51–60 of 400 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most startups fail. You need to be good to succeed.
You need to be good enough to succeed. People needn't go beyond that to maintain a status quo.
Startups are explicitly disrupting the status quo. Yeah, one needs to be good enough to do that but it’s nothing to downplay. That is hard in a world of established actors.
I found this part amusing: "Charity [company founder] has a more intuitive, spontaneous style, often shines brightest in a crisis, is allergic to checklists". It looks like an almost inadvertent admission. In other words, the founder doesn't have the qualifications or characteristics that the underlings assume they need to be in a leadership position. I automatically become CEO, CTO, etc., by starting my own company,…
Even though currently less popular, I think Zuckerberg is a great example of this. He went from a college kid to a top 20 CEO with no formal training, except running his company.
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>After a while you merit your position by not running the company into the ground, but instead making it succeed. That's not merit for the position but not being a five alarm dumpster fire at the position. There is a difference. As long as the company is lucky or there's enough overall competence in leadership or they hired the right employees that incompetence may not be destroy the company. That doesn't mean they'r…
Most startups fail. You need to be good to succeed.
I found this part amusing: "Charity [company founder] has a more intuitive, spontaneous style, often shines brightest in a crisis, is allergic to checklists". It looks like an almost inadvertent admission. In other words, the founder doesn't have the qualifications or characteristics that the underlings assume they need to be in a leadership position. I automatically become CEO, CTO, etc., by starting my own company,…
First, I didn’t read that at all as a remark about someone’s qualifications. It seems a straightforward and friendly admission of where 2 different styles exist. Acknowledging those style differences is a _good_ and healthy thing and not a tacit appeal to hierarchy. Second, your whole comment is littered with implicit reinforcement of the hierarchy. You use terms like underling, bosses, and equate the founding of the…
It wasn't. That's why I said, "It looks like an almost inadvertent admission." The rest of the blog post, though, is explaining in detail why the author qualified for their promotion.
> Second, your whole comment is littered with implicit reinforcement of the hierarchy. You use terms like underling, bosses, and equate the founding of the company with founding of a hierarchy. If you, who claim to be skeptical of the hierarchy, can’t stop doing that how can you expect those around you who are trying to model their behavior off of you?
I don't understand this comment. Of course I used terms to describe hierarchies. How can one talk about about thing, even critically, without using terms to describe it?
> In knowledge industries managers aren’t leaders, they are support staff. The best software managers and executives know this and do everything in their power to make it easy for the actual leaders and experts, the IC doing the work (yes including that intern you just hired) to get on with it.
"Support staff" who by strange coincidence get paid a lot more money than the people they supposedly "support" and also have the power to hire and fire them. Hmm...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even though currently less popular, I think Zuckerberg is a great example of this. He went from a college kid to a top 20 CEO with no formal training, except running his company.
He might have received some subset of formal education along the way. He could've hired some private tutors, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>After a while you merit your position by not running the company into the ground, but instead making it succeed. That's not merit for the position but not being a five alarm dumpster fire at the position. There is a difference. As long as the company is lucky or there's enough overall competence in leadership or they hired the right employees that incompetence may not be destroy the company. That doesn't mean they'r…
Most startups fail. You need to be good to succeed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First, I didn’t read that at all as a remark about someone’s qualifications. It seems a straightforward and friendly admission of where 2 different styles exist. Acknowledging those style differences is a _good_ and healthy thing and not a tacit appeal to hierarchy. Second, your whole comment is littered with implicit reinforcement of the hierarchy. You use terms like underling, bosses, and equate the founding of the…
> First, I didn’t read that at all as a remark about someone’s qualifications. It wasn't. That's why I said, "It looks like an almost inadvertent admission." The rest of the blog post, though, is explaining in detail why the author qualified for their promotion. > Second, your whole comment is littered with implicit reinforcement of the hierarchy. You use terms like underling, bosses, and equate the founding of the c…
One wonders why hierarchical thinking endures. Hmmm…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need to be good enough to succeed. People needn't go beyond that to maintain a status quo.
> to maintain a status quo Startups are explicitly disrupting the status quo. Yeah, one needs to be good enough to do that but it’s nothing to downplay. That is hard in a world of established actors.
Nonetheless, you're still attributing way too much to the ability of the leadership. After all, that story is so remarkable precisely because it's pretty much the only well known example of this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most startups fail. You need to be good to succeed.
I've been mostly in startups for the last 10+ years. Until recently the main thing you needed to be good at is getting more VC money. That is correlated to certain measures of success but having a ton of free money means you can patch a lot of failures over that would bankrupt most companies. Then either sell or IPO before the house of cards came down. It's been interesting watching over the last year as that strateg…
I found this part amusing: "Charity [company founder] has a more intuitive, spontaneous style, often shines brightest in a crisis, is allergic to checklists". It looks like an almost inadvertent admission. In other words, the founder doesn't have the qualifications or characteristics that the underlings assume they need to be in a leadership position. I automatically become CEO, CTO, etc., by starting my own company,…
This is really the truth, especially in giant corporations. It's really fun when you are part of a startup and sell to a big company and they realize that not one member of the startup would have been hired by HR, and suddenly, the team members from the startup getting the promotions over the HR approved, pedigreed bigco employees.