4 ms·
That's a good illustration of no matter how brilliant the leader is, a bad team under them and/or poor execution can lead to failure. Even with this infighting
by jonah 15y ago
That's a good illustration of no matter how brilliant the leader is, a bad team under them and/or poor execution can lead to failure.
Even with this infighting and whatnot going on Amazon is still doing amazing things. I'd be interesting to see what it'd look like if they were able to execute everything well.
It seems that's also a crucial role of the exec - if they see something that needs to be happening and it's not, they need to get in there make the necessary changes.
- gaius 15y agoHow does a good leader end up with a bad team? That's worth understanding.
- mkeshav 15y agoIs a team of donkeys lead by a lion better than a team of lions lead by a donkey?
- gyardley 15y agoOn a team of lions, the donkey is lunch.
- nicferrier 15y agobad leadership?
- stonemetal 15y agoThere are probably a million different ways for it to go bad. There is a theory that gets posted here from time to time that As hire As and a few Bs that get through the filter, Bs hire Bs and a few Cs get through the filter, and so on down the line until you have hired people you really shouldn't have. The other theory is promote until incompetent. My guess is much more mundane, when you hire middle management they act like middle management. Which works as long as Their sphere of responsibility and control is well defined. When you need to cross cut concerns middle management actively fights against it. All most like using inheritance for code reuse and having deep inheritance hierarchies.
- gaius 15y agoThe theory is usually stated as A's hire A's and B's hire C's (because they are afraid of being usurped)
- loumf 15y agoAlso B's can't tell the difference between A's, B's and C's.
- jarek 15y agoSince classifying people appears to be so trivial it can be boiled down to one character, does being bothered by the use of apostrophes in pluralization make me an A, a B, or a C?
- stonemetal 15y agoI think that puts you solidly in the B or C category for unwillingness to think outside the box.</sarcasm>
- bmj 15y agoBecause at some point, the team gets so big, it's harder to weed out bad managers. Additionally, managers are human, and will make mistakes. Often it's like the frog-in-the-pot story--you don't notice the little mistakes, only the sum of their results.
- gruseom 15y agoSo why does the team have to get so big? Isn't that the mistake right there?
- bmj 15y agoHonest question: can a company manage $34.2 billion a year in sales with a small management team? I suppose the answer is "yes," given that MS seemed to manage with a minimal number of middle managers, at least based on the Joel Spolsky story shared elsewhere in this thread.
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoEven the best managers are led by the incentives. If you want a project to succeed, make sure incentives are lining up. If you have a project outside the incentive structure, plan on it failing.
- cookiecaper 15y agoIndeed. The whole job of a manager is to keep whatever metrics are used looking good for his department and/or team. If your metrics don't correlate well to a given project, it will be almost impossible for it to work unless you have a command structure that's aware of this potential dissonance and can send down the edicts necessary to fix it for a given situation. Middle management is really dangerous for this reason. Managers effectively are stuck with blinders; their one and only job, and often the only thing they know how to do (frequently through surreptitious or less-than-stellar means), is to keep their team and/or department sitting pretty in terms of normal company metrics. This correlates both to the resource allocation given a team and the rewards allocated specifically to the individuals that comprise that teams (including the manager, of course), which is why people appreciate "good" managers, until something unanticipated comes up and is killed by this rigid process.