Of the many problems with “hire good people and give them room”, the first is that you don’t necessarily know you’re getting good people. And if they are good y

Of the many problems with “hire good people and give them room”, the first is that you don’t necessarily know you’re getting good people. And if they are good you don’t know they’re good in your environment. You generally do know a founder is good if they’ve got scale problems, but obviously a lot of founders have failed before ever reaching that hurdle, and maybe would have benefitted from help. But even assuming you can get good people in the door, the problem with giving them room is that you’re often creating something static and giving them ownership of it. When the world suddenly turns sideways and potential needs to flow through multiple people’s fiefdoms, at the very least you’ve created a lot of friction, but at worst you’ve erected impenetrable walls. That these problems can often only be solved by founders isn’t a surprise: when you create a a top down structure that doesn’t work, you can only fix it from the top. It’s exceedingly hard to delegate the one power that matters, which is the ability to reshape the business rather than optimise parts of it. If you can work out how to scale that without conflict then you can probably solve world peace while you’re at it.