Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, it's fear over ego. At the last company I worked for, the CEO discovered Marty Cagan and immediately switched the entire company over to following his recommendations. I was on a product team, and we came up with our own strategy to meet our OKRs. The CEO didn't like our approach, and decided that, actually, he was going to both set the objectives, and results, and tell us how to achieve them. We were basically a feature team.

But it wasn't ego, it was fear. The company was running out of runway, we just hadnt been told yet. The CEO adopted the product team strategy as a Hail Mary, out of sheer panic, and he sabotaged it for the exact same reason: he was terrified of not trying it, and then terrified of it not working.

Not only because of this anecdote, but because of several other important ones, I view leadership as being generally fear-driven in their decision making. Ducklike, they appear calm and even confident on the surface, while desperately thrashing and failing below the surface. Or, like someone falling down a hill and reaching out for anything to hold on to.

Not to pick a fight, but there is this misconception from salaried employees that the running of a company is mostly calm and relaxed, and there are certainty where next months salary is going to come from. Or at least that good management achieves this.

But in reality, leadership of a company is constant chaos, the image of the dog with room on fire saying everything is fine comes to mind.

Who knows what the right decisions is, everybody has feet of clay.

There is some truth in this. In the startup world, we often tend to avoid this framing because it isn't positive - but every startup begins in the process of failing (running out of resources and ceasing to be a going concern, one way or another).

The term "runway" is often interpreted to mean: "We need to get this plane going fast enough to lift off before the end of the road". Reality is more complex, because there isn't a plane yet. You have to design and build that as you go, and if you get it wrong, you crash.

Management is in this position: without action, the company will die. With the wrong actions, the company will die. Many decisions close doors, and it's not exactly clear from the start what sequence of doors will lead to the company not dying.

If you involve the team too much in the sausage-making aspects of this, they will invariably become distracted, lose focus, and the company will die. If you leave them too much in the dark, they will lose trust, and the company will die.

It's not easy, and all of this leads to the duck nature: calm up top, under the water feet are paddling like crazy.

"If you involve the team too much in the sausage-making aspects of this, they will invariably become distracted, lose focus, and the company will die. If you leave them too much in the dark, they will lose trust, and the company will die."

Incredible truth in this statement!

When I was much younger I spent two years trying to run an open company only to be “openly told” that several of my employees didn’t want to know and that it was too stressful for them to go through all of the tribulations.

Some people honestly don’t want to know what’s happening. They just want to do their jobs and get paid. And I came to the conclusion that it’s perfectly acceptable.

Still love the open company concept. But if you love and respect the people you work with you have to think pretty deeply about it and whether it’s actually of service to your employees, investors and team.

It's the old "you are not the customer" but applied to management. I really really want to be told what the high level goals are and come up with a solution. So of course when I started managing people I worked really hard to communicate those high level goals and let them decide the how. They told me no thanks please just let me know what tickets to work on.

People are different and motivated by different things and that's ok.

The dictator who listens really seems to be what the majority prefer because they don't actually want to be accountable for those decisions they just want a seat at the table.

> The dictator who listens really seems to be what the majority prefer because they don't actually want to be accountable for those decisions they just want a seat at the table.

Yes. I would go so far as to say people want to experience the feeling of making decisions, of responsibility, without actually having any.

I was also incredibly optimistic about this approach in the past but life experience has shifted me away from it. I personally can't understand people not wanting to know. It is weird dynamic. I changed jobs a few years ago and went from management to an IC role for a while. It was nice to focus on technical problems but it also did my head in. I felt incredibly neurotic knowing that stuff was going on but I was in my little bubble of productive calm.

What a fantastic and succinct description. Developing something new, whether you're a startup or an established company, feels like that. In a large company, dying may mean something less dramatic, but it may still lead to a team or division sacked.

Yep. This is why getting people talking about priorities and focus is job one on the product side of things. The conversation will look different depending on size, but it’s still there.

> everybody has feet of clay.

Where is that from?

It goes back to a Biblical reference, book of Daniel:

This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass/His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay/Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces.

It has been used a lot since then, for something that seems impressive but is actually weak at the base. I'm not sure when "iron and clay" got reduced to just "clay", but it was by at least the early 19th century.

I’ve worked for and with many people who’s stress response is to try and control everything, especially the flow of information (read as hoarding information and giving people the bare minimum, and often less than that).

It inevitably leads to more stress, not just for them, but for the whole organization. I’ve never seen it play out well long term and wish I had a good way to call it out and correct it. At least I can more clearly see the pattern now that I’ve run into it a few times.

> he was terrified of not trying it, and then terrified of it not working

What a great piece of insight and observation. That really sums up so many situations where we seemingly shoot ourselves in the foot. It's the dilemma of being afraid of not going down a path but also fearing what we may find at the end of that path.

"We're running out of runway; let's change our development approach"? Talk about counterproductive...

Fear/panic is not known for inducing rational decisions.

Well look at all the unicorns that pivoted their way into success. Clearly you're supposed to pivot! /s

Starting and running a company is very scary, so it's not surprising that many people who are not cut out for the emotional work involved end up like this.

> The company was running out of runway, we just hadnt been told yet.

At least your CEO didn't dump all the bad news and resulting anxiety directly on the team. Good job, it's exactly what he's paid for.

Well, instead he waited until we were almost out of money, then laid off a very large percentage of the company one morning.

That sounds like the right thing to do. If you have to do layoffs, it's better to do them all at once and then tell everyone how much runway you have left. Doing several smaller once, making everybody unsure of the future and afraid for their jobs is much worse.

This is very true, and is also why we have things like corporations, founder cash-outs, outlandish executive compensation packages, finance, golden parachutes, etc. The whole idea is to make failure somebody else's problem, so that you're set for life regardless of what you do. This takes fear out of the equation, so that (supposedly at least) you can make rational decisions and it becomes a simple dollar-maximization exercise.

It'd be an interesting experiment to see if we could take executives out of the decision-making loop and just have AI (or aggregated intelligence) make the decisions, since computers are generally better at it than humans and certainly don't have pesky emotions or egos to get in the way.

Boy, this sure sounds familiar.

Every seed stage company ever....

Somehow the lack of sales are the product teams fault? Let's start messing with the product to figure out why sales aren't happening. Haha, it's so sad it's almost funny!

A lot of founders hire a product team way too prematurely. A lot of founders who have experience making product think that the product sells itself....

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