5 ms·

This is conventional wisdom. https://hbr.org/2004/01/managers-and-leaders-are-they-different https://hbr.org/2004/01/managers-and-leaders-are-they-differ... h

• richrichie 2y ago
  Synthesizing conventional wisdom into readable blog posts is Paul Graham's specialty though. It clearly has a market.
  • neom 2y ago
    Well the blog post said that some other wisdom was conventional wisdom, I'm not sure what the conventional wisdom he was pointing to is, I was just saying, people have known how to build, grow and manage enterprises for a little while now, I'm not sure why Ron Conway was so flabbergasted. Maybe he didn't make notes because he'd read some Patrick Lencioni. ;)
  • wahnfrieden 2y ago
    Was it conventional wisdom when he published an article suggesting that lisp knowledge would have prevented 9/11 hijackers from succeeding? It’s so conventional that he de-listed the article but keeps it published and available by URL
    • kragen 2y ago
      what's the url? usually pg thinks lisp knowledge makes people more likely to succeed, not less
      • wahnfrieden 2y ago
        https://paulgraham.com/hijack.html https://paulgraham.com/hijack.html > By promoting themselves from data to code, hijackers on September 11th promoted box-cutters into 400,000 lb. incendiary bombs Published September 2001
        • kragen 2y ago
          aha, this is awesome! and indeed the solution he suggests (locking the cockpit door) is the only one of the various security measures put in place to prevent a recurrence that is generally agreed to have been effective rather than just security theater i want to give pg a lot of credit for clear thinking here, but of course if he'd suggested locking cockpit doors in august 02001 instead of september, that would have been significantly more impressive your original summary of https://paulgraham.com/hijack.html https://paulgraham.com/hijack.html was not correct
          • wahnfrieden 2y ago
            Thanks for explaining my link back to me
            • kragen 2y ago
              sure, i hope it helped you understand it. thanks for the link! i don't remember if i read it at the time or not
        • kazinator 2y ago
          That doesn't say anything like that Lisp knowledge could have prevented the attacks. It does say that reasoning similar to reasoning about computer systems security could have led to better aircraft security. The code/data rhetoric is not exclusively an earmark of Lisp. A primary concern in security are situations in which what is intended to be data allows for a surprising malicious use whereby it effectively becomes a way to program behaviors into the software which processes the data. For instance, Winamp being exploited by loading a specially crafted MP3 playlist file is an instance of data becoming code; no Lisp in sight. Code being a flipside of data, in the context of security, is simply the consequence of the Von Neumann model. Graham is arguing for compartments; exactly why we use containers and such. The main idea is that the passenger cabin should be sandboxed away from the cockpit, which isn't earth-shattering. Where he mentions Lisp is this: > The defense that does work is to keep code and data in separate places. Then there is no way to compromise code by playing tricks with data. Garbage-collected languages like Perl and Lisp do this, and as a result are immune from buffer overflow attacks. This point seems bungled. Garbage collection is no panacea. Bugs in a garbage collected run-time can expose applications to exploitable attacks. The advantage in Perl and Lisp is that the application programmer is not writing low-level buffer manipulation routines from scratch. That stuff is in the language run time, where we debug the low-level implementation code once, and have thousands of applications use the debugged thing. If a hole is found, we fix it once, and close the issue in thousands of apps once they upgrade to the new run-time. Garbage collected languages do not necessarily keep code and data in separate places. Moreover, non-garbage-collected languages do that. The C language can easily be implemented in a conforming manner such that the data areas (automatic storage (a.k.a. stack) and dynamic (malloc) are not executable. C keeps code and data separate. Functions are not objects. In some C implementations, like certain DSP chips, functions are in a separate space; you cannot cast a function pointer to char * and access the function image, because the resulting pointer will be interpreted in a different memory area. Of course, C data can contain pointers to functions, which can be redirected if overwritten. Lisp data can also contain function pointers: e.g. a closure object with a pointer to code and to an environment. If that is stored in a heap somewhere where an array is also stored, and the run-time has a bug which allows array overrun, it could perhaps be exploited.
• getnormality 2y ago
  I carefully reviewed all three of these articles. While it's possible that I still missed something, I did not find any material that aligns with the unique point of Paul's post. Nothing that says leaders may have to directly engage with employees underneath their direct reports to understand what is actually going on in the company. It is perhaps possible to interpret these articles as saying anything whatsoever, but they don't seem to specifically say what Paul's article says.
  • giarc 2y ago
    But even PG goes back on that by saying "Obviously founders can't keep running a 2000 person company the way they ran it when it had 20. There's going to have to be some amount of delegation." So what he is saying is managers should talk to their reports. He writes like this is some groundbreaking realization, but to me I'm not even sure what he's getting at. For example he pushes back against the idea of hiring and letting them do work, but then says don't micromanage them, so which is it?
    • cal85 2y ago
      When he says "That would be micromanaging them, which is bad" he is describing the traditional view. He continues, "Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice..."
    • ta988 2y ago
      There is a balance between letting people run free, and controlling every tiny decisions. You have to keep the direction and vision, and you have to make sure everyone is going toward that. But you shouldn't trust they will do it by themselves (they may not have internalized it as much as you do either) and you shouldn't trust your ability to deal with every detail of the complex system you are trying to build. If you hired specialists that's also because you were lacking some abilities, not just because you want extensions of yourself by lack of time. And if you hired generalists that's because you needed glue to make the whole operation work with a level of understanding that you can't allocate your time to, and because you may lack the variety of skills that allow for efficient communication with the specialists. As with any complex system, you have to be careful about degrees of freedom, too many and it can break down and too little and it can get seized.
• Terretta 2y ago
  > This is conventional wisdom. I'm not sure it is. Let's look at those three links: 1. The first of these dovetails -- not the same, but on the same hunt -- with Graham's piece, and is an excellent read. - Unconventional wisdom 2. The second is formulaic anecdata consultjunk, the same method incurious journalists use covering politics through "focus groups". - Conventional wisdom 3. The third uses the same formula, and while more effort (think "polling" or "survey" instead of "focus group") in an attempt to elevate from anecdata to study, seems not to have read or understood the first. This third one is also contrary to the (often rejected while not yet disproven) theories* of Elliot Jacques, that people have sweet spot time horizons, and most can only flex +/- 2 horizons. As this article bullet lists (because of course) how to "shift from a leader/manager mindset to a lead/manage one and balance the two skillsets" it applies solely the manager rubric to action, through the lens of a manager that doesn't understand Graham's piece or the first article, almost irreconcilable with Graham's stance or the first HBR piece. - Conventional wisdom (orthodoxy, even) PG article and first link are not conventional wisdom, though it might sound that way to Taylorist thinking. - - - Perhaps the lack of awareness Graham keeps noting is to be expected. Seems unusual for serial startup entrepreneurs who have built firms from $0 to $B to have also individually joined and worked up to C-level in "institutions" (50+ years old, and 5K - 100K+ employees, not just other tech unicorns still bearing Founder imprints) after learning the startup experience that lets them see management practice through a "it doesn't have to be like this" lens, making it rare to find the perspective necessary to delve into Graham's take or the difference between these three HBR articles. Perhaps it's not only that management culture is a distorted bubble (PG: "VCs who haven't been founders themselves don't know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world"). Perhaps it's that founders with institutional perspective are themselves unicorns. --- Footnote: * Elliott Jaques' "Stratified Systems Theory of Requisite Organization" suggests that individuals have a natural "sweet spot" time horizon for decision-making at work (which should align with the time horizon of the decisions' scope and impact), and most can only communicate up or manage down within a range of one or two levels above or below their own optimal horizon. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requisite_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requisite_organization
  • mrandish 2y ago
• paulsutter 2y ago
  The article says exactly the opposite. The central point is that a founder runs a company differently from a “professional manager” > There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode. Business schools don't know it exists. > …what they were being told was how to run a company you hadn't founded — how to run a company if you're merely a professional manager. But this m.o. is so much less effective that to founders it feels broken. There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.
• sarbak 2y ago
  Leader and founder is not the same thing. I think the key difference is that a founder has a much better understanding of the company as a complex system. This understanding includes not just how people think it works at a certain point. It includes all the previous attempts, reasoning behind those attemps, the context of past failures and successes, the personal dynamics behind those choices. Complex systems are notoriously hard to understand. Seeing the system develop from zero to complexity is an experience and perspective that is impossible to replace. Even most early employees don't have a comparable understanding. Of course not all founders know everything about all the key components of their businesses, but the founding team does have a much much better understanding than other person. I think that's why founders get frustrated with ineffective things. While most others have to account for unknown unknowns and give others benefit of doubt, the founders have a much better and robust understanding of why things happen the way they happen. The difference between management and leadership may be more about where you focus and how you engage others. Being a founder and being a leader is different in how well you understand the system.
  • neom 2y ago
    I think there is an interesting question in: should more founders be public market CEOs leading their vision? That is a super interesting question imo. We had a lot of discussion about this at DigitalOcean pre ipo, it's the main reason I left, and after I left the CEO was still my best friend and after a lot of conversation, he didn't feel like public market exec sounded that interesting either, the whole founding leadership team switched over. I'm not sure about the other guys, but a couple of us basically said "we're founders not public market execs" and bowed out. I say kudos to Brian, Jeff Lawson, Matthew Prince etc for doing both, because I've heard that the job in the public markets can get brutal. https://www.wallstreetzen.com/stock-screener/founder-led-companies https://www.wallstreetzen.com/stock-screener/founder-led-com...
  • whymauri 2y ago
    Anyone can be a founder. Not everyone can be a leader.
    • 2y ago
• j45 2y ago
  I’d say HBR reading leaders often lead an existing company that they weren’t the founders of. Or maybe it’s not a founder led company anymore. Founders have to lead themselves and other while going from 0 to 1. I’m not sure what you are saying is accurate. Even if Paul was rewriting a topic… more than one writer writes about a topic for their readers, no? The MBA form of management using people as process .. is increasingly less applicable and in need of updating .. where software increasingly can push papers and connect people and processes. We don’t see this much in management consulting or MBAs very much. Maybe there’s a benefit to leaving how the world was.
• Eumenes 2y ago
  HBR is certainly conventional, but the content is pretty much indistinguishable from what a LLM would tell you. There's a reason its popular among HR careerists, the PMC, and MBAs. All the content just reads like generic self help literature to me. I far prefer the casual nature of a blog post from someone like pg.
  • fwip 2y ago
    LLMs excel at regurgitating conventional wisdom. Paul, on the other hand, is doing it poorly.
• vslira 2y ago
  I think you’re being too dismissive of a third kind of player that is neither “leader” or “manager”, which is “owners”. There’s a saying (which I’m sure has an English equivalent) where I live that goes something like “It’s the owner’s gaze which fattens the cow”. Owner vs manager is the original “AI alignment problem”, usually taught as the principal-agent problem in business schools, and is very real. SV-type founders are, by and large, meaningful owners in their enterprises and thus heavily invested (literally) in the company’s performance. Professional managers, leaders or not, are just selling their labor. There is a whole field of management science about designing proper compensation structures to make CEOs better aligned with shareholders, but you get that quicker by making them the same person. Of course there’s a whole other world of majority shareholders leveraging their position to extract value from minority shareholders, which is just another version of the same problem. All this to say, you’re right that there’s prior art about what he’s writing, but its the principal-agent problem, not leaders vs managers, and in general business literature does not equate the issue of founder ownership with the PA-problem (obviously any undergrad can link the two issues, but that’s not how they’re usually approached)
  • Terretta 2y ago
    > too dismissive of a third kind of player that is neither “leader” or “manager”, which is “owners” A recent science fiction series explores this exact concept against a tableau of post-democracy communism, socialism, fascism, and libertarianism: The Owner Trilogy, by Neal Asher: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24087399-the-complete-owner-trilogy https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24087399-the-complete-ow... (The read of it is something like Altered Carbon meets The Expanse.)
• baxtr 2y ago
  But when pg says something the fanboys get excited!
• rawgabbit 2y ago
  TLDR. The first article says managers are political infighters who work in an organization whose primary purpose is self preservation. Leaders are transformative and defy the historical inertia and offer novel solutions.