Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO (2011)
a16z.com
a16z.com
Business is not really like this. First, if everyone doesn't go home, you're going to have a major problem with OSHA. Next, there is rarely a singularity of purpose around a strategy and viable, co-operative alternatives are possible. Next, crushing all your competition would lead to an un-beneficial monopoly, so it's not really a worthwhile fight. Finally, war, and specifically combat are high stress and traumatic experiences that are not sustainable for more than a few months at a time. Humans can act in this way, and maybe the CEO is in this pure fight/ flight/freeze/posture mode, but it's not great to lead a major company there.
That said, there is a lot we can learn from the military, but this "business as war" analogy is pretty absurd. Does it mean the workers are mercenaries? If a worker leaves the company, are they a traitor? Maybe I'm reading too far into it, but let's leave war to the military!
No, we can't because talking about any topic with war metaphors seems to be deeply ingrained in human linguistics.
In games like football, we talk about the the quarterback being the "field general" and the offensive tackles and defensive tackles "battling in the trenches".
When husbands & wives argue or fight in divorce cases, we talk about them "drawing their battle lines".
Historians or politicians often talk of "class warfare" or "war on poverty". The "Occupy Wall Street" protest is another borrowing of words from war.
Biologists and doctors talk about "war against disease" and the "war on cancer".
Wikipedia's most controversial articles have "edit wars" which results in pages getting locked.
In computer science, we have the "Byzantine Generals Problem" which is war metaphor.
If you want to jump into every thread <topic X> to plead with people to "stop comparing X to war", you're not going to get anywhere. (E.g. "can we please stop comparing distributed computing fault detection to Byzantium generals and war?")
Even the linguistics field which studied our propensity to always compare topics to "war" also went meta on itself with "linguistic wars": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_wars
There was an article posted to HN some time ago (last year?) that argued we should stop saying people must "fight cancer" and similar terminal diseases, because it puts the patient in an unfair position: it's all about their "will to live" and their "struggle", and if they die, it can be seen as a failure on their part. While (I think) there is a mental factor to fighting terminal diseases, the article argues cancer will often kill you regardless of how much you "fight", so it's unfair to put it in those terms.
Or maybe more accurately it's deeply ingrained in Anglo-American culture?
I don't know about all languages but French, German, and Chinese all have military and war metaphors that are commonly used in everyday speech. It's not unique to American English.
You think there is singularity of purpose in war? Every general, every battalion, every captain, every soldier has their own interests at play. It's a miracle of leadership that those can be put aside long enough to fight side by side.
Crushing the competition sounds like the right move in war. But then why have so many armies failed to subdue and control the local populace? Could it be that treating the conquered with respect, as partners, as humans, might be more effective than sheer domination?
And how sustainable is war? It depends. In WW1, soldiers at the front lines for more than a few days often suffered shell shock from the severe tension, nonstop terror, and unbelievable pounding that must have felt like it came from the bowels of the Earth. In other wars, there is no traditional front line, and soldiers are deployed for months or years. And they're not in 100% fight mode the entire time either.
War and business are not the same. But they may be closer than you think.
I would agree that businesses and militaries do share similarities, and solve for the same problems. For instance, employee surveys came out of troop morale studies in WWI, and there is a lot of cross contamination of ideas, like the book, "Team of Teams".
Finally, there are cases where businesses actual do go to war, think Blackwater, circa 2006, where the services provided directly support one side in an armed conflict. To me, that's what a business going to war looks like!
I don't think that anything even remotely that decisive has been the case for many years now. From what I see, war these days is a lot more about attempting to establish a strong enough position to deter competetion for a sufficient duration to achieve economic/political ends.
Of course, the US has been widely criticized for using that strategy and it likely was a major factor in their failure to win that war.
To my mind, that is the whole point of the wartime analogy. It _is_ life and death (for your company) when you are at war.
Sometimes you need shocking analogies to get the message across to employees; if you have weeks of money left in the bank, you need everyone to be ruthlessly focused on the strategy that has been decided. No time for picking daisies or fixing tech debt when you have weeks of money left! This shocking analogy aims to provides focus and clarity when it's most needed.
> When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company was weeks away from bankruptcy—a classic wartime scenario. He needed everyone to move with precision and follow his exact plan; there was no room for individual creativity outside of the core mission. In stark contrast, as Google achieved dominance in the search market, Google’s management fostered peacetime innovation by enabling and even requiring every employee to spend 20% of their time on their own new projects.
I would say zero to 1 is not wartime though. I hope no one is suggesting this.
Wartime is more about your company is rapidly coming apart at the seams and growth rates are going down rather than up.
If you've ever been in such a company you'd probably get why the brutal analogy being made.
1. If everyone doesn't go home it's a crisis, it's NEVER ok
2. We work unbelievably hard to try and find "viable, co-operative alternatives" and, at least in modern warfare, there is almost never a singularity of purpose
3. "Crushing" your competition hasn't worked since WWII - even then we worked to rebuild afterwards. Building Partnerships is a key tenet of modern warfare
4. On the ground negotiations are a daily/standard practice in the shit even if they aren't formal diplomatic negotiations
5. Low-Intensity war has been the standard for over a decade now too...and being in a warzone for a year at a time is not uncommon
So there's things to be learned on either side and it's worth really understanding both to have a full picture.
War is just a continuation of politics, and politics are neither black nor white. Neither strategic objectives are black and white - due to fog of war and imperfect intelligence.
>Business is not really like this.
It kinda can be, if you drive out competition, attaining a virtual monopoly(you keep one competing company on life support while you reap all the benefits, without having all the disadvantages of being a literal monopoly) on your speciality you are literally destroying a livelihood of all people employed by your competition.
>First, if everyone doesn't go home, you're going to have a major problem with OSHA.
if your employees are desperate enough, they will comply, especially in countries with lack of social safety net.
Is it horrible? absolutely yes, and we should do everything from system perspective to prevent it.
I run businesses now.
Business is war.
War is business.
I like baseball or football analogies much better. People who use them are a lot more likely to know what they are talking about.
If you can't earn your money by winning against competitors, you will be left to starve and die. No blood, no trauma, but the end result is not too different.
By contrast, when Larry came to power, Google was more like the USA today. Rich, with very good resources, and playing the role of world superpower.
Microsoft was prioritizing an unscalable revenue stream: advertising. Google was expanding the search market, and later came back for the advertising and browser markets once it had resources. Up until about the Google plus days Google never engaged in an endeavor with serious competition.
To quote M.A.S.H. " War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse." What is business? Cupcakes.
Love this. just wanted to punch up the end.
Stack ranking is a classical example. Firing the bottom 10% once or twice may actually be a good thing. But then you have to realize that this was a one off and you should stop or things get weird. Same with crunch time projects. My company recently has had a few high urgency projects with a lot of overtime and stress. Instead of calming down things it seems management has got addicted to permanent panic and not surprisingly people are burning out.
This is a classic red flag. One of the few easily visible from the trenches, too.
Indeed. And the overwhelming majority of the interviews ask completely unrelated questions to the actual work being done. I consider that a red flag. Take home tests expected to be done in your free time. Another one. When done jumping through all the hoops people will be presented with a contract that they hope the more egregious clauses are not enforceable, and so on. All this before the first day on the job.
Will people play along? Hell yes, and if asked we love all of that.
Most red flags are actually difficult to see for rank-and-file employees, or at least subtle. Not so this one.
Further, everyone needs to pay bills but it's actually pretty rare to be in a position where it's your current job or nothing. Most people can move, either within their organization or to another one, given a little bit of time and effort.
Even Churchil, considered a hero in Britain after WWII, lost the next election badly to Atlee, as people were looking for a peacetime leader.
The good thing is Atlee setup the NHS. So I guess peacetime leaders are important after war.
(Edit: clarity and spelling)
I agree with the large paintbrush aim of the article. Singular focus and knowing how to load your gun and fire those 1-3 shots you've got. You don't get 6, or 18 - that's peacetime. You have lots of data, customer feedback etc to show you how to point those few those shots, but that's all you've really got.
The one sentiment I didn't fully agree with was:
> Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture.
This makes it feel like during war time the CEO doesn't have control of the culture, which counter to the entire post, is exactly what the CEO has control of. It's just that the culture is different in peace vs war, just like the CEOs are. Arguably the whole company is different all the way to an individual person level.
To speak to the other threads, I don't think the co-founders of Google were ever good peace or wartime CEOs. I think they rightfully gave up that seat multiple times because it's just not them. And to be explicit, there's nothing wrong with that.
"Peacetime CEO strives for broad based buy in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus-building nor tolerates disagreements."
Feel off to me. You're always creating culture, and if you've got good people and a strong culture, consensus flows naturally from single-minded mission focus. No matter how dire the straights, you need buy in from your team. In a crisis, that buy in stems from the mission and trust you've built over the years. Dictatorial decrees without a team that trusts you and a strong culture will cause the company to fail regardless of how urgent the battle. They'll just quit.
"Peacetime CEO strives for broad based buy in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus-building nor tolerates disagreements."
Oh good just what we need. More permission to be a jerk at work to try and communicate urgency. This is one of those things where a smart accomplished person says a thing and we're supposed to listen but even in 9 years this behavior is outmoded. If we framed all of this up as ruthless prioritization and clear understanding of urgency, then that tells you what you need to know. Figure out what works for you in a way that doesn't violate your teams' principles and values.
Yet many years after he'd successfully turned Apple around and, arguably, become a peacetime CEO, he wasn't fired. Moreover, were it not for his declining health, I don't think he would have stepped away even as Apple became the dominant force it's turned into over the last few years.
Maybe eventually he'd have stopped but, were he still alive, I imagine he'd still be leading Apple now.
You can deactivate consensus-building and encourage disagree and commit without being a jerk. It's one of the though ones when you are leading, but it can be pulled off. Of course you need to collectively make the judgement that you want to give ownership to tight groups and that people will need to sense if they need to disagree and commit, otherwise you will sound delusional and get out of touch with the rest of the team.
Tell many people who lived through World War II in an active theatre or, in more recent decades, conflicts in Somalia, Syria, or Yemen, that, "You aren't having an emergency for years at a time. That's just normal."
Steering back from warfare to business, after returning to Apple it took Steve Jobs several years it around and put it on a long-term firm stable financial footing. He avoided bankruptcy fairly quickly (he had no other option), but they were by no means out of the woods.
In the auto industry it took years for Toyota and, particularly, Nissan to turn around after WWII. In the early 1980s Chrysler were in a dreadful state after a combination of years of mismanagement and the second oil shock of 1979.
These problems were not quick or easy to fix.
I would think that yelling is either effective, or not effective, in producing outcomes and that should be true regardless of external circumstances. But maybe the desired outcomes are different in the two times? And the effectiveness of yelling varies by desired outcome?
I find that explanation unlikely, but possible. More likely he likes to yell, and is looking for justification.
What works for me is to be a jerk
and if it violates my teams' principles and values, I replace those individuals until it doesn't
;)
Seriously though, looking at your linkedin profile, you have been out of school for less than 2 years. There's a lot more to learn about other people.
Using political speech is often being a huge jerk, because you have a power imbalance and someone calling you out on it has to fight against the tide.
Consider who you are speaking to, in what context, and be as authentic as you can.
I think there is a critical element here, which is that the wartime CEO must actually be leading. If you behave like that, but can also inspire people to work for the cause, then it can work. If you behave that way, but also just say meaningless, mean, and average stuff, nobody needs to be exposed to that.
Such a good point. Most of the famous management books fall into this category.
I wonder if this is organic or not.
Thiel argues that the opposite of the competition emerges (which is a monopoly), and that these monopolies tend to operate much more ruthlessly and efficiently in the present day and are much harder, if not impossible, to dismantle. I disagree with him on whether that's a good thing or not, but I think his understanding of corporate mechanisms is much closer to reality than Ben Horowitz. The truth is that war theater is expensive -- too expensive these days for anyone to afford. Those characteristics of the "wartime CEO" he demonstrates (as well as some of the "Peacetime CEO") -- besides more focus on the present than the future, how many of them truly are proactively solving the crisis rather than reactively panicking?
The great CEO is able to manage their organisation to handle both. But odd are, you won't see this. Because they know to do that effectively, their "all hands" messaging has to be bland, tending towards peacetime messaging - or risk spooking the peacetime parts of the business. But then when talking to the wartime parts of the business, typically much smaller audiences, they are aggressive, and encourage the single minded focus of the leader of that part of the business.
Simon Wardley has many many good articles on this topic, often with the military angle - because war is the ultimate expression of conflict, and business are always in conflict with something.
Perhaps Netflix offered something unique, or perhaps paying one provider and using one app is more of a benefit than it's given credit for.