Hacker News Reader

Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

Similar feeling. These principles somehow do not help me make decisions or build mechanisms for my teams. On the other hand, the principles in the book Turn the Ship Around, the book No Rules Rule, and Amazon's 14 leadership principles helped me a lot because they give clear guidelines on how to make trade-offs. In particular, Turn the Ship Around advocates pursuing excellence instead of minimizing errors. Netflix advocates Freedom and Responsibility. Amazon advocates working backwards (customer obsession) and making two-way door decisions. More importantly, they prescribe a system to balance trade-offs especially when there's conflicting choices. For instance, Turn the Ship Around explores how to make sure everyone delivers yet the leader can fully delegate responsibilities -- it's not surprising that it requires a system.

View on HN

I was a bit skeptical of "Turn the Ship Around" because of its title, and despite all the positive reviews, but it's one of the best management books I've ever read. It's definitely worth a read, even if you're not a manager, as it applies to any team-related activity, and provides a useful toolkit for improving your team, whether you're the leader or not.

Jim Keller (helped design the spec for x86-64, was in management during Apple, AMD and Tesla's ultra successful periods) said when he was interested in management he just read like 100's of books on it, and turned out there was lots of really useful information that he applied and got great results from.

Yeah, the book also passes Taleb's Skin in the Game test: the author is also the practitioner of what he wrote about.

Hm. That's a generous take. Marquet lived the experience once. Now he goes around and lectures people in it instead.

I have all respect for Marquet and I agree with most of the things he says about leadership, as well as try to apply it daily myself. But my best reading of Taleb is that the sort of thing Marquet does (potentially get lucky, extract oneself from the situation, and then live off of the one experience), that's the opposite of skin in the game.

To be fair, that's pretty true of Taleb himself.

Sure it is. But, and this is a subtle point, he does not go around telling people specifically how they ought to invest, or how they ought to insure against tail risk.

He tells people how he invests, and some theoretical consequences of tail risk depending on input parameters.

It's a small difference, but, from what I understand, a meaningful one to Taleb.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com