How to Be a C.E.O., From a Decade’s Worth of Them
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
CEO's should deliver results and help the company grow. If they have issues with him coming to work at 10 am, then the work culture should be adjusted imo for people to understand what it takes for him to deliver results.
I used to work on a massive private yacht. I'm cleaning and polishing the outside making it look pretty for all the passerby's to admire after we arrived at the marina at Atlantis in the Bahamas. A tourist perhaps in his early 40s with a family stops me to ask "How do I achieve getting my own yacht?" I said what everyone says, hard work. He scoffed at me and replied that he works very hard in technology in Vegas. He works 50+ hours a week and that he will never realize a yacht like this.
It's not hard work. That's not the answer. It's something else. After working 6 years on private yachts my best guess is that the people who own the yachts hire people who know what they are doing, they provide those people with the resources they need, and they stay out of their way. They do not micromanage.
The writer mentions Ray Dalio and his hundreds of principles for working at his firm, Bridgewater Associates. Maybe, but the big thing to take away from Dalio's principles is not to micromanage. He has built an algorithm to make decisions based on merit of each employee's history of making the correct decision. [0] "In order to be an effective investor, one has to bet against the consensus and be right." He has established a way to quantify merit, which I think is similar the democratization of the stock market itself.
[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_w...
It's some combination of starting position, aptitude, hard work, and luck.
Source: I worked there once upon a time.
Do you mean giving guidance instead of micromanaging which means "to control every part, however small."
The problem with micromanagement comes from one person making all the decisions for her subordinates. Whereas, it makes more sense for productivity to spread the decision making across many people. Another problem that micromanagement causes is subordinates not having confidence in the decisions they do make. So people who are otherwise smart and hard working find their time wasted in second guessing themselves not able to make a decision.
Micromanage is very different than guidance which means "advice or information aimed at resolving a problem or difficulty." Perhaps, a better way to describe what Ray Dalio is offering is guidance and based on listening to that video his principles are more suggestions than demands. More importantly, with a grain of humility, Ray encourages guidance coming from below encouraging his subordinates to offer guidance to him. This is very different from micromanagement which is unidirectional.
The CEO should be making the most major business decisions for the company. However, it is the responsibility of the the employees to realize that vision. The person welding shouldn't have to know about markets. However, the very wealthy people I have interacted with would never go into the galley and tell me how to bake a cake. They would say they have guests flying in and would I make something a little more special to impress them.
To expand on what you are saying. Perhaps, one of the ways to support a subordinate is to offer guidance. The keyword I make here is offer or perhaps a better word, proffer, to offer for acceptance meaning it is ok for the subordinate to reject the guidance.
My experience is that these CEOs hire people who know what they are doing, provide them with the resources they need, and stay out of their way. However, if the subordinate does not produce the CEOs do not micromanage. They simply let them go or move them into a more appropriate position.
Being a CEO is more than not micromanaging but my experience observing several CEOs including a few billionaires closely is that they strikingly don't waste their time micromanaging. If someone needs to be micromanaged, they are let go.
We're conflating micromanagement as the style of management and an instance of micromanagement, which is mostly what I'"m talking about. Quality management should be flexible and a manager should be able to navigate between different levels of involvement. On the CEO side of what you're saying, depending on what it is, micromanagement might be the way to go. That can't be a long term solution but for specific things it might be the most effective.
I think we're saying very similar things, I was just giving you a more accurate BW style management viewpoint. Anyways, Ray's points a guidelines anyways, sometimes rules need to be broken to move quickly, but you can always come back and discuss whether that decision to break them was valid.
Other than possibly in finance, working 100 hours a week _for someone else_ is not going to lead to owning a mega yacht. One needs to actually take the risk and accept the consequences. “Risk” usually is working for no compensation for a while, sometimes years.
(Tech is unique for not absolutely requiring this, in that a VC may be willing to absorb most of the founding risk. The founders receive salaries long before cashflow would support them. In almost any other industry, “owning the means of production” actually means taking that risk yourself.)
Assuming you weren't born into wealth, you have to take on outsized risk to get outsized results. You can be smart about the risk you take, do a lot of research into the correct risks, and limit the downside as best you can, but you can't beat math.
A first-time entrepreneur raising capital without a product or revenue is, for all intents and purposes, unique to tech and biotech. The very few exceptions aren’t common enough that an entrepreneur could plan around them.
For anyone considering a non-tech business, the podcast “How I Built This” covers it well: http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this
The fundamental problem is that hard working for the right thing. Modern capitalism has perfected the art and tech to force people to work on inconsequential work (thinking Google hired so many to lure people clicking ads).
If people were freed and have the resource to work on things they care, the people who want yacht, probably had good chance to get it; and the people who want to go to Mars, should also have the change not entirely in the hands of a billionaire business man disguised as a genius technologist.
I'm not sure if it's what you meant but working to make people click ad is probably the most consequential work that has been done in SV in the past 40 years... It's the thing that enabled everything else.
Luck is an enormous part of success, despite how much people would like to think it's all hard work and determination.
Money, power and prestige are byproducts and make very poor motivators in themselves. A CEO motivated by money, power and prestige (even those who naively pretend second order effects) will likely make suboptimal decisions.
"If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all."
And enough with this “making a bet” bullshit. Founders aren’t betting their own money, and they are getting paid considerable salaries for their work. IOW they aren’t risking anything. Not even opportunity cost.
My general recommendation to those who feel they're working too much is to 'demote' themselves to a position of lower responsibility / talent requirements.
Getting funding I understand, but the other 2 are so nebulous and/or trivial sounding it's no wonder people sometimes make fun of those roles.
The only time you really need to step in is if something goes wrong. Maybe they are working in a wrong direction, maybe here is a conflict or an obstacle, or maybe they over/underperform.
Good managers push work down as a rule, not when they "can no longer cope."
I am a strict 9 a 5 guy. I believe in sustainable projects. Wisely choose your priorities, make progress every day, and your projects will be successful in the near term as well as in the long term.
Has HN considered a bookmark or favorites feature like dBforums?
If you do this, people will tell you you're insane, and you'll eventually stop. That's why Elon is different, because he cannot stop. I feel that this alone explains 90% of the CEO question - who can choose to stop and who cannot choose to stop.
People are inherently different. In the physical realm this is completely self evident. It's far from controversial to acknowledge that you could train day in day out for years at a sport and never be even remotely comparable to even a middling professional in one of those sports. And whilst we try to ignore it in the mental domains, the same is no doubt true. So ultimately I think the key to success is to find what you personally do well at and leverage that into your own path to success. While keeping with the one constant in advice - the first time you fall, which you will, get up and try again.