Besides, the goal here is not that Bezos knows every detail; it’s that he knows enough of the details that a subordinate isn’t going to be able to bullshit him. And once he has trusted subordinates with a long history of not bullshitting him, he can offload some of the “understanding details” to them, so however difficult it was to try and bullshit Bezos, it’s going to be even harder to bullshit a team of Bezos and a trusted lieutenant.
And ultimately you can develop a skill or a technique for not being bullshitted even without knowing any of the relevant details ahead of time. Just as there are techniques to bullshitting a person, like handwaving and glossing over inconsistent or inconvenient details, there are also counter-techniques for not letting people bullshit you, like demanding all of the inconvenient details that people seem to be glossing over or trying to hide.
That’s the mentality that gets you with a Boeing CEO who doesn’t know that airplanes need redundancies. I think you can expect more from a great founder. In particular, people who have worked with Jeff Bezos have said that he is incredibly smart and broadly competent.
Probably more important is an intrinsic curiosity. Jeff Bezos seems like the kind of guy who really enjoys learning about aerospace manufacturing techniques or rocket engine design or distributed systems or supply chain management. If you’re smart and intrinsically curious, these deep dives aren’t really that much time and effort. If you’re the stereotypical MBA midwit, it’s outside your comfort zone and what you enjoy and it will be an ordeal.
> They have to be able to build a management team of properly incentivized highly skilled professionals.
It helps to remain involved with the details until you can tell who’s trustworthy. Once you have other trustworthy people to help you manage the details, of course you can delegate more and more of the work to them, and enlist them to help you with the deep dives.
> Time in the day is limited, if you are delving into details on X and Y, that means at that same time you are not spending time on Z.
Right. The flip side is that Jeff Bezos delegated a lot of the day to day operational management to the S-team so he had more time for deep dives. In other words, rather than focusing his attention broadly on the top level big picture, he scanned for problems and when he found one and spent his attention narrowly examining them one by one. Which, again, sounds like exactly what a curious person would do! Spending all of your time focusing on the exact same high-level overview over and over again sounds really boring because you never get to learn anything, and it’s the learning that’s the fun part.