project/team/company/etc exactly how they wanted to be. This was especially true of the senior engineers in attendance. Just because you’re a top performer, it does not follow that you also want to be a top-level executive.
> ...Just because you’re a top performer...
Do you just trust performance reviews for finding them? My experience in BigTech that those can't be always trusted. It seems getting good reviews is a skill and some people are better at it while some others might not even care about ratings at all.
In every case I've seen with healthy leadership, you could just ask who the top people are. Up to about 200-person size groups, you could ask any leader (even the top group leader) and they could just tell you. Because they generally know who is doing what, how difficult the various things are and who is turning in consistently outstanding work. (If the leadership can't do this, they might not be paying close enough attention.)
Performance reviews can serve many different purposes, but I don't think this is one of them.
Finding “true” top performers requires much more effort than your average mid-large company wants to spend. You need a collaborative effort between individual contributors, line managers, VPs, and the C-suite to get a good idea of who the most important people in the company are. And part of that is politics (making sure that everyone knows who you are and why you’re important) - there’s always a chance that a super critical person slips under the radar.
As an engineer I can tell you who the most important people in my section of the org chart are off-hand, in order of importance. As in, people without whom my org would fail, or at least flounder. Some of them are engineers, some of them are sales/business liaison, some of them are “management” (but frequently do a hell of a lot more than “just” manage). I don’t think a traditional performance review would identify all of them as being mission-critical, but it would probably identify them all as performing at least as expected for their roles.
I know at least one fairly critical junior engineer[0] that maybe isn’t the fastest or most efficient worker, but is learning fast and could easily be a top-tier engineer with the right support and growth opportunities. Fortunately my company did identify this and has given them a number of opportunities (including an invite to the retreat, among many others), but a standard performance review would probably score them as “adequate” or whatever other mid-tier. The way this happened for us is frequent “skip-level” meetings, 1-1 or 1-many, as well as quarterly team retreats with all members (up to the VP) present. This allows 3 levels of employees to all interact, and if you keep on top of this as a senior manager or VP (with either an engineering background or an open mind, which all people in this scenario have) it becomes fairly straightforward to find these people. It’s not a formula, or a set of rules/identifiers, or even some guidelines that are followed, which makes it tricky to make this “fair” - it relies on everyone involved having good judgement.
[0] I know “critical junior engineer” doesn’t sound great, but it’s what happens when you have a rag-tag team of engineers building a product from the ground up with minimal support from the rest of the company (and thus few resources), and then hit it big and suddenly have a largely successful product on your hands that was written by essentially 4 people. Each one of those 4 people are non-overlapping domain experts, and it just so happens that 3 of them are senior engineers and 1 is a junior. Over the last 6 months this has been improving, but a year ago, it literally was 1 critical junior engineer who was the only person who knew about 20% of the product.
I was reacting to the idea that the "top execs" are generally not the people you'd want. There was an undertone in pg's description that seemed to me like, "SJ hated those stupid and ineffective managers so he bypassed them to invite the people doing the real work."
I've worked in places with some ineffective managers, and at bigger companies I've witnessed a few ladder-climbing sociopathic liars, so I get the sentiment.
I just think it's more useful to figure out how to remove those ineffective people, or better yet build a cultural immune system that rejects them, rather than bypass them.
Cracked engineers, designers, growth people, AEs... the best ICs shouldn't necessarily be in management positions. Yet, the CEO should neither be air-gapped from those people nor managing their work/career on a day to day basis.
You have people who are most important to a:
- a project. - a problem. - the organization.
And I think we can divide organization into internal and external. When you divide like that, you’ll usually end up with four very different lists with some overlap at an upper management level.
None of the four areas are more important than others. If your software problem has a month long outage, that’s a huge problem. But that’s different from if you only have two months of runway left or if nobody has cleaned your office in a month. And since the problems are different, the people involved should be different too. Then you’ll end up with a lot of different hierarchies of most important people depending on what lens you’re looking through.
In Jobs’ case, his personality was probably strong enough that didn’t matter but broadly it can be helpful to officially say, “this person is important even though they don’t manage anyone”. It helps with fairness so that people don’t have to seek out the “secret” ways of being important, and it can accelerate decision making in the absence of someone like Steve Jobs
"Crack": adj., first-rate; excellent: a crack shot. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/crack
"Cracked": no such meaning https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cracked
department heads spend all their time organizing groups of people. if organizing people better is your company's competitive advantage, then sure, putting your best people in those seats is probably best. but if your company's competitive advantage is that it makes better optical instruments, produces gasoline more cheaply, demolishes buildings more safely, or makes better-tasting food—you'd better let your best operators spend a lot of their time grinding mirrors, operating refineries, annotating floor plans, or cooking. if they spend all their time organizing people, your company will lose its competitive advantage
