15 ms·

Operations for Effective CEOs

413 points by anacleto 7y ago

dchuk 7y ago
I’m a part of a very quickly growing startup, and I’ve realized the power of narrative/storytelling big time in the last few months. It just doesn’t scale to tell everyone what to do, you have to get them all bought in on the Why via a compelling story and allow them to drive towards that through their own ideas.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  Devil's advocate: story telling doesn't give people self direction. A lot of people need to be told what to do. HN isn't a great audience for this because there's a lot of entrepreneurs and doers here. Not everyone knows how to properly prioritize tasks or even how to come up with their own task list.
  - sumanthvepa 7y ago
    Strongly agree. For many people, it's just a job. Clear direction is a must. However it need not exclude narrative story telling. A leader needs to adapt their style of leadership to the people they lead and the situation they are in.
  - nilkn 7y ago
    That's why you still have a traditional management organization. Moreover, you avoid putting those people to whom you refer into decision-making roles. Strong narratives and storytelling help to guide those who are in decision-making roles so that they are aligned with you.
  - topicseed 7y ago
    Very true. I built a business as a sole founder five years ago, and to this date, coming up with task lists and what to do next is the largest hurdle I face, almost daily. A lot of projects to work on, a lot of things —create new stuff, do recurring tasks— to complete, but deciding what to do now, and what to do when, is incredibly difficult when you're on your own. I have a few freelancers and an assistant and even deciding of their tasks is a little improvised.
  - UncleMeat 7y ago
    So then you need more layers of management. It is impossible for a CEO to tell everybody what to do. If the line engineers can't prioritize themselves then there needs to be layers of management who interpret the vision and convert it into priorities.
  - anbop 7y ago
    No one said it does. But if you tell someone "fix whatever is causing the disks on this machine to fill up" they're going to be more motivated to do so, and more able to make the best decisions about how to do so, if they know what the purpose, or "story," is, that they're a part of. It's just like if you told someone to play the part of a random extra in a convenience store in a movie, they will do a better job if they know what the movie is about. Even the way you play an extra is different in a slapstick comedy vs. a movie about blood diamonds, for example.
  - Animats 7y ago
    "Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?" - Henry Ford "Hon Hai (parent of Foxconn) has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache" - Terry Gou
- shostack 7y ago
  Different types of stories work with different people though. Some perhaps joined for the mission. They want to continue believing in it. Some perhaps joined for business success, so they need to hear a different story, or the same story told through a different lens that relates to their goals.
- tnolet 7y ago
  You're correct. You can't tell everyone what to do. Therefore you delegate and add middle management and have overarching goals. Telling a narrative that everyone can interpret willy nilly and pick and choose the bits they like is basically "hoping" things go as you imagined them. You need hope, but you also just need to check and follow up.
aj7 7y ago
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. Enough said.
- tasuki 7y ago
  -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
  - dsjoerg 7y ago
    Who never once got anyone to build a ship or anything else
    - svara 7y ago
      How do you know that? As an internationally famous author, he has certainly influenced people in some way. It's just incredibly hard to measure how exactly. Arguably, he precisely described the role for artists in society with that quote.
    - ronilan 7y ago
      Maybe. But he did make a fundamental scientific discovery. He proved that snakes and elephants cause Gaussian distribution.
    - Verdex 7y ago
      To be fair, the whole quote is about getting people excited to do work not by telling them the actual actions they have to perform, but selling them a dream to long for and work towards. It could be that his goal was to get people to repeat his quote about building ships. And he did it by selling some dream about being motivational by telling a grand story.
    - lstodd 7y ago
      Citation needed.
- stronglikedan 7y ago
lukethomas 7y ago
Great post talking about the value of an internal "communication architecture." Related post worth checking out: https://medium.com/@gokulrajaram/designing-a-communication-architecture-the-ceos-most-important-operational-responsibility-28937bd291e8 https://medium.com/@gokulrajaram/designing-a-communication-a...
jchook 7y ago
If you like this article I would highly recommend books by Patrick Lencioni Lencioni can upgrade your organizational health game several fold.
jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
> narratives (not facts) are what move people I actually find this practice really annoying. If I'm on contract cutting together some hack's godawful kung fu action film, the last thing I want to hear is the fiction he tells himself to get to sleep every night. Narrative is what we give to the public when we want to trick them into thinking that buying low-quality shoes will end world poverty. It has no place inside the company. Maybe it's helpful for customers to believe in the fantasy version of your company, but inside, you want people who know what is really going on, and are willing to participate without the use of such tricks.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Narratives don't need to be bullshit.
- habitue 7y ago
  Narratives are things that fill in the holes between the facts. You can't make sense of the world without them. We also call them "models" sometimes. Whenever there's ambiguity or not enough evidence, or uncertainty about how something might play out, it's a narrative (informed by the facts, but not a fact itself) that tells you how to proceed.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  > If I'm on contract cutting together some hack's godawful kung fu action film, the last thing I want to hear is the fiction he tells himself to get to sleep every night. Hum, no, that would be a lot of bullshit to accept. But I am sure you'll like to know you are helping creating a godawful kung fu action film. And it's very likely you'll like to hear on how successful the move will be.
- aklemm 7y ago
  I could tell a story around your work about how you are focused on the ultimate bottom line and how your efforts bring that clarity to the people around you, and I bet you'd eat it up.
  - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
bryanmgreen 7y ago
Internal communication FROM the CEO is important, and it's nice to see a comprehensive article review a lot of important tactics. However, where a lot of executives also fail is not allowing/encouraging/listening to the discussion that is ABOUT the CEO and Organization. Employee perspective can be very valuable too. Just talking at someone is never the right or effective way, 99.9% of the time.
DrScientist 7y ago
Totally agree people benefit from understanding the why - it allows them to bring their own capabilities to the problem, not just follow instructions. Not so sure it needs to be in the form of a narrative though... Why isn't the 'why' a just a fact? By building a story to try to get emotional engagement, aren't you guilty of trying to over-control people's emotional response? If you give them the facts they can make their own personal connections to the mission - again bringing their own story to it, rather than top down. You do need to tailor it to your workforce of course - I work in a high tech industry with lots of self-motivated PhD's.
kujaomega 7y ago
What a about the people that identify CEO is trying to sell smoke? Some people are tired to hear the same story again and again, in one place or another. When will we empower transparency?
- proverbialbunny 7y ago
  You begin to identify how much a CEO is selling smoke. The ratio is imho easiest to identify by keeping track of buzzwords (ie business lingo). The more vague (yet at the same time oddly specific) the lingo is, historically the more likely the CEO and company is pulling one over the investors eyes. The more straight forward and normal the lingo is the more likely they are to being honest, because they can't avoid the hard facts when being forward with their language. When it comes to investing in companies this is one of the key things I look for. It can be used on multiple levels, however, some companies will spin buzzwords who are legitimate. The key is identifying the difference between empty buzzwords and meaningful business language.
Fede_V 7y ago
I thought the article got better later on, but, the opening couple of paragraphs that emphasized story telling were very weak. Senior leadership has a much better understanding of the business context and long term plan than I do, but, I have a much better understanding of the problem details in my specific domain. What I find most valuable from senior leadership is clear feedback about how what we are doing fits in the broader context of what the company is doing, as well as specific high level feedback on the roadmap of our org. The story format can be helpful to frame a vision of how you'd like a product launch to go, but, it's not suitable at all for most of the communication a CEO/SVP does.
- traskjd 7y ago
  It’s a great post, but I suspect could have been about 5 posts. Detail and tactic rich :)
carrozo 7y ago
Does anyone have strong opinions on the cadence of CEO/leadership internal comms? Is weekly just right, too much? Monthly?
- alexhutcheson 7y ago
  At each level of management, you can probably reduce the cadence of formal communications: 1. Direct team lead (including leadership of very small start-ups) - weekly or biweekly, depending on how many interesting things you normally have to share 2. Director/manager-of-managers - monthly, again conditional on having enough interesting things to share 3. VP and above/leadership of 100+ person company - quarterly It's critical that you actually have interesting content, data, or strategy to share, and it's worth putting effort into gathering this content and presenting it in a compelling way. A common anti-pattern is to have regular all-hands meetings with boring or repetitive content, which causes people to zone out or look for reasons to skip it so they can get their work done instead. It can be hard to identify this, because the bored people won't respond to surveys, or won't respond honestly. A good rule-of-thumb would be that if you're not spending at least a couple hours prepping for the meeting, then it's probably not worth having.
  - carrozo 7y ago
    I like the reasoning here but don’t you think that senior leadership only communicating once a quarter (your example of 100+ employees) seems a bit out of touch and all the risks that entails?
    - alexhutcheson 7y ago
      Once/quarter is for "broadcast" communication - all-hands meetings, email newsletters, etc. In addition to that, they should be engaging with each individual team that reports to them. For example, you might also find it useful to do quarterly team-level strategy reviews where the team presents their accomplishments from the previous quarter and discusses their team-level roadmap for the next quarter. At the same time, senior leadership needs to get used to being "out-of-touch" to some extent. Most people who are new to senior leadership make the opposite mistake, and are far too involved in details of execution that they should have fully delegated. Too much direct involvement can deprive your managers of opportunities to take initiative and grow in their careers.
marban 7y ago
Nothing new if you've read The Effective executive by Peter Drucker. Published 1966, for what it's worth.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
blargmaster33 7y ago
Just read The Art of War by Sun Tzu.
fredsanford 7y ago
This is off topic, but... When I saw this pop up on HN, my first thought was: A lobotomy for most of them... And in my experience, from a customer point of view, I don't think I'm too far off track. I was nowhere near this cynical when I was younger. ((waits for the chorus of downvotes and "OK boomer")) :) On topic... Read Tom Sawyer.
just_myles 7y ago
You know I don't normally recommend books I read or have read, but both of these books below really resonate with me: "The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers": https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+hard+thing+about+hard+things&crid=2S6R0FSJS0VSB&sprefix=the+hard+thing+a%2Caps%2C365&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_16 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+hard+thing+about+hard+things&... "What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture": https://www.amazon.com/What-You-Do-Who-Are/dp/B07X36GGQ7/ref=sr_1_3?crid=2S6R0FSJS0VSB&keywords=the+hard+thing+about+hard+things&qid=1575914558&sprefix=the+hard+thing+a%2Caps%2C365&sr=8-3 https://www.amazon.com/What-You-Do-Who-Are/dp/B07X36GGQ7/ref...
- seanhunter 7y ago
  +1 for The hard thing about hard things. Definitely the book that helped me the most when I first found myself in the position of being in change.
mmaunder 7y ago
I'd caution that "narrative" and "story telling" can lead to fables. You should understand this as defining a clear vision, why it matters, how to get there, what it will look like on Monday morning once you've arrived and then ensure individuals and teams have clearly defined roles and own those roles. This is what Jobs' reality distortion field was built on.
wenc 7y ago
I heard this on Lex Fridman's podcast with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on "storytelling" Lex Fridman: Microsoft has 50-60 thousand engineers. What does it take to lead such a large group of brilliant people? Kevin Scott: ...(snipped)... One central idea in Yuval Harari’s book Sapiens is that “storytelling” is the quintessential thing for coordinating the activities of large groups of people once you get past Dunbar’s number. I’ve really seen that, just managing engineering teams. You can brute-force things with small teams, but past that things start to fail catastrophically if you don’t have some set of shared goals. Even though this is sort of touchy feely, and technical people balk at the idea that you need to have a clear mission, it’s very important. Lex Fridman: Stories are sort of the fabric that connects all of us, and that works for companies too. Kevin Scott: It works for everything. If you sort of think about it, our currency is a story. Our constitution is a story. Our laws are a story. We believe very strongly in them, and thank God we do, but they’re just abstract things, they’re just words. If we don’t believe in them, they’re nothing. Lex Fridman: In some sense, those stories are platforms.
- anacleto 7y ago
  This is a fantastic articulation. Kevin Scott: Microsoft CTO - Lex Fridman [0] [0] https://lexfridman.com/kevin-scott/ https://lexfridman.com/kevin-scott/
  - halflings 7y ago
    Would recommend reading "Sapiens" if you found that excerpt interesting (as it's rehashing one of the most important ideas from that book).
purplezooey 7y ago
It's not storytelling or any other skill. It's who you know. Look at the recycled clowns that are many CEOs. Buy back shares. Hire more recycled faces. Nothing interesting there.

413 points by anacleto 7y ago

I’m a part of a very quickly growing startup, and I’ve realized the power of narrative/storytelling big time in the last few months. It just doesn’t scale to tell everyone what to do, you have to get them all bought in on the Why via a compelling story and allow them to drive towards that through their own ideas.

hanniabu 7y ago
Devil's advocate: story telling doesn't give people self direction. A lot of people need to be told what to do. HN isn't a great audience for this because there's a lot of entrepreneurs and doers here. Not everyone knows how to properly prioritize tasks or even how to come up with their own task list.
- sumanthvepa 7y ago
  Strongly agree. For many people, it's just a job. Clear direction is a must. However it need not exclude narrative story telling. A leader needs to adapt their style of leadership to the people they lead and the situation they are in.
- nilkn 7y ago
  That's why you still have a traditional management organization. Moreover, you avoid putting those people to whom you refer into decision-making roles. Strong narratives and storytelling help to guide those who are in decision-making roles so that they are aligned with you.
- topicseed 7y ago
  Very true. I built a business as a sole founder five years ago, and to this date, coming up with task lists and what to do next is the largest hurdle I face, almost daily. A lot of projects to work on, a lot of things —create new stuff, do recurring tasks— to complete, but deciding what to do now, and what to do when, is incredibly difficult when you're on your own. I have a few freelancers and an assistant and even deciding of their tasks is a little improvised.
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  So then you need more layers of management. It is impossible for a CEO to tell everybody what to do. If the line engineers can't prioritize themselves then there needs to be layers of management who interpret the vision and convert it into priorities.
- anbop 7y ago
  No one said it does. But if you tell someone "fix whatever is causing the disks on this machine to fill up" they're going to be more motivated to do so, and more able to make the best decisions about how to do so, if they know what the purpose, or "story," is, that they're a part of. It's just like if you told someone to play the part of a random extra in a convenience store in a movie, they will do a better job if they know what the movie is about. Even the way you play an extra is different in a slapstick comedy vs. a movie about blood diamonds, for example.
- Animats 7y ago
  "Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?" - Henry Ford "Hon Hai (parent of Foxconn) has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache" - Terry Gou
shostack 7y ago
Different types of stories work with different people though. Some perhaps joined for the mission. They want to continue believing in it. Some perhaps joined for business success, so they need to hear a different story, or the same story told through a different lens that relates to their goals.
tnolet 7y ago
You're correct. You can't tell everyone what to do. Therefore you delegate and add middle management and have overarching goals. Telling a narrative that everyone can interpret willy nilly and pick and choose the bits they like is basically "hoping" things go as you imagined them. You need hope, but you also just need to check and follow up.

aj7 7y ago

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. Enough said.

tasuki 7y ago
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- dsjoerg 7y ago
  Who never once got anyone to build a ship or anything else
  - svara 7y ago
    How do you know that? As an internationally famous author, he has certainly influenced people in some way. It's just incredibly hard to measure how exactly. Arguably, he precisely described the role for artists in society with that quote.
  - ronilan 7y ago
    Maybe. But he did make a fundamental scientific discovery. He proved that snakes and elephants cause Gaussian distribution.
  - Verdex 7y ago
    To be fair, the whole quote is about getting people excited to do work not by telling them the actual actions they have to perform, but selling them a dream to long for and work towards. It could be that his goal was to get people to repeat his quote about building ships. And he did it by selling some dream about being motivational by telling a grand story.
  - lstodd 7y ago
    Citation needed.
stronglikedan 7y ago

lukethomas 7y ago

Great post talking about the value of an internal "communication architecture." Related post worth checking out: https://medium.com/@gokulrajaram/designing-a-communication-architecture-the-ceos-most-important-operational-responsibility-28937bd291e8 https://medium.com/@gokulrajaram/designing-a-communication-a...

jchook 7y ago

If you like this article I would highly recommend books by Patrick Lencioni Lencioni can upgrade your organizational health game several fold.

jacobwilliamroy 7y ago

> narratives (not facts) are what move people I actually find this practice really annoying. If I'm on contract cutting together some hack's godawful kung fu action film, the last thing I want to hear is the fiction he tells himself to get to sleep every night. Narrative is what we give to the public when we want to trick them into thinking that buying low-quality shoes will end world poverty. It has no place inside the company. Maybe it's helpful for customers to believe in the fantasy version of your company, but inside, you want people who know what is really going on, and are willing to participate without the use of such tricks.

Spooky23 7y ago
Narratives don't need to be bullshit.
habitue 7y ago
Narratives are things that fill in the holes between the facts. You can't make sense of the world without them. We also call them "models" sometimes. Whenever there's ambiguity or not enough evidence, or uncertainty about how something might play out, it's a narrative (informed by the facts, but not a fact itself) that tells you how to proceed.
marcosdumay 7y ago
> If I'm on contract cutting together some hack's godawful kung fu action film, the last thing I want to hear is the fiction he tells himself to get to sleep every night. Hum, no, that would be a lot of bullshit to accept. But I am sure you'll like to know you are helping creating a godawful kung fu action film. And it's very likely you'll like to hear on how successful the move will be.
aklemm 7y ago
I could tell a story around your work about how you are focused on the ultimate bottom line and how your efforts bring that clarity to the people around you, and I bet you'd eat it up.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y ago

bryanmgreen 7y ago

Internal communication FROM the CEO is important, and it's nice to see a comprehensive article review a lot of important tactics. However, where a lot of executives also fail is not allowing/encouraging/listening to the discussion that is ABOUT the CEO and Organization. Employee perspective can be very valuable too. Just talking at someone is never the right or effective way, 99.9% of the time.

DrScientist 7y ago

Totally agree people benefit from understanding the why - it allows them to bring their own capabilities to the problem, not just follow instructions. Not so sure it needs to be in the form of a narrative though... Why isn't the 'why' a just a fact? By building a story to try to get emotional engagement, aren't you guilty of trying to over-control people's emotional response? If you give them the facts they can make their own personal connections to the mission - again bringing their own story to it, rather than top down. You do need to tailor it to your workforce of course - I work in a high tech industry with lots of self-motivated PhD's.

kujaomega 7y ago

What a about the people that identify CEO is trying to sell smoke? Some people are tired to hear the same story again and again, in one place or another. When will we empower transparency?

proverbialbunny 7y ago
You begin to identify how much a CEO is selling smoke. The ratio is imho easiest to identify by keeping track of buzzwords (ie business lingo). The more vague (yet at the same time oddly specific) the lingo is, historically the more likely the CEO and company is pulling one over the investors eyes. The more straight forward and normal the lingo is the more likely they are to being honest, because they can't avoid the hard facts when being forward with their language. When it comes to investing in companies this is one of the key things I look for. It can be used on multiple levels, however, some companies will spin buzzwords who are legitimate. The key is identifying the difference between empty buzzwords and meaningful business language.

Fede_V 7y ago

I thought the article got better later on, but, the opening couple of paragraphs that emphasized story telling were very weak. Senior leadership has a much better understanding of the business context and long term plan than I do, but, I have a much better understanding of the problem details in my specific domain. What I find most valuable from senior leadership is clear feedback about how what we are doing fits in the broader context of what the company is doing, as well as specific high level feedback on the roadmap of our org. The story format can be helpful to frame a vision of how you'd like a product launch to go, but, it's not suitable at all for most of the communication a CEO/SVP does.

traskjd 7y ago
It’s a great post, but I suspect could have been about 5 posts. Detail and tactic rich :)

carrozo 7y ago

Does anyone have strong opinions on the cadence of CEO/leadership internal comms? Is weekly just right, too much? Monthly?

alexhutcheson 7y ago
At each level of management, you can probably reduce the cadence of formal communications: 1. Direct team lead (including leadership of very small start-ups) - weekly or biweekly, depending on how many interesting things you normally have to share 2. Director/manager-of-managers - monthly, again conditional on having enough interesting things to share 3. VP and above/leadership of 100+ person company - quarterly It's critical that you actually have interesting content, data, or strategy to share, and it's worth putting effort into gathering this content and presenting it in a compelling way. A common anti-pattern is to have regular all-hands meetings with boring or repetitive content, which causes people to zone out or look for reasons to skip it so they can get their work done instead. It can be hard to identify this, because the bored people won't respond to surveys, or won't respond honestly. A good rule-of-thumb would be that if you're not spending at least a couple hours prepping for the meeting, then it's probably not worth having.
- carrozo 7y ago
  I like the reasoning here but don’t you think that senior leadership only communicating once a quarter (your example of 100+ employees) seems a bit out of touch and all the risks that entails?
  - alexhutcheson 7y ago
    Once/quarter is for "broadcast" communication - all-hands meetings, email newsletters, etc. In addition to that, they should be engaging with each individual team that reports to them. For example, you might also find it useful to do quarterly team-level strategy reviews where the team presents their accomplishments from the previous quarter and discusses their team-level roadmap for the next quarter. At the same time, senior leadership needs to get used to being "out-of-touch" to some extent. Most people who are new to senior leadership make the opposite mistake, and are far too involved in details of execution that they should have fully delegated. Too much direct involvement can deprive your managers of opportunities to take initiative and grow in their careers.

marban 7y ago

Nothing new if you've read The Effective executive by Peter Drucker. Published 1966, for what it's worth.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

blargmaster33 7y ago

Just read The Art of War by Sun Tzu.

fredsanford 7y ago

This is off topic, but... When I saw this pop up on HN, my first thought was: A lobotomy for most of them... And in my experience, from a customer point of view, I don't think I'm too far off track. I was nowhere near this cynical when I was younger. ((waits for the chorus of downvotes and "OK boomer")) :) On topic... Read Tom Sawyer.

just_myles 7y ago

You know I don't normally recommend books I read or have read, but both of these books below really resonate with me: "The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers": https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+hard+thing+about+hard+things&crid=2S6R0FSJS0VSB&sprefix=the+hard+thing+a%2Caps%2C365&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_16 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+hard+thing+about+hard+things&... "What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture": https://www.amazon.com/What-You-Do-Who-Are/dp/B07X36GGQ7/ref=sr_1_3?crid=2S6R0FSJS0VSB&keywords=the+hard+thing+about+hard+things&qid=1575914558&sprefix=the+hard+thing+a%2Caps%2C365&sr=8-3 https://www.amazon.com/What-You-Do-Who-Are/dp/B07X36GGQ7/ref...

seanhunter 7y ago
+1 for The hard thing about hard things. Definitely the book that helped me the most when I first found myself in the position of being in change.

mmaunder 7y ago

I'd caution that "narrative" and "story telling" can lead to fables. You should understand this as defining a clear vision, why it matters, how to get there, what it will look like on Monday morning once you've arrived and then ensure individuals and teams have clearly defined roles and own those roles. This is what Jobs' reality distortion field was built on.

wenc 7y ago

I heard this on Lex Fridman's podcast with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on "storytelling" Lex Fridman: Microsoft has 50-60 thousand engineers. What does it take to lead such a large group of brilliant people? Kevin Scott: ...(snipped)... One central idea in Yuval Harari’s book Sapiens is that “storytelling” is the quintessential thing for coordinating the activities of large groups of people once you get past Dunbar’s number. I’ve really seen that, just managing engineering teams. You can brute-force things with small teams, but past that things start to fail catastrophically if you don’t have some set of shared goals. Even though this is sort of touchy feely, and technical people balk at the idea that you need to have a clear mission, it’s very important. Lex Fridman: Stories are sort of the fabric that connects all of us, and that works for companies too. Kevin Scott: It works for everything. If you sort of think about it, our currency is a story. Our constitution is a story. Our laws are a story. We believe very strongly in them, and thank God we do, but they’re just abstract things, they’re just words. If we don’t believe in them, they’re nothing. Lex Fridman: In some sense, those stories are platforms.

anacleto 7y ago
This is a fantastic articulation. Kevin Scott: Microsoft CTO - Lex Fridman [0] [0] https://lexfridman.com/kevin-scott/ https://lexfridman.com/kevin-scott/
- halflings 7y ago
  Would recommend reading "Sapiens" if you found that excerpt interesting (as it's rehashing one of the most important ideas from that book).

purplezooey 7y ago

It's not storytelling or any other skill. It's who you know. Look at the recycled clowns that are many CEOs. Buy back shares. Hire more recycled faces. Nothing interesting there.