Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#181

Post by sangnoir » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 3:28 PM UTC

dmos62 wrote: post #107

mattm wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the wartime/peacetime leader conundrum. The tactics she used worked well because the situation was dire. They probably wouldn't have worked well in a company with a good culture. Winston Churchill is the most famous example of this. He was a great leader during wartime but terrible during peacetime.

This book A First-Rate Madness by Nassir Ghaemi [0] is about that. He looks at various historical leaders and how one half of them make good wartime leaders, but bad peacetime leaders, and the other half -- the opposite. Some of his case studies are, as far as I can remember (couldn't find a summary online): generals in US civil war (Lee and the scortched-earth-guy), Chamberlaine, Churchill, Hitler, JFK, Lincoln, Nap…

> the scortched-earth-guy

William Tecumseh Sherman, of "Sherman's march to the sea"

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#182

Post by nandkeypull » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 3:32 PM UTC

The best manager I ever had was the polar opposite of a micromanager. Very laid-back, offered insightful ideas, but not in pushy way. He gave us a lot of freedom to get the work done and didn't constantly check in every day.

What I really admired about him was his ability to keep his cool and "Don't Panic", even when everyone else was worked up about an emergency. He always just took the bad news in stride and suggested some possible courses of action.

It also helped that although he had some of the stereotypical engineering awkwardness, he liked to make off-hand comments that were often hilarious and Star Wars-related.

I never thought of our standups as the Jedi council.

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#183

Post by JepZ » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 3:36 PM UTC

Nvidian wrote: post #55

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO. I’ve worked for many companies and no CEO comes close. Over the past 2 decades, there have been ups and downs, but his belief in his company, his employees, and his product was always there. Every three months after quarterly results, he stands up for 2 hours+ to explain his vision, long term goals, short term goals, where to improve, celebrate successes. His vision that GPU computing woul…

OT: Any idea why he doesn't seem to like the idea of an Open Source Nvidia driver for Linux?

Does he see it as a risk, distraction or something?

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#184

Post by groupthinking » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 3:37 PM UTC

Trust

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#185

Post by forinti » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 3:42 PM UTC

The best manager I ever had was the best because he simply would leave our team alone. We knew what we had to do and he knew we would do it. He would sometimes ask if we needed anything and things worked great.

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#186

Post by imsofuture » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 3:46 PM UTC

forinti wrote: post #185

The best manager I ever had was the best because he simply would leave our team alone. We knew what we had to do and he knew we would do it. He would sometimes ask if we needed anything and things worked great.

Yeah, exactly this. Managers make a huge impact when they're needed, but rarely is that in the day to day. My best managers have always set clear objectives, and moved mountains for our team in the larger organization, but when it comes to executing they've always known it's best to get out of the way (obviously barring situations where things go wrong, or they do need to help).

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#187

Post by bentoscher » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 3:50 PM UTC

stevetursi wrote: post #161

She fought for us, when there was an issue she cared and sought to understand, she understood that family comes first before work (and lived the example), she protected us from the politics of the large organization, and she did whatever she could to obtain the resources we needed to do the job (a nearly impossible task at that company.) She had a 100-200 people on her staff yet she always made time to meet with whoe…

“Life is mostly froth and bubble, Two things stand like stone. Kindness in another's trouble, Courage in your own.” - Adam Lindsay Gordon

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#188

Post by ambicapter » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 3:53 PM UTC

rjzzleep wrote: post #88

I remember going to an Erlang conference where Basho was a sponsor. One of the engineering managers held a presentation on something new in Riak and had a small error in it. One of the other basho guys in the audience corrects him and his reaction to that was the following: "That's Ryan Zezeski, he's awesome and if he says that, you should listen to him". My immediate reaction was: "wow, I want to work for this guy"…

> I look at him and say: "What do you want, you don't have a clue about this stuff anyway."

I know you specified this was 10 years ago, but I can't think of a single situation where this would not be a douchebag move.

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#189

Post by pommers » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 3:54 PM UTC

My favorite manager taught me how to navigate the workplace. He managed 20 very different people and always found time for one of us if wee needed it. He would fight other people to say that we (graduates) were valuable to the company and would always feed back to us the responses he was getting.

One thing I am really grateful for is that he expected me to be able to find and point out the policies and procedures for anything I needed him to do. This meant that I could keep him honest, and he could learn from me instead of having to search himself whenever I came up with an unusual problem (like being a graduate and getting called for an incident while not on call). I still do all my own reading before I go to my manager now with things I need them to do, and it helps me to help them help me (for the most part).

He was also always there for me if I was getting beaten around inside or outside work (even after he stopped being my manager). He is the best manager I have had by far, and I would work with him again in an instant.

I am still amazed how he managed to do so well after being thrown into the job managing a large group of people working across the department, while other managers I've had who have only needed to look after a small team (10 people) seem to never have time for us.

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#190

Post by bane » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 3:58 PM UTC

stevetursi wrote: post #161

She fought for us, when there was an issue she cared and sought to understand, she understood that family comes first before work (and lived the example), she protected us from the politics of the large organization, and she did whatever she could to obtain the resources we needed to do the job (a nearly impossible task at that company.) She had a 100-200 people on her staff yet she always made time to meet with whoe…

> She fought for us

That seems to be the theme with me as well, all of my best managers and supervisors shared this trait even if I disagreed with them in other ways.