Founder Mode

Throughout my career I've seen a lot of managers willfully focus more on crafting a narrative of "everything is fine" than fixing problems -- usually by hiding and mismeasuring known problem areas for example. At first I thought those were bad apples, but I came to realize those managers' managers are perfectly content with this type of dishonesty, because they get credit if it's not caught, and can wash their hands of it if they have plausible deniability.

So multiple times I see a founding team who's utterly sincere, and then a huge management chain that believes in nothing, couldn't care less about customers, and treats the whole job as a game/performance, and some very sincere engineers. And I just think to myself... "How does the C level not see this?"

I think the founder not only motivates people to work on the correct thing by doing this, but the founder also directly experiences feedback from working with people lower on the org chart, enabling them to steer the company with more accurate information.

I'm not sure it is.

Let's look at those three links:

1. The first of these dovetails -- not the same, but on the same hunt -- with Graham's piece, and is an excellent read.

- Unconventional wisdom

2. The second is formulaic anecdata consultjunk, the same method incurious journalists use covering politics through "focus groups".

- Conventional wisdom

3. The third uses the same formula, and while more effort (think "polling" or "survey" instead of "focus group") in an attempt to elevate from anecdata to study, seems not to have read or understood the first.

This third one is also contrary to the (often rejected while not yet disproven) theories* of Elliot Jacques, that people have sweet spot time horizons, and most can only flex +/- 2 horizons. As this article bullet lists (because of course) how to "shift from a leader/manager mindset to a lead/manage one and balance the two skillsets" it applies solely the manager rubric to action, through the lens of a manager that doesn't understand Graham's piece or the first article, almost irreconcilable with Graham's stance or the first HBR piece.

- Conventional wisdom (orthodoxy, even)

PG article and first link are not conventional wisdom, though it might sound that way to Taylorist thinking.

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Perhaps the lack of awareness Graham keeps noting is to be expected.

Seems unusual for serial startup entrepreneurs who have built firms from $0 to $B to have also individually joined and worked up to C-level in "institutions" (50+ years old, and 5K - 100K+ employees, not just other tech unicorns still bearing Founder imprints) after learning the startup experience that lets them see management practice through a "it doesn't have to be like this" lens, making it rare to find the perspective necessary to delve into Graham's take or the difference between these three HBR articles.

Perhaps it's not only that management culture is a distorted bubble (PG: "VCs who haven't been founders themselves don't know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world").

Perhaps it's that founders with institutional perspective are themselves unicorns.

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Footnote:

* Elliott Jaques' "Stratified Systems Theory of Requisite Organization" suggests that individuals have a natural "sweet spot" time horizon for decision-making at work (which should align with the time horizon of the decisions' scope and impact), and most can only communicate up or manage down within a range of one or two levels above or below their own optimal horizon. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requisite_organization

Everything was done by committee in increments of the 1-hour recurring meeting once a week. You could be on 10 of these recurring meetings for 10 different projects.

The first part of every meeting was a recap of last meeting. The middle part was about 20 minutes of trying to make progress on blocking items while the ex-BigCo managers came up with excuses for why they didn’t do their part yet (usually it was because they had too many meetings). The last 20 minutes was a performative exercise where we decided on action items for the week which we all knew were unlikely to get done.

The company went on like this for years after I left until they ran out of extra funds to keep the charade going. The management scattered to other “startups” where I’ve heard they’re continuing to repeat the same games.