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You've got musk prescribing technical solutions at the CEO level, so clearly it's not true in every case.

hef19898 5y ago
And I'd say Tesla is successful despite and not because of that. Examples include: Tesla's shot at an in-house ERP and the drive to fully automate production. Both cost them a lot.
- afarrell 5y ago
  Also https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/tesla-must-pay-137-million-to-ex-worker-over-hostile-work-environment-racism.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/tesla-must-pay-137-million-t... The ability to say "this is no longer my job" is crucial if a leader is to focus on what is their job.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bobsomers 5y ago
I've talked to some folks from Tesla whose stories absolutely reinforced the parent's point. Some of the silly things Musk has dictated turned into massive wastes of resources for the engineering team.
- edoceo 5y ago
  But not to Musk, who writes the check. Not always about engineering team resources.
bombcar 5y ago
There’s a line somewhere between understanding technical issues (and being able to make decisions on it) and being too interested in the details.
- crabmusket 5y ago
  And another line after that when mandating the details from on high.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I worked at a multi-billion dollar company (not Tesla) where the CEO considered himself chief engineer and tried to prescribe low-level technical solutions from the CEO level. It was terrible. CEOs don’t have the time to keep up with technologies and understand the low-level requirements that drive good decision making. A person doing a CEO job can’t possibly keep up with someone doing full-time engineering work in any fast-moving field. The only way we could make progress was by subtlety seeding our ideas to the CEO and waiting for him to claim them as his own directives after he realized they were good ideas. It was an exhaustive way to get things done.
seattle_spring 5y ago
Like the absolutely asinine "steering yoke"?
- stavros 5y ago
  Everyone's first words at the reveal were "is this a yoke?".
mLuby 5y ago
I'm sick of "but Elon Musk does X." Yes, the guy's exceptional. That literally means not representative, outside the normal rule or distribution. So like a black swan, you can point to him and say "proof X is possible" but you can't point to him and say "proof X is normal"—you've got to wait for "half of Fortune 500 CEOs do X." (Nothing personal colordrops, I've just seen this take a lot lately.)
- Jetrel 5y ago
  I mean, it's a fair take to argue that CEO-ship ought to be meritocratic, in the sense of only hiring extremely exceptional individuals. If you're just an average jobsworth doing a merely 'decent' job, you shouldn't be the ceo of any company. It's kind of similar to airline pilots or surgeons, where we have to demand "excellence" as a lowest-common-denominator. At that level, they need to be graded on a reverse curve, where unlike regular grades, where a mere 65% score is a passing grade — for those folks, nothing less than a 95% should be a passing grade. It's easy to make the argument for airline pilots and surgeons, because the human tragedy that results from their potential incompetence is immediate and obvious. I feel like the tragedy that comes out of incompetent CEOs is a lot more insidious, and sneaky. Poorly run companies, and depressing "waste of life" has ruined a lot of people's lives. In fact, one could dare to surmise that it's actually, statistically speaking, directly killed a lot of people (an easy low-hanging fruit here would be safety stuff that OSHA doesn't cover), but there's a lot of mental health stuff we don't track as well. This whole line of thinking reminds me a lot of Florence Nightengale — her primary contribution to medical statistics was to take something that people brushed off as irrelevant or not-causal, and prove that it was a primary malefactor. She convinced the british top brass that the bulk of their deaths during war had nothing to do with enemy action, or even hospital deaths from injury, but literally was just caused by petty diseases, due to poor barracks sanitation amongst uninjured men.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    Competence at being a CEO, competence in the core business (whether engineering or otherwise,) and competence at splitting focus between completely different levels of the business are all different competences. Being skilled at all three is the exception, but that doesn't make the non-exceptions incompetent. If you always aim for the exception, what you actually end up doing is selecting for the third competence; someone who can code-switch. And if that person isn't exceptional, then you just have a CEO who is getting involved things outside their depth.

hef19898 5y ago

And I'd say Tesla is successful despite and not because of that. Examples include: Tesla's shot at an in-house ERP and the drive to fully automate production. Both cost them a lot.

afarrell 5y ago
Also https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/tesla-must-pay-137-million-to-ex-worker-over-hostile-work-environment-racism.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/tesla-must-pay-137-million-t... The ability to say "this is no longer my job" is crucial if a leader is to focus on what is their job.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bobsomers 5y ago

I've talked to some folks from Tesla whose stories absolutely reinforced the parent's point. Some of the silly things Musk has dictated turned into massive wastes of resources for the engineering team.

edoceo 5y ago
But not to Musk, who writes the check. Not always about engineering team resources.

bombcar 5y ago

There’s a line somewhere between understanding technical issues (and being able to make decisions on it) and being too interested in the details.

crabmusket 5y ago
And another line after that when mandating the details from on high.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

I worked at a multi-billion dollar company (not Tesla) where the CEO considered himself chief engineer and tried to prescribe low-level technical solutions from the CEO level. It was terrible. CEOs don’t have the time to keep up with technologies and understand the low-level requirements that drive good decision making. A person doing a CEO job can’t possibly keep up with someone doing full-time engineering work in any fast-moving field. The only way we could make progress was by subtlety seeding our ideas to the CEO and waiting for him to claim them as his own directives after he realized they were good ideas. It was an exhaustive way to get things done.

seattle_spring 5y ago

Like the absolutely asinine "steering yoke"?

stavros 5y ago
Everyone's first words at the reveal were "is this a yoke?".

mLuby 5y ago

I'm sick of "but Elon Musk does X." Yes, the guy's exceptional. That literally means not representative, outside the normal rule or distribution. So like a black swan, you can point to him and say "proof X is possible" but you can't point to him and say "proof X is normal"—you've got to wait for "half of Fortune 500 CEOs do X." (Nothing personal colordrops, I've just seen this take a lot lately.)

Jetrel 5y ago
I mean, it's a fair take to argue that CEO-ship ought to be meritocratic, in the sense of only hiring extremely exceptional individuals. If you're just an average jobsworth doing a merely 'decent' job, you shouldn't be the ceo of any company. It's kind of similar to airline pilots or surgeons, where we have to demand "excellence" as a lowest-common-denominator. At that level, they need to be graded on a reverse curve, where unlike regular grades, where a mere 65% score is a passing grade — for those folks, nothing less than a 95% should be a passing grade. It's easy to make the argument for airline pilots and surgeons, because the human tragedy that results from their potential incompetence is immediate and obvious. I feel like the tragedy that comes out of incompetent CEOs is a lot more insidious, and sneaky. Poorly run companies, and depressing "waste of life" has ruined a lot of people's lives. In fact, one could dare to surmise that it's actually, statistically speaking, directly killed a lot of people (an easy low-hanging fruit here would be safety stuff that OSHA doesn't cover), but there's a lot of mental health stuff we don't track as well. This whole line of thinking reminds me a lot of Florence Nightengale — her primary contribution to medical statistics was to take something that people brushed off as irrelevant or not-causal, and prove that it was a primary malefactor. She convinced the british top brass that the bulk of their deaths during war had nothing to do with enemy action, or even hospital deaths from injury, but literally was just caused by petty diseases, due to poor barracks sanitation amongst uninjured men.
- Talanes 5y ago
  Competence at being a CEO, competence in the core business (whether engineering or otherwise,) and competence at splitting focus between completely different levels of the business are all different competences. Being skilled at all three is the exception, but that doesn't make the non-exceptions incompetent. If you always aim for the exception, what you actually end up doing is selecting for the third competence; someone who can code-switch. And if that person isn't exceptional, then you just have a CEO who is getting involved things outside their depth.