But if you were CEO and you wanted to, how would you engineer the incentives such that actually productive managers succeeded? Or is there something about corporate structure that makes it impossible?
- The orgs most susceptible to rampant empire-building are ones where execs seem disconnected from the product. IMO the best way to discourage rampant headcount growth is for upper-level execs to scrutinize hiring needs. Some orgs (especially pre-2022) have been apt to approve headcount growth without sufficient oversight as to what the new people are actually supposed to be doing, and whether or not they're necessary. Loose hiring policies result not only in corp bloat and high expenditures, but reward empire-builder managers more than product-oriented managers.
- To double down on that point, part of the problem is that in too many companies execs and managers don't speak product. The point of hiring is ostensibly to ship more/different/better product, but when execs themselves do not speak product hiring becomes divorced from this underlying goal. You hire so your seniors have juniors to mentor. You hire so a manager can get promoted. You hire to "expand your scope". But at the end of the day there is only one valid reason to actually hire: so the company can produce more/different/better products that it otherwise cannot do without hiring. This is especially true at companies like Google and Meta where the PM track and Engineering tracks are fully decoupled.
But, I've never seen that in practice. Maybe the politics of the C suite mean you want those office politics back-stabbing folks around to take those high level positions?
You also need a good way to tell apart the backstabbers from the good guys.
Step 2: Realize that what you requested is impossible for sufficiently large organizations
Step 3: Negotiate a golden parachute for yourself. Don't hate the player, hate the game
Now one way to climb the ladder may be to grow the product or service, but in a larger org the ability to influence a product or service in a major way might be a bit limited, with decision-making at the business level being controlled by upper echelons. So the ladder-climbing process would select for different skills and temperament than founding/running a company.
Essentially, in a corporate hierarchy, we're asking people with ladder-climbing skills to become business people as they reach the top, and not everyone can make that transition successfully. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that very few can actually make that transition successfully.
Human brains learn through feedback [1]. To become a good business person, you need to run a business and get feedback just like a real founder/CEO, including business failures. Your question essentially becomes - how can a CEO structure incentives so that managers at all levels become good business people?
It's a great question, to which there is no simple answer that I know of. Would appreciate any pointers to potential solutions.
One way could be to treat each team at a certain level (say no more than 50 people) as a business of its own. It might not be the most efficient way for the corporation to deliver on its objectives, but it would likely create a lot of business-savvy managers. But now you have a pool of business-savvy folks that want to get paid like founders, and that might not be possible in a corporation. In terms of (in)efficiency, you could have duplicate teams that provide similar services, wasting resources, and adding costs to spin up new teams as existing ones fail or move on.
Something like this might be more feasible at a societal level - a capitalistic structure that encourages the growth of smaller size businesses while inhibiting the growth of mid- to large corporates.
Open source organizations actually seem to be the closest that I've seen that seem to operate this way.
If you can't get good enough people, you're going to fail hard inevitably no matter what you do (if you've got a quasi monopoly moat it may take a long rot to get there).
He seems like a ‘slave driving demon’. Best example how he treated the folks at Twitter or his other companies… demanding ‘hardcore’ hours and exactly like you said… he doesn’t care about people… doesn’t care whether they burn out or creating a culture where bullying is accepted.
I don’t think he really cares about solving big problems, it’s just a front to feed his big ego… he wants be seen as real life Tony Stark.
If he really cared about solving big problems like the climate crisis etc he wouldn’t have wasted his time with Twitter.
He wouldn’t have come with a stupid idea like the hyperloop and trying to derail a high speed rail project.
What he has achieved is he inspired more people to become engineers and problem solvers and have a positive vision of the future. But his big ego and narcissistic traits have ruined it and more and more folks see what he really is.
At the beginning his ambitions were probably more aligned to this vision, but he probably got more jaded over the years, realised it’s effin hard and his narcissism got the better of him.
It’s a shame the way he treated the Tesla founders. Also I never saw him credit his various teams, it’s always about him.
Tesla and SpaceX are successful despite his involvement, because ppl care about creating more sustainable solutions for humanity… it’s a great mission.
/rant over ;)
Also, if you're working for any large company, you are a cog in the machine.
I would argue that administrative and organizations bloat is a very real problem across virtually every large business. The bigger the business, the worse the bloat problem.
You can't do it, but you can fool idiots on the internet that you can!
Like this? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/03/twitter-s...