How Square Defangs Difficult Decisions

This reminded me of the preposterous "RASCI" at Ebay.

I never know what to think of articles like this where the subject matter basically is an example of the opposite. Square probably has some of the worst decision-making amongst peer companies. It had pretty much a monopoly on new age SMB card present credit card processing and has appeared to throw much of that away by deciding to go into all sorts of unrelated businesses. It ceded $5b of market value to Stripe. Has been ridiculously slow to expand internationally and bring out Apple Pay devices. And continues to burn precious resources on unrelated, losing businesses like food delivery. And now SPADE? Serenity now.

This entire article should have stopped after this quote: "Consensus means no ownership. What’s important is not that everyone agrees, but that everyone is heard and then the right person makes a decision."

The rest just reads like typical, big company bullshit non-content. But the first few paragraphs? I agree with that a whole lot. After being in many, many, many meetings where multiple people "own" something and it's almost impossible to get anything done. But one owner? Even if you don't entirely agree with the direction it's at least crystal clear.

Anyone else read this article as an advertisement of Gokul Rajaram to other companies?

I’ve seen a lot more success with the "hire smart people and get out of the way" methodology of managment. If you allow people the freedom to work together and make their own decisions in a mature manner, you don’t need these childish techniques for making decisions. In practice, this probably makes people feel like they are in some bizarro world than that they are an adult entrusted with real responsibility.

A manager’s role can be reduced to keeping people on track and helping settle contentious decisions, whether by mediating or making the decision themselves.

If I was interviewing for a company and I found out they used techniques like this, I would get up in the middle of the interview and walk out.

I think the process described has a flaw -- it has the role of "Approver" and requires the Owner to "Run your decision and the process by the Approver." This is problematic, since, at that point, the Approver becomes the new Owner, and, the Decision will be formed in a way that the Owner thinks the Approver will recognize (and perhaps not the form they believe in). In effect, this statement invites micro-management. Interestingly enough, the author knows this approach is problematic, because they say immediately after, "Again, the default of the Approver should be to monitor the decision process, not result."

Alternatively, a Vision/Retrospective process might work better, where by the Owner's manager (the business structure) provides the higher-level vision and then looks at the Owner's decisions and executions in retrospective. If the poor decisions are consistently being made, it's a problem of vision or staffing. Asking the owner to get approval for each decision removes the owner's necessary authority, and hence undermines their ability to forge consensus and execute with needed autonomy.

Regardless of the framework jargon, this process is something most successful executives internalize pretty early on in their careers. Besides being common sense, it becomes obvious very quickly that, except in edge cases, making quick decisions transparently based on as much data as is available will lead to the best result. Even if the best result means iterative failure until the actual best outcome is reached. A lot of people don't believe this at first and pretend the "gut feel" method is best. Don't fall into that trap. In the best case you'll have the same decision outcome, but you'll have alienated your organization in the meantime. In the worst case, you'll have made a terrible decision... and also alienated your organization.

Makes sense (other than the awkward "Defangs" word in the title; I guess using "Makes" was too clear and boring).

Reminds me a bit (just in terms of having an explicit process) of Andy Grove's Ideal Decision Model: Free Discussion, Clear Decision, Full Support.

In particular, I liked the Full Support stage of Andy Grove's process. Granted, could devolve into "fall in line or you're output" in weak cultures, but in stronger cultures I think it makes sense to acknowledge that everyone needs to accept/support a decision, whether it was their pick/favorite/etc., for the decision to be successful.

That tangent aside, I also liked the Square notes@ email list.

Actually, when I get successful I want to publish bullfu__ery like this as though it's valuable information