Hacker News Reader

Comment by hemantv | Hacker News Reader

Individuals have visions not committee. We build monuments for individuals not for committee.

Having said that no man is island of itself. Current incentive structure works great to motivate individuals to start companies

View on HN

I don't think this holds to scrutiny. This breaks down as soon as you get out of the idea phase.

Everyone has visions, and most great achievements today are the results of an amalgamation of them. The really big achievements are almost always the result of groups, not individuals.

People that idolize others have to turn a blind eye to everything surrounding that individual's achievement. It's simply easier to simplify big achievements as "this person was great". In reality though, it's a culmination of everything that came before that individual, the support around them, some of their decisions and much more.

In other words: monuments are a bad argument to evaluate if something is good or not. Especially in today's individualistic society.

It's a shallow Instagram motivational phrase.

> This breaks down as soon as you get out of the idea phase.

No, it does not. Most ideas fail, and a significant amount of "off the ground" projects fail.

To be successful long term, it requires vision and commitment. You can find people to grind on your vision, but you cannot make them see what you see.

The overwhelming majority of massive successful projects and companies have a key figure that drove them to success.

I'd wager there are very few examples (if any) of a massive and successful companies that began life as a startup with a 30+ person board, for example.

If you've got 30 people on a committee, or 30 people on your board, well, good luck with that (in any context.)

My business has always had 3 or 4 people as owners, and hence as the "executive committee". I've found that to be helpful. If you can't convince your fellow owners then it's likely a bad idea.

(We've also turned away good ideas, and executed on bad ideas, the group approach is not infallible.)

But it really helps to develop a vision beyond just "my idea this morning" before diving into implementation.

> You can find people to grind on your vision, but you cannot make them see what you see.

I call bullshit. If you can't explain your vision you're a shitty leader. Good leaders can share their vision and get people to buy into them, adding their visions on top of it.

This is an oversimplification of very complex human interactions. Humans seek the simple explanation, even when there isn't one.

>The overwhelming majority of massive successful projects and companies have a key figure that drove them to success.

  s/a key figure/key figures/g

Every project that is big enough has multiple people driving them to success. This idea that the person at the top is the only one driving it is insane. It's individualistic propaganda. No, you did not build your company/product/achievement alone. It's self-serving bias being projected onto someone else.

>I'd wager there are very few examples (if any) of a massive and successful companies that began life as a startup with a 30+ person board, for example.

That's moving the goalpost. Nobody's saying you need 30 people for things to happen. Anything greater than 1 is, by definition, no longer an individual effort.

Take one of the most known examples: Apple. It took both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to make it happen. After their initial success, it wouldn't have grown to today's behemoth without the thousands of others that came after and worked on each and every product to make them successful. It's always a group effort. We can simplify and say "Jobs did it" but it's absolutely inaccurate.

I don't understand why smart people need idols. I get why the masses need their figures, but once you think about it for 5 seconds it's obvious they are mostly myths.

> We can simplify and say "Jobs did it" but it's absolutely inaccurate.

It actually would not be. We got to witness Apple with Jobs, without and with-again... the track record unambiguously demonstrates how impactful a single visionary, highly motivated leader can be within an organization.

We're now seeing Apple without Jobs yet again, and while the stock price has coasted upwards under Cook, Apple has not been the "bold" "think different" Apple ever since. Present-day Apple largely relies on it's existing products and small iterations. Apple, under Cook, has produced nothing market-changing or revolutionary, like they consistently delivered under Jobs.

Seems like confirmation bias. We often than not like to lionize successful individuals, but plenty of visions are false or otherwise fail. On the other hand, we tend not to remember group efforts because it's harder to remember multiple individuals at a time. But surely they do exist. Was there a single visionary behind Bell Labs? Xerox PARC? The traitorous eight? The Apollo program? The Manhattan Project?

Groups are slower and less consistent in decision making than individuals, simple as that.

There are different types of group governance and almost all of them having an individual decision-maker at the front. Oppenheimer directed the Manhattan Project but he wasn't a "visionary individual," he had plenty of talented geniuses working under him.

I believe there would be a single polymath who has skills in multiple fields, such as Oppenheimer who was great at science and administration who can lead a group for successful execution. For Apollo moon mission, it was the US president vision at the foremost. Even for TSMC and other companies such people exist. I don't want to say that entire credit goes to an individual but leaders with multiple skills are necessary.

Nah, this is not true. This is just the narrative because someone want to get the honors or the stacks of cash. Apple wasn't created by Steve Jobs. Not even created by Steve Jobs and the Woz. They did start something that eventually became Apple. They had a lot of sway, but without all the other people that worked there and created all the important details it would have just been a pipe dream.

>We build monuments for individuals not for committee.

That's the second time i'm hearing that quote today from completely unrelated sources.

The quote is from David Ogilvy, in case anyone is wondering.

"Search all the parks in all your cities; you'll find no statues of committees."

https://x.com/The_AdProfessor/status/1705254246109651053

Seems like it's deliberately using "committee" as a pejorative to make a political point. Flip it to "you'll find no statues of groups of people" and it's patently false.

Of course, you are right.

----

Edit, I was mistaken in my earlier post, so I will just leave this here as a correction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burghers_of_Calais

Reply on news.ycombinator.com