Founder Mode

I feel like Amazon is a great case in point - Bezos exercised direct command-and-control of all major initiatives for his entire tenure at the helm.

Delegation was obviously in play, but responsibility was never diffused. At the end of the day, there was a direct chain of responsibility from you all the way up to Bezos, and he wouldn't hesitate to send one of his personal fixers in if things were going off the rails in a particular branch of the organisational tree.

It’s surprising that this is surprising.

Every conversation loses information. Something is always lost in translation, even among excellent communicators. If you only rely on your direct reports to get information about your organization you will be flying blind. This will happen in situations where everyone has the purest intentions. Add on top politics and personal interests and the problem compounds.

Here are a few tools I’ve used to get a richer understanding of what’s going:

  - skip level one on ones
  - metrics
  - using the product as a user
  - occasionally looking at a few “low level” artifacts like customer support threads, slack conversations, PR reviews, or user stories. 

You’re essentially doing a virtual walk-around. Imagine in a physical plant, once a week, the CEO walks around the fence perimeter, through the stock rooms, observes the gate for a few minutes, walks the factory floor inconspicuously, makes herself coffee in the back cafeteria, and uses the warehouse bathroom. While she does this she occasionally asks a question here or there, praises a good effort, and very visibly picks up a piece of trash. It’s possible to do a similar thing virtually.

The observations from the above activities are invaluable sources of information. You cross reference it with what your direct reports tell you. You challenge them based on your first hand observations. Ask a lot of questions, and when they can’t answer them, encourage them to also become more intimately involved in their part of the organization.

No single perspective is enough to understand what’s going on

This is not micromanagement. This is being aware.

"management by walking around" is definitely a thing.

Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing depends on your experience with it, mostly.

There is even a name for it: Gemba Walk, a LEAN practice.

Management self-help guru Tom Peters (of In Search of Excellence fame) built a whole method around it, called Management by Walking Around. It differs from Gemba Walking in lacking a specific focus.

> As the pandemic showed with JIT supply chains, efficiency and resilience are often at odds.

I’m not convinced this is necessarily true. JIT implies making all of your buffers more obvious, and you will want to reduce unnecessary buffers to save cost, but maintaining some buffers for the sake of resilience isn’t incompatible with JIT supply chains. The problem comes when you combine short-term oriented management with JIT supply chains; if you quantify the cost of a buffer, you make it easier for that type of management to make that kind of decision.

Toyota, for example, is one of the firms that popularized JIT, but they don’t usually run into the same short-termist problems that afflict other firms. Relatedly, Toyota’s senior management have all spent decades if not their entire careers at Toyota and still includes members of the Toyoda family. Those guys are probably not going to play fast and loose with resiliency just to make quarterly numbers look good. They are going to look at the quantified and understood cost of their resiliency buffers and say, “removing this buffer might save lots of money next quarter but in the long run that represents a risk to a company I intend to pass down to my grandchildren so I won’t do it”. Whereas a different manager at a different company might say, “this will definitely make the next quarter’s numbers look amazing and if there are consequences in the long run, either I’ll have switched companies or I can just say it’s not my fault”.