My last CEO was a great leader, except he showed up at 10am most days. Employees saw him get to work 90 minutes after they did. They didn't see that he stayed until 9p most nights since most of them were gone by 530. He lost the respect of the employees because he never understood that the example he set was visual. And he got fired despite the executives who worked closely with him all thinking he did a great job.
Sounds like a work culture and "top" in your workplace might be not too healthy then.
CEO's should deliver results and help the company grow. If they have issues with him coming to work at 10 am, then the work culture should be adjusted imo for people to understand what it takes for him to deliver results.
Wow, that's pretty bad. That's people I guess. Though maybe that CEO now has a job where he doesn't need to stay until 9, which is probably a win for him...
I've never worked for an executive who didn't take note of how they and their superiors were viewed by their employees. The bad ones don't care, but they all at least follow it.
One CEO says when hiring he asks if the applicant thinks she is smart or hard working. The only correct answer is hard working. Later in the article another CEO at a college job fair looks at a plain resume and asks what the kid has been doing with his time. The kid says he drives home and works Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at his family's diner all weekend returning to school on Monday morning.
I used to work on a massive private yacht. I'm cleaning and polishing the outside making it look pretty for all the passerby's to admire after we arrived at the marina at Atlantis in the Bahamas. A tourist perhaps in his early 40s with a family stops me to ask "How do I achieve getting my own yacht?" I said what everyone says, hard work. He scoffed at me and replied that he works very hard in technology in Vegas. He works 50+ hours a week and that he will never realize a yacht like this.
It's not hard work. That's not the answer. It's something else. After working 6 years on private yachts my best guess is that the people who own the yachts hire people who know what they are doing, they provide those people with the resources they need, and they stay out of their way. They do not micromanage.
The writer mentions Ray Dalio and his hundreds of principles for working at his firm, Bridgewater Associates. Maybe, but the big thing to take away from Dalio's principles is not to micromanage. He has built an algorithm to make decisions based on merit of each employee's history of making the correct decision. [0] "In order to be an effective investor, one has to bet against the consensus and be right." He has established a way to quantify merit, which I think is similar the democratization of the stock market itself.
At Bridgewater, its not exactly just not micromanaging, that is one of the parts. Its more along the lines of knowing when to manage, specifically where the fine line is between micromanaging and "true managing", removing people who aren't performing (firing or getting them into the correct role), getting people leverage that they need (that is supporting them in the way they need) and escalating to other management "correctly". Management is finding the right balance of all of that to allow a subordinate to achieve their potential.
>>Management is finding the right balance of all of that to allow a subordinate to achieve their potential.
Do you mean giving guidance instead of micromanaging which means "to control every part, however small."
The problem with micromanagement comes from one person making all the decisions for her subordinates. Whereas, it makes more sense for productivity to spread the decision making across many people. Another problem that micromanagement causes is subordinates not having confidence in the decisions they do make. So people who are otherwise smart and hard working find their time wasted in second guessing themselves not able to make a decision.
Micromanage is very different than guidance which means "advice or information aimed at resolving a problem or difficulty." Perhaps, a better way to describe what Ray Dalio is offering is guidance and based on listening to that video his principles are more suggestions than demands. More importantly, with a grain of humility, Ray encourages guidance coming from below encouraging his subordinates to offer guidance to him. This is very different from micromanagement which is unidirectional.
The CEO should be making the most major business decisions for the company. However, it is the responsibility of the the employees to realize that vision. The person welding shouldn't have to know about markets. However, the very wealthy people I have interacted with would never go into the galley and tell me how to bake a cake. They would say they have guests flying in and would I make something a little more special to impress them.
To expand on what you are saying. Perhaps, one of the ways to support a subordinate is to offer guidance. The keyword I make here is offer or perhaps a better word, proffer, to offer for acceptance meaning it is ok for the subordinate to reject the guidance.
My experience is that these CEOs hire people who know what they are doing, provide them with the resources they need, and stay out of their way. However, if the subordinate does not produce the CEOs do not micromanage. They simply let them go or move them into a more appropriate position.
Being a CEO is more than not micromanaging but my experience observing several CEOs including a few billionaires closely is that they strikingly don't waste their time micromanaging. If someone needs to be micromanaged, they are let go.
Sometimes you need to micromanage, but if you find yourself doing that you better figure out what is wrong with that machine or person and replace it or them after the engagement/meeting/whatever is completed.
We're conflating micromanagement as the style of management and an instance of micromanagement, which is mostly what I'"m talking about. Quality management should be flexible and a manager should be able to navigate between different levels of involvement. On the CEO side of what you're saying, depending on what it is, micromanagement might be the way to go. That can't be a long term solution but for specific things it might be the most effective.
I think we're saying very similar things, I was just giving you a more accurate BW style management viewpoint. Anyways, Ray's points a guidelines anyways, sometimes rules need to be broken to move quickly, but you can always come back and discuss whether that decision to break them was valid.
Some people micromanage incessantly. Are you saying that micromanagement is just one of many tools a CEO can use to achieve a result, that sometimes it is the quick and easy solution to, perhaps, a roadblock launching a product? I can agree with that.
I’d add “take risks, then do everything you can to reduce the risks.”
Other than possibly in finance, working 100 hours a week _for someone else_ is not going to lead to owning a mega yacht. One needs to actually take the risk and accept the consequences. “Risk” usually is working for no compensation for a while, sometimes years.
(Tech is unique for not absolutely requiring this, in that a VC may be willing to absorb most of the founding risk. The founders receive salaries long before cashflow would support them. In almost any other industry, “owning the means of production” actually means taking that risk yourself.)
Pretty much. You can't produce labor for someone and some day financially responsibly own a huge yacht. There's no path that makes sense unless you hit outsized luck in the form of an IPO gone right or something similar.
Assuming you weren't born into wealth, you have to take on outsized risk to get outsized results. You can be smart about the risk you take, do a lot of research into the correct risks, and limit the downside as best you can, but you can't beat math.
Of course, but it’s almost always after a company at least has a product and usually after revenue is funding salaries. Using PG’s phrase, it’s after the company is “default alive.” By that point, the founding risk is pretty low.
A first-time entrepreneur raising capital without a product or revenue is, for all intents and purposes, unique to tech and biotech. The very few exceptions aren’t common enough that an entrepreneur could plan around them.
The fundamental problem is that hard working for the right thing. Modern capitalism has perfected the art and tech to force people to work on inconsequential work (thinking Google hired so many to lure people clicking ads).
If people were freed and have the resource to work on things they care, the people who want yacht, probably had good chance to get it; and the people who want to go to Mars, should also have the change not entirely in the hands of a billionaire business man disguised as a genius technologist.
> work on inconsequential work (thinking Google hired so many to lure people clicking ads).
I'm not sure if it's what you meant but working to make people click ad is probably the most consequential work that has been done in SV in the past 40 years... It's the thing that enabled everything else.
“Both of my great occasions in life happened by accident simply because I showed up.” Loving this quote. It´s so true actually. If you don´t put yourself out there and go network or go to events, it´s quite difficult to stumble upon new opportunities. You might just get the chance to get your foot in the door somewhere. This can also be referred to the "online and social media space" - if you don´t put yourself out there (eg.on Linkedin) people are never going to recognize you and your work. In my opinion, you can work as hard as you want, if no one actually sees it and values it, it´s still a waste of time.
Yes, but it's about 'making' luck or, more accurately, taking advantage of luck when it does come. If you don't get out there then you can't be in the right place at the right time!
Yeah, exactly. That´s what I meant. If you don´t put yourself out there, stumbling across a great opportunity becomes rather unlikely.
What I always ask myself is, if that phenomenon should really be called luck. I mean, if you´re at an event already that a lot of interesting people attend, then it´s very likely you´re gonna get to know someone "interesting". Like you´re already better than "the ones on the couch". Because I guess luck is something you don´t really get to have an influence on. Do you understand what I mean?
"To serve people" - is a far more attractive reason to be a CEO and a far more likely reason to succeed massively as a CEO. Most business books focus on the "how", but the "why" is critical for a CEO.
Money, power and prestige are byproducts and make very poor motivators in themselves. A CEO motivated by money, power and prestige (even those who naively pretend second order effects) will likely make suboptimal decisions.
"If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all."
I think 'power' here sounds negative (probably not intentionally), but remember with power comes the ability to make meaningful change and have a real impact.
Our CEO is strictly a 9 to 5 dude. CTO, too. And this is at a startup, I imagine if this was an established company, they wouldn’t even show up. In general they just push the responsibility onto the people who are willing to take it, and then claim credit for their success. That, in short, is how to be a C*O.
Is it bad to be a 9 to 5 executive? That sounds great from the perspective of the people working there, because then there isn't a culture of overwork.
It kind of is if you demand more than that from everyone else. A peon is killing himself for 0.5% equity while you’re sitting pretty on a 40% stake. It’s not like people are dumb or blind.
Hopefully you have a salary you are happy with. If you decided to take .5% instead of money you are are betting on the company, at 40% the CEO is putting a bigger bet. The success of the company is something they are responsible for and if it fails it direct affects them and their career prospects. A failed company doesn't reflect badly on a developer and does not follow them into interviews.
My stake is considerably larger than that. It’s what we’re offering to a great new hire. Guys in their mid 20’s, super talented, but nevertheless don’t have a clue.
And enough with this “making a bet” bullshit. Founders aren’t betting their own money, and they are getting paid considerable salaries for their work. IOW they aren’t risking anything. Not even opportunity cost.
Most founders work very hard (without pay) for a long time before getting funded/profitable--if they ever get funded/profitable. Most of their 'reward' comes down to taking this risk, and it definitely has a high opportunity cost.
It can be different in a very early stage startup but generally a CxO's job isn't to do the grunt work. It's to set direction/vision, create opportunity and ensure there is money in the bank. That's why you have a job. If you don't like it you could always do what they did and go out on your own. If you do that be prepared to live with daily existential dread and possibly a realisation that you don't have the skills to do what they are doing. Desk time is a very bad indicator of performance.
I take it you've never had that weight of expectation? If it were so trivial everyone would be a billionaire. Deciding what to do and what not to do is no easy task.
That's quite a claim. Maybe it's other things preventing people from being billionaires, like the fact that there are so few CEO positions, for starters.
I don't know about your CEO, but reality is that people of different talent levels can work more/less than others of different talent levels and still succeed. Hard truth!
My general recommendation to those who feel they're working too much is to 'demote' themselves to a position of lower responsibility / talent requirements.
It's unfortunate that you're being downvoted. Your attitude towards work hours may not be popular to hear but I think it's a very common one to bear, especially if your CEO isn't performing as much as they are demanding themselves.
I think the downvoting came from the bit about pushing responsibility on to others. Because that's exactly what great managers are supposed to do. You hire talented people and then you oversee their schedules while trusting them to do their job.
The only time you really need to step in is if something goes wrong. Maybe they are working in a wrong direction, maybe here is a conflict or an obstacle, or maybe they over/underperform.
Oh the strawman 4-hour work day executive, I made it almost ten minutes into reading the comments before finding it here. In your original comment your executives are working 8 hours a day, now it's 4?
Good managers push work down as a rule, not when they "can no longer cope."
I have a friend who shows up late every day. But when shows, he knows what everybody on his team needs to be doing. He has connections all over his organization, so he knows who to call to get things done. He was replaced by a guy who shows on time every day, but he is totally lost.
I am a strict 9 a 5 guy. I believe in sustainable projects. Wisely choose your priorities, make progress every day, and your projects will be successful in the near term as well as in the long term.
"Push work down" is a pretty fundamental aspect of management in general, not just executive management. The alternative is the CEO trying to do literally everything. Good managers focus on leading their employees, do the "real work" that they're very good at (if they have any time left after managing their employees), and push the rest down to the next level.
HN does have a "favorite" feature. Click on the timestamp of the comment and you should see a "favorite" link. There's a similar link for submissions. Favorites can be referenced via your profile page. Or are you thinking of something other than this?
Lots of comments here about how to be a successful CEO. We should all be looking at Elon Musk as the prime example. Work 120 hour work weeks when the going is tough, 100 hour weeks when the going's good, and if you're just starting out, spend every waking hour on your product/company.
If you do this, people will tell you you're insane, and you'll eventually stop. That's why Elon is different, because he cannot stop. I feel that this alone explains 90% of the CEO question - who can choose to stop and who cannot choose to stop.
So are you saying this is an inherent quality of certain individuals? If so, what can we learn from Musk in that case? I hope there are things he does that I can implement in my life, and that I'm not relegated to wishing I was born more "Muskian".
I think this is why it's far more important to try to find your own path to success than to emulate others' paths.
People are inherently different. In the physical realm this is completely self evident. It's far from controversial to acknowledge that you could train day in day out for years at a sport and never be even remotely comparable to even a middling professional in one of those sports. And whilst we try to ignore it in the mental domains, the same is no doubt true. So ultimately I think the key to success is to find what you personally do well at and leverage that into your own path to success. While keeping with the one constant in advice - the first time you fall, which you will, get up and try again.
