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Something I've been saying is that the "asshole CEO" is necessary to get large orgs to actually do things. The author tells a relevant example, where a CEO is t

Something I've been saying is that the "asshole CEO" is necessary to get large orgs to actually do things. The author tells a relevant example, where a CEO is too timid to force change without the approval of his underlings (wtf?), who in turn are afraid to make changes with the CEO's approval. This results in a deadlock where nothing changes. The kind of systems thinking outlined in the article is a very rare thing in the world, and outright frowned upon as "not proper" by those entrenched in the more conservative approaches to leadership. Case in point: Elon Musk. Compare SpaceX to NASA. The development cost of Starship, including about a dozen test articles, is the cost of a single SLS launch. People love to go on about how SpaceX is "making mistakes" and that their "rocket blew up", while neglecting to mention that the first SLS test launch also failed to achieve the desired orbit. Elon Musk is one of the few corporate CEOs that get that mistakes are necessary stepping stones on the way to success. He encourages experimentation and rapid iteration, and will fire idiots that push back against improvement. Remember the engineer that argued with him about Twitter's slow performance, where it takes tens of seconds for it to show less than 1 KB of text? That guy had no incentive to make changes and was happy to let things be. Meanwhile, I've been to over 150 organisations as a consultant, and not one of them has this mindset at any level of management. Everything has to be perfect up front. Everything needs to be planned 6 months in advance. Nobody is ever allowed to flip a harmless switch "just to test" an idea, no-no-no! That's not proper. The switch flipping has to be documented. It has to have a test plan, a rollback plan, a UAT plan, and seventeen people need to have a hundred meetings over months instead of simply trying the thing to see if it works. This is the inherent nature of self-organised bureaucracies. Everyone optimises for their own personal local optimum, which is never the organisation's optimum. Only the CEO can force behaviour changes to redirect efforts towards the global optimum, but that requires forcing people out of their local optimum, which is unpleasant for those people. That's why you need "asshole CEOs" like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk. These people can never rise to top organically, via ass kissing and "making nice". They have to be there from the beginning, holding the reins of power in a way that cannot be taken from them by people that are made uncomfortable.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Necessary mistakes isn't a blank check to put pre-alpha software and hardware on public roads, then dare regulators to act. There's likely a lot of survivorship bias in your analysis. I'd wager most of those examples are success in spite of assholeness, not because of it.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  Your comment is the epitome of the faulty thinking mentioned in the article. The essence of your post is: "Mistakes shouldn't be made, because there may be consequences.", which is the exact thing the article is warning against. How many people died because of Tesla auto-pilot over the last decade, across hundreds of thousands of cars on the road? Half a dozen? A dozen? This must be stopped or at least regulated, that's your argument. To put some perspective on things: About the same number of people were killed by gun violence in Texas alone just yesterday. According to half the voters in the United States, regulation can never be justified as a solution to this carnage. Never. Literally "any" regulation is "too much" regulation in their minds. Systems thinking is about rising above these primitive self-interested, myopic decisions. It's using numbers and facts at a global scale instead of an individual scale. If Tesla develops a working self-driving AI, they'll save tens of thousands of lives annually, if not hundreds of thousands. Killing a few people due to imperfect intermediate stages on the way there is worth it. Not to the dead people and their families, of course, but to the overall population. It's uncomfortable locally but optimal globally. That's literally what systems thinking is about: forcing people out of their local optimums, against their will, to achieve a global optimum. That optimum might actually be preferred by everyone, but local gradient descent by individuals will never get over the hump to achieve it. Just look at the people suing the FAA for allowing the Starship launch. There are people that would rather that we remain stuck on Earth forever than take the slightest risk, like a few chunks of concrete being thrown around. It's absurd, but its the exact behaviour I see in large organisations at every level.
  - redhale 4y ago
    Gross. I hope this is parody. You seem to have taken the article's point of taking FINANCIAL risks to a company's bottom line, and perverted it to justify killing a few of your customers for the sake of a beta test. Why not go for human medical testing without consent, while we're at it? Taking risks MUST have limits, especially when it comes to human life.

paulryanrogers 4y ago

Necessary mistakes isn't a blank check to put pre-alpha software and hardware on public roads, then dare regulators to act. There's likely a lot of survivorship bias in your analysis. I'd wager most of those examples are success in spite of assholeness, not because of it.

jiggawatts 4y ago
Your comment is the epitome of the faulty thinking mentioned in the article. The essence of your post is: "Mistakes shouldn't be made, because there may be consequences.", which is the exact thing the article is warning against. How many people died because of Tesla auto-pilot over the last decade, across hundreds of thousands of cars on the road? Half a dozen? A dozen? This must be stopped or at least regulated, that's your argument. To put some perspective on things: About the same number of people were killed by gun violence in Texas alone just yesterday. According to half the voters in the United States, regulation can never be justified as a solution to this carnage. Never. Literally "any" regulation is "too much" regulation in their minds. Systems thinking is about rising above these primitive self-interested, myopic decisions. It's using numbers and facts at a global scale instead of an individual scale. If Tesla develops a working self-driving AI, they'll save tens of thousands of lives annually, if not hundreds of thousands. Killing a few people due to imperfect intermediate stages on the way there is worth it. Not to the dead people and their families, of course, but to the overall population. It's uncomfortable locally but optimal globally. That's literally what systems thinking is about: forcing people out of their local optimums, against their will, to achieve a global optimum. That optimum might actually be preferred by everyone, but local gradient descent by individuals will never get over the hump to achieve it. Just look at the people suing the FAA for allowing the Starship launch. There are people that would rather that we remain stuck on Earth forever than take the slightest risk, like a few chunks of concrete being thrown around. It's absurd, but its the exact behaviour I see in large organisations at every level.
- redhale 4y ago
  Gross. I hope this is parody. You seem to have taken the article's point of taking FINANCIAL risks to a company's bottom line, and perverted it to justify killing a few of your customers for the sake of a beta test. Why not go for human medical testing without consent, while we're at it? Taking risks MUST have limits, especially when it comes to human life.