Lex Fridman: Microsoft has 50-60 thousand engineers. What does it take to lead such a large group of brilliant people?
Kevin Scott: ...(snipped)... One central idea in Yuval Harari’s book Sapiens is that “storytelling” is the quintessential thing for coordinating the activities of large groups of people once you get past Dunbar’s number. I’ve really seen that, just managing engineering teams. You can brute-force things with small teams, but past that things start to fail catastrophically if you don’t have some set of shared goals. Even though this is sort of touchy feely, and technical people balk at the idea that you need to have a clear mission, it’s very important.
Lex Fridman: Stories are sort of the fabric that connects all of us, and that works for companies too.
Kevin Scott: It works for everything. If you sort of think about it, our currency is a story. Our constitution is a story. Our laws are a story. We believe very strongly in them, and thank God we do, but they’re just abstract things, they’re just words. If we don’t believe in them, they’re nothing.
Lex Fridman: In some sense, those stories are platforms.