It didn't work that way on projects I led. Maybe everyone at Anthropic is a "10."
I was lucky when I had one person who could do that ("deeply understand the root goal and can autonomously choose the most important next things to work on"), who could take over if I went on vacation or got hit by a bus.
But I had reports who just wanted to work in their area of specialization, and had no curiosity whatsoever outside that. Or the guy who, no matter what I said, would never tell me when he had finished something - the only way I found out would be when I walked past his cube and saw him reading a science fiction book.
Don't tell me I should have just fired them, and gotten someone better. They did useful work, contributed to the project, and they were what the company had to work with. A big part of management is figuring out what people can do, want to do, are capable of doing in the future if encouraged.
But seems like the company (and you) thought that was acceptable so who knows.
It's refreshingly free of buzzwords and rigid "process" too!
Theres nothing more to it than that. Frameworks etc blah blah blah. Who cares. Get the work done.
* Poorly defined goals / definition of success
* Overly-complex plans, slowly executed against
* A focus on issues that aren't the real bottleneck
* Large cost and time overruns
* Project is eventually cancelled
I've had the interesting experience of watching the same type of "transformation" project run twice at similar companies. In the first case, the project was bogged down to the extent that I genuinely updated to believe it wasn't possible to achieve. In the second case, I saw incredible progress / pace with a much smaller team, pushing on all the key points with the right planning, and learned some lessons I wish I'd known on take 1.
lol this usually happens when those leading the project have no vision and aren't ruthless about achieving a well-defined outcome state.
Having a vision is understated and very rare to find in people. Many people pretend/wish they had 'it'.
This reads a lot like Waterfall to me. This is what I was used to 20 years ago. The project manager wanted a daily email of my progress. We had a weekly meeting where everyone’s blockers were discussed. This took all day for complex projects.
Most stuff I do that is long term isn't that critical and gets broken into reasonable size phases; the closest one is planned in detail, the next one has no major open questions, and the rest have a brief summary of what will be accomplished / what is the goal of that phase only.
That gets rid of a lot of the lack of flexibility of waterfall, and it does happen that priorities change a lot and many projects don't get to the latter phases (often, by definition/priority, the less "immediate fire" ones).
What’s wrong with a daily synchronous call?
Some of this reads like micromanagement. Why does a project organizer need to spend lots of time tracking people, why aren’t they recording what they’re working on in a transparent manner?
The idea of writing down all the steps required, aka way too many steps, some people love to tell you all the ways things are impossible and "you will need to do X too". When after the fact you discover X wasn't important.
