8 ms·

Bureaucrat Mode

109 points by kiyanwang 2y ago

delichon 2y ago
A demon that's attracted to people in bureaucrat mode and repelled by people in get-it-done mode (or visa versa) would be worth trillions of dollars per year to the economy and the most hated technology since the bomb.
- Onavo 2y ago
  I think that's called a "founder" practicing "move fast and break things".
  - shermantanktop 2y ago
    People like that are rendered impotent and ejected quickly from any organization that they don’t have last-word control over. Which explains why some founders love being founders, because power-loving people love power. If you just want to work at a startup, great, but if you want to work on a mission for more than a couple of years, that doesn’t work. You have to solve the emergence of collective self-interest, and just yelling “I am founder” will not help when most people hear that as the rantings of a disconnected CEO.
smitty1e 2y ago
This is why a Navy battle groups use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_by_negation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_by_negation In summary, leaders of major slices of the effort run their own show, merely informing the HMFIC, who retains veto power, regarding status.
- metaphor 2y ago
  Your wiki cite suggests: > Command by negation first came into being on individual ships, where it made sense - a captain who delegated authority and exercised command by negation could easily monitor his staff and communicate with them because it was a small environment. ...which is more or less asymptotic to the pragmatism behind Agile methods advocating for smaller teams of competent individual contributors. Followed by: > Within wider naval engagements, however, the Officer in Tactical Command (OTC) still maintained a rigid control structure, because communications systems simply couldn't work efficiently enough to make loose and autonomous doctrines viable. > The introduction of AEW&C systems, SOSUS and satellite-fed data risked overwhelming the OTC, and so forces were forced to shift towards granting individual commanders more autonomy - something that improved communications made possible. I interpreted this as an intercommunication scalability problem exacerbated by adoption of new tech. Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month expressed this hazard as the n(n-1)/2 notional communication channels within a given team, to which effective segmentation (i.e. where command by negation comes into play) helps mitigate.
mouse_ 2y ago
That CIA manual excerpt also explains climate policy. It also explains why laymen distrust experts. Remember: The powers that be forbid progress, as progress might disrupt the powers that be.
- hyggetrold 2y ago
  > Remember: The powers that be forbid progress, as progress might disrupt the powers that be. Mostly agree but would amend - what is actually forbidden is change. And since all progress involves change...you can fill out the rest.
  - Alupis 2y ago
    The infamous Oscar Wilde quote, "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy" is as true as ever. Every bureaucracy ends up the same - serving only itself to preserve itself.
tptacek 2y ago
I think at this point it's becoming (analytically) problematic to take "founder mode" at face value, and I'd be careful running with it too far. I gather that the talk† was an empirical case study, and the PG post was a first extrapolation from the talk, something in the actual spirit of an "essay" ("this is interesting, let's start writing and see where it takes from us") and people who were actually at the talk are bristling at the idea of that post being taken as received wisdom. When you're at the point of literally situating "founder mode" as the opposite of the CIA's strategy for disrupting activist groups, you're probably a step past even "received wisdom". There's an obvious failure mode for 3rd-hand analyses like these: for years hapless dingbat founders tried to cargo cult Jobs and Gates success by just deliberately being assholes. This isn't quite that, but you can see where the wind is blowing. † The Graham post that kicked off "founder mode" was in part a report on a recent private talk about things Brian Chesky had done to improve AirBNB's performance.
- dasil003 2y ago
  You're onto something here talking about cargo culting and received wisdom. Ideas like founder mode spread because it fits a pattern a lot of people see. That's how an idea gains traction. But once an idea gains traction, especially one that comes from a successful founder, it will inevitably be adopted by the multitudes seeking success—some significant portion of which will lack the maturity and judgment to understand where the idea might not apply. There's a reason that founder mode is a contrast to the way Airbnb worked in the recent past, despite continuity of the founding team over that timespan. Context is everything, even for the best ideas.
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  I think the counter-point to much commentary about business is that there are a huge number of extremely private companies that simply avoid analysis. Fidelity, Trader Joes, and Koch Industries to name an example in Finance, Retail, and Energy respectively. I own an extremely profitable small business and no one can understand it. It's really just... not like what anything says. My children can take it over, or not, and it doesn't even matter, because I built it and the business will never be a public company and they will get everything when my wife and I die. And it will exist in perpetuity because of reasons, mostly because of the government being the government. So much advice here is obtuse. I wish I could shake people but no one ever understands.
kjellsbells 2y ago
The tweet in the post is not quite correct. The manual is CIA (strictly, OSS) and intended as a sourcebook for operatives to share ideas with people under (Axis) occupation. To frame it as "CIA vs activist groups" isnt really right and adds baggage where there need be done. Original link: https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
- jancsika 2y ago
  I doubt people are even reading the document posted in the tweet. Take number 7: 7. Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reason-able" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on. I'm just imagining a would-be saboteur convincing civil rights activists to be cautious about a bus boycott, and those activists doing just that and waiting until Rosa Parks got arrested to organize the boycott. I bet that poor operative got a real talking-to back at Langley! But yeah, in the context of Cold War escalation of tensions number 7 makes a whole lot of sense.
- squidlogic 2y ago
  > Haggle over precise wording of communications, minutes, resolutions
  - kjellsbells 2y ago
    Touché! But words matter, and, especially as the original tweeter is a History professor specializing in the Cold War (which, surely means he has a pretty good understanding of what the CIA did, and does, and what the OSS did in WW2 that led to the production of the manual from which the screencap was taken), yes, I expect the words to be accurate and reflect the reality of the situation.
- nicbou 2y ago
  It was so successful that it pervades German culture to this day.
  - 2y ago
keybored 2y ago
These founder/hacker/startup blogs of wisdom are quite shallow. Here’s a “how to Mode” mock-list and also the idea that things are self-replicating. So? Anything more? I don’t think the hacker/startup/founder persona is interested in going deeper. Because to their mind society should be very loosely coupled on all levels and that would just solve all such problems. - OSS projects are small enough to have a “BDFL” - Most things about companies are bad. But if they were small and not monopolistic they would be good - Problems along the way are partially solved with disruption/geniuses of the gaps The cooperation between all these very small entities would be fine. I don’t know. I don’t think it is often touched upon. You shouldn’t hire a chess prodigy grand master to teach you chess. Probably. You probably want someone who is more in touch with what it feels like to be a beginner. Who at least has been there. Similarly you don’t want sociological input from the hacker/startup/founder persona. They’ve already got it figured out. (Refer to Dilbert)
- janalsncm 2y ago
  > OSS projects are small enough to have a “BDFL” Not just that, most of them are “useless”. The median NPM package probably has zero downloads per month. That’s ok, it’s your time, so if you want to create a new terminal emulator for the heck of it I say go for it. But anarchy is hardly a perfect solution.
fijiaarone 2y ago
If you are a big successful entrenched organization, change to the status quo is the last thing you want. Because the status quo is that you’re a big successful entrenched organization.
- threeseed 2y ago
  Also if you are an organisation like that your customers expect you to behave in a certain way. They want you to be slow, predictable, reliable etc.
janalsncm 2y ago
The document the author is referencing is a CIA sabotage manual. It’s not a prescription for how to run a bureaucracy any more than their section on sabotaging electrical cables is intended as a prescription for electricians. I think many Americans believe that because the American government is slow, unresponsive and generally painful that all governments must be this way. As a counterexample I would like to suggest Singapore, which has an online visa process (traveler visa) which was a breeze to follow and was approved in under 2 days. Compare that to the US legal immigration system (USCIS) which if you ever have the misfortune of dealing with, is a nightmare to navigate. The government needs a UX department to streamline all of the painful processes it has. Make it easy to follow the law.
- derefr 2y ago
  The article's implicit conceit is that a bureaucracy is just an attempt to abstract away what is in actuality a bunch of distinct self-interested obstructionist fiefdoms — that each do all they can to prevent the organization from 1. doing anything that would pose an existential threat to the fiefdom, 2. starting any project that would be the fiefdom's ultimate responsibility to deliver upon, 3. reorganizing in a way that would cause the the fiefdom's "slack", or continued underperformance (compared to the organization's usually-unrealistic expectations) to be made more legible, 4. doing anything to equalize and redistribute any special advantages that come with the fiefdom's existing responsibilities, ...and so forth. The CIA sabotage manual applies perfectly to the usual sort of bureaucratic organization full of such fiefdoms, as such fiefdoms use exactly these techniques to prevent the projects that would threaten them from moving forward (at anything beyond a glacial pace.)
  - janalsncm 2y ago
    I guess what I’m saying is that the author is conflating bureaucracy with the broken system suggested in a sabotage manual, and that bureaucracy doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, we need agile and efficient bureaucracies. “Founder mode” isn’t scalable, sorry. Figuring out how to organize large groups of people into efficient, stable, and effective organizations is still a massively underdeveloped technology in my opinion. > There's going to have to be some amount of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp they are, will probably vary from company to company. PG’s post ended before it got interesting. Maybe by design, because if it was any more specific (read: useful) it would be falsifiable. As it stands now, “founder mode” is so open to interpretation that anyone who says it doesn’t work probably just wasn’t doing it right.
closeparen 2y ago
And yet the incentives could not be clearer... if you want meaningful amounts of actual money that can house and educate your children, you need to let go of fanciful pursuits like "making stuff people want" and "solving hard technical problems" and instead get good at bureaucrat mode. The most charitable reading of this situation, I think, is that the tech people routinely underestimate the leverage of even mediocre social technology vs. high-end computer-touching skill.
threeseed 2y ago
What is with these VCs always roleplaying. Based on his Linkedin profile, Andrew Chen has never worked in companies that are large enough to have most of the qualities. I have. For 20+ years now. And the reason that these companies do things like check legal, brand and compliance before decisions or have committees or create complex approval workflows is because they need to. Often they work in highly regulated environments or are in situations where not having the right people in the loop costs more and can be an existential risk to the company. And they always learn this the hard way. Just like Elon Musk has been learning every day with Twitter.
jrflowers 2y ago
I like this post because the venture capital guy uses screenshots of an old handbook to criticize the famously failed state of… Europe. > In Europe however… :) It is fascinating how some people have the tendency to, when made very angry about something, find solace and comfort in writing missives about the superiority of their minds and ideals. It can sometimes result in a pleasant cross between evergreen internet quotes “don’t put in the paper that I was mad” and “in this moment I am euphoric… because I am enlightened by my own intelligence”
ResearchAtPlay 2y ago
This article fundamentally misunderstands the role and purpose of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is tool to manage large, complex, and heterogeneous systems. Ideally, efficient and effective bureaucracy goes unnoticed. Why can I plug my laptop into the power outlet anywhere in Miami or in Vancouver and it just works? Why can I drive on the right side of the road from Toronto to San Diego and be reasonably sure that everyone else will drive on the right side as well? Because humans have self-organized into a multitude of governments, standards organizations, and corporations that all align to produce the same shape of power plug and teach compatible rules-of-the-road across vast geographical distances and unrelated communities. Without bureaucracy, we humans would not be capable of building a global society. Pointing to broken, ineffective, and inefficient processes to scapegoat “the bureaucrat” reveals an ignorance of the underlying mechanisms that make human society function. EDIT: To those of you downvoting this comment, please let me elaborate. I am tired of the trope of the lazy bureaucrat because I refuse to believe that inefficient government and corporations are inevitable. I do believe that we must strive for efficient and effective government to improve our society because the potential benefits are immense. Those improvements must be driven by competent and qualified leaders who understand and foster the advantages that result from collaboration, communication, and making choices that benefit society as whole. A failure of bureaucracy is a failure of leadership!
hintymad 2y ago
If we study the mentality of the leadership, we can understand why. The utmost motive of the bureaucrats is self-preservation, so their default mentality is fear: fear to make mistakes, fear to become the scapegoat, fear to lose their jobs, fear to leave a bad impression to their bosses, and etc. So naturally they will design a system to shield themselves from such perceived failures, and so come the committees, processes, documents, and what not.
deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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surgical_fire 2y ago
> It’s very aspirational to work somewhere where you see leadership from across the company working towards high-conviction success. No. I've been there. It's absolutely awful. Quite often those that "lead by conviction" are just narcissistic sociopaths. Their awful decisions are coated by a veneer of self-importance, and their conviction has no basis on reality.
- cheema33 2y ago
  > Quite often those that "lead by conviction" are just narcissistic sociopaths. Hell to the yes. I have also worked at places where the leader was afraid of making critical decisions and tried too hard not to offend anyone. Both are bad. Like most things in life, middle ground works best.
roenxi 2y ago
These organisational topics are important and there are dynamics here that the article doesn't emphasis on what and why this "Bureaucrat Mode" happens. When companies are founded, there must be people involved who can execute a large chunk of the value chain single handily (if not the entire thing). Like a restauranteer who can buy ingredients, cook them, put together an interesting menu, engage in entertaining chit-chat, knows how to advertise and is good with finances. In a large company though accountability matters a lot more and comparative advantage becomes a factor. It is also hard to hire great generalists (50% chance someone has a specific skill, that combination above is already approaching 1:100, let alone being good at something). So you specialise - there is a procurement specialist, a chef, a menu designer, a hostess, etc, etc. Shortly after that transition there are still old hands around in leadership positions who know the entire value chain, but they slowly leave the business. Eventually there is a group of subject matter experts who execute the known chain really efficiently but no longer have personal or even institutional knowledge of how to set up a valuable new process because they specialise (theory of comparative advantage style logic kicks in). At this point, the dictatorial centralised nature of the company becomes a problem. If change is required, it depends on a tiny pool of leaders who are personally unclear on how the thing they control works at the micro level because they don't have the skillset required to set up new businesses. The only safe option is to iterate on the existing process, the company simply isn't capable of radical change any more. Or if it is, success will be more of a fluke than a predictable thing.
Xeamek 2y ago
"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” The idea that there is no good reason or value in those big bureacratic machines is equally naive as idea that it just has to be that way. Everything is case-by-case and 'big corpo ALWAYS bad' mentality is just stupid
photonthug 2y ago
What attempts have been made to mathematically model bureaucracy? I’ve been wondering about this for a while but casual searches mostly lead to dead ends about something like data driven policy, or bureaucracy leveraging models but not itself being modeled.
- lemonwaterlime 2y ago
  Historically, threads from systems theory via Jay W. Forrester (“Industrial Dynamics”) and organizational psychology via Gareth Morgan (“Images of Organization”) are good places to start. You can then trace them to more modern treatments for insights.
frinxor 2y ago
Good read! Reminds me of the Gervais Principle https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... , which is also a fantastic (and much longer) read with a similar lifecycle of the “corporation”
junto 2y ago
I got to be honest. I read the text in the screenshot and assumed your post was political and aimed at a globally well known “politician”.

109 points by kiyanwang 2y ago

A demon that's attracted to people in bureaucrat mode and repelled by people in get-it-done mode (or visa versa) would be worth trillions of dollars per year to the economy and the most hated technology since the bomb.

Onavo 2y ago
I think that's called a "founder" practicing "move fast and break things".
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  People like that are rendered impotent and ejected quickly from any organization that they don’t have last-word control over. Which explains why some founders love being founders, because power-loving people love power. If you just want to work at a startup, great, but if you want to work on a mission for more than a couple of years, that doesn’t work. You have to solve the emergence of collective self-interest, and just yelling “I am founder” will not help when most people hear that as the rantings of a disconnected CEO.

smitty1e 2y ago

This is why a Navy battle groups use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_by_negation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_by_negation In summary, leaders of major slices of the effort run their own show, merely informing the HMFIC, who retains veto power, regarding status.

metaphor 2y ago
Your wiki cite suggests: > Command by negation first came into being on individual ships, where it made sense - a captain who delegated authority and exercised command by negation could easily monitor his staff and communicate with them because it was a small environment. ...which is more or less asymptotic to the pragmatism behind Agile methods advocating for smaller teams of competent individual contributors. Followed by: > Within wider naval engagements, however, the Officer in Tactical Command (OTC) still maintained a rigid control structure, because communications systems simply couldn't work efficiently enough to make loose and autonomous doctrines viable. > The introduction of AEW&C systems, SOSUS and satellite-fed data risked overwhelming the OTC, and so forces were forced to shift towards granting individual commanders more autonomy - something that improved communications made possible. I interpreted this as an intercommunication scalability problem exacerbated by adoption of new tech. Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month expressed this hazard as the n(n-1)/2 notional communication channels within a given team, to which effective segmentation (i.e. where command by negation comes into play) helps mitigate.

mouse_ 2y ago

That CIA manual excerpt also explains climate policy. It also explains why laymen distrust experts. Remember: The powers that be forbid progress, as progress might disrupt the powers that be.

hyggetrold 2y ago
> Remember: The powers that be forbid progress, as progress might disrupt the powers that be. Mostly agree but would amend - what is actually forbidden is change. And since all progress involves change...you can fill out the rest.
- Alupis 2y ago
  The infamous Oscar Wilde quote, "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy" is as true as ever. Every bureaucracy ends up the same - serving only itself to preserve itself.

tptacek 2y ago

I think at this point it's becoming (analytically) problematic to take "founder mode" at face value, and I'd be careful running with it too far. I gather that the talk† was an empirical case study, and the PG post was a first extrapolation from the talk, something in the actual spirit of an "essay" ("this is interesting, let's start writing and see where it takes from us") and people who were actually at the talk are bristling at the idea of that post being taken as received wisdom. When you're at the point of literally situating "founder mode" as the opposite of the CIA's strategy for disrupting activist groups, you're probably a step past even "received wisdom". There's an obvious failure mode for 3rd-hand analyses like these: for years hapless dingbat founders tried to cargo cult Jobs and Gates success by just deliberately being assholes. This isn't quite that, but you can see where the wind is blowing. † The Graham post that kicked off "founder mode" was in part a report on a recent private talk about things Brian Chesky had done to improve AirBNB's performance.

dasil003 2y ago
You're onto something here talking about cargo culting and received wisdom. Ideas like founder mode spread because it fits a pattern a lot of people see. That's how an idea gains traction. But once an idea gains traction, especially one that comes from a successful founder, it will inevitably be adopted by the multitudes seeking success—some significant portion of which will lack the maturity and judgment to understand where the idea might not apply. There's a reason that founder mode is a contrast to the way Airbnb worked in the recent past, despite continuity of the founding team over that timespan. Context is everything, even for the best ideas.
monero-xmr 2y ago
I think the counter-point to much commentary about business is that there are a huge number of extremely private companies that simply avoid analysis. Fidelity, Trader Joes, and Koch Industries to name an example in Finance, Retail, and Energy respectively. I own an extremely profitable small business and no one can understand it. It's really just... not like what anything says. My children can take it over, or not, and it doesn't even matter, because I built it and the business will never be a public company and they will get everything when my wife and I die. And it will exist in perpetuity because of reasons, mostly because of the government being the government. So much advice here is obtuse. I wish I could shake people but no one ever understands.

kjellsbells 2y ago

The tweet in the post is not quite correct. The manual is CIA (strictly, OSS) and intended as a sourcebook for operatives to share ideas with people under (Axis) occupation. To frame it as "CIA vs activist groups" isnt really right and adds baggage where there need be done. Original link: https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...

jancsika 2y ago
I doubt people are even reading the document posted in the tweet. Take number 7: 7. Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reason-able" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on. I'm just imagining a would-be saboteur convincing civil rights activists to be cautious about a bus boycott, and those activists doing just that and waiting until Rosa Parks got arrested to organize the boycott. I bet that poor operative got a real talking-to back at Langley! But yeah, in the context of Cold War escalation of tensions number 7 makes a whole lot of sense.
squidlogic 2y ago
> Haggle over precise wording of communications, minutes, resolutions
- kjellsbells 2y ago
  Touché! But words matter, and, especially as the original tweeter is a History professor specializing in the Cold War (which, surely means he has a pretty good understanding of what the CIA did, and does, and what the OSS did in WW2 that led to the production of the manual from which the screencap was taken), yes, I expect the words to be accurate and reflect the reality of the situation.
nicbou 2y ago
It was so successful that it pervades German culture to this day.
- 2y ago

keybored 2y ago

These founder/hacker/startup blogs of wisdom are quite shallow. Here’s a “how to Mode” mock-list and also the idea that things are self-replicating. So? Anything more? I don’t think the hacker/startup/founder persona is interested in going deeper. Because to their mind society should be very loosely coupled on all levels and that would just solve all such problems. - OSS projects are small enough to have a “BDFL” - Most things about companies are bad. But if they were small and not monopolistic they would be good - Problems along the way are partially solved with disruption/geniuses of the gaps The cooperation between all these very small entities would be fine. I don’t know. I don’t think it is often touched upon. You shouldn’t hire a chess prodigy grand master to teach you chess. Probably. You probably want someone who is more in touch with what it feels like to be a beginner. Who at least has been there. Similarly you don’t want sociological input from the hacker/startup/founder persona. They’ve already got it figured out. (Refer to Dilbert)

janalsncm 2y ago
> OSS projects are small enough to have a “BDFL” Not just that, most of them are “useless”. The median NPM package probably has zero downloads per month. That’s ok, it’s your time, so if you want to create a new terminal emulator for the heck of it I say go for it. But anarchy is hardly a perfect solution.

fijiaarone 2y ago

If you are a big successful entrenched organization, change to the status quo is the last thing you want. Because the status quo is that you’re a big successful entrenched organization.

threeseed 2y ago
Also if you are an organisation like that your customers expect you to behave in a certain way. They want you to be slow, predictable, reliable etc.

janalsncm 2y ago

The document the author is referencing is a CIA sabotage manual. It’s not a prescription for how to run a bureaucracy any more than their section on sabotaging electrical cables is intended as a prescription for electricians. I think many Americans believe that because the American government is slow, unresponsive and generally painful that all governments must be this way. As a counterexample I would like to suggest Singapore, which has an online visa process (traveler visa) which was a breeze to follow and was approved in under 2 days. Compare that to the US legal immigration system (USCIS) which if you ever have the misfortune of dealing with, is a nightmare to navigate. The government needs a UX department to streamline all of the painful processes it has. Make it easy to follow the law.

derefr 2y ago
The article's implicit conceit is that a bureaucracy is just an attempt to abstract away what is in actuality a bunch of distinct self-interested obstructionist fiefdoms — that each do all they can to prevent the organization from 1. doing anything that would pose an existential threat to the fiefdom, 2. starting any project that would be the fiefdom's ultimate responsibility to deliver upon, 3. reorganizing in a way that would cause the the fiefdom's "slack", or continued underperformance (compared to the organization's usually-unrealistic expectations) to be made more legible, 4. doing anything to equalize and redistribute any special advantages that come with the fiefdom's existing responsibilities, ...and so forth. The CIA sabotage manual applies perfectly to the usual sort of bureaucratic organization full of such fiefdoms, as such fiefdoms use exactly these techniques to prevent the projects that would threaten them from moving forward (at anything beyond a glacial pace.)
- janalsncm 2y ago
  I guess what I’m saying is that the author is conflating bureaucracy with the broken system suggested in a sabotage manual, and that bureaucracy doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, we need agile and efficient bureaucracies. “Founder mode” isn’t scalable, sorry. Figuring out how to organize large groups of people into efficient, stable, and effective organizations is still a massively underdeveloped technology in my opinion. > There's going to have to be some amount of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp they are, will probably vary from company to company. PG’s post ended before it got interesting. Maybe by design, because if it was any more specific (read: useful) it would be falsifiable. As it stands now, “founder mode” is so open to interpretation that anyone who says it doesn’t work probably just wasn’t doing it right.

closeparen 2y ago

And yet the incentives could not be clearer... if you want meaningful amounts of actual money that can house and educate your children, you need to let go of fanciful pursuits like "making stuff people want" and "solving hard technical problems" and instead get good at bureaucrat mode. The most charitable reading of this situation, I think, is that the tech people routinely underestimate the leverage of even mediocre social technology vs. high-end computer-touching skill.

threeseed 2y ago

What is with these VCs always roleplaying. Based on his Linkedin profile, Andrew Chen has never worked in companies that are large enough to have most of the qualities. I have. For 20+ years now. And the reason that these companies do things like check legal, brand and compliance before decisions or have committees or create complex approval workflows is because they need to. Often they work in highly regulated environments or are in situations where not having the right people in the loop costs more and can be an existential risk to the company. And they always learn this the hard way. Just like Elon Musk has been learning every day with Twitter.

jrflowers 2y ago

I like this post because the venture capital guy uses screenshots of an old handbook to criticize the famously failed state of… Europe. > In Europe however… :) It is fascinating how some people have the tendency to, when made very angry about something, find solace and comfort in writing missives about the superiority of their minds and ideals. It can sometimes result in a pleasant cross between evergreen internet quotes “don’t put in the paper that I was mad” and “in this moment I am euphoric… because I am enlightened by my own intelligence”

ResearchAtPlay 2y ago

This article fundamentally misunderstands the role and purpose of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is tool to manage large, complex, and heterogeneous systems. Ideally, efficient and effective bureaucracy goes unnoticed. Why can I plug my laptop into the power outlet anywhere in Miami or in Vancouver and it just works? Why can I drive on the right side of the road from Toronto to San Diego and be reasonably sure that everyone else will drive on the right side as well? Because humans have self-organized into a multitude of governments, standards organizations, and corporations that all align to produce the same shape of power plug and teach compatible rules-of-the-road across vast geographical distances and unrelated communities. Without bureaucracy, we humans would not be capable of building a global society. Pointing to broken, ineffective, and inefficient processes to scapegoat “the bureaucrat” reveals an ignorance of the underlying mechanisms that make human society function. EDIT: To those of you downvoting this comment, please let me elaborate. I am tired of the trope of the lazy bureaucrat because I refuse to believe that inefficient government and corporations are inevitable. I do believe that we must strive for efficient and effective government to improve our society because the potential benefits are immense. Those improvements must be driven by competent and qualified leaders who understand and foster the advantages that result from collaboration, communication, and making choices that benefit society as whole. A failure of bureaucracy is a failure of leadership!

hintymad 2y ago

If we study the mentality of the leadership, we can understand why. The utmost motive of the bureaucrats is self-preservation, so their default mentality is fear: fear to make mistakes, fear to become the scapegoat, fear to lose their jobs, fear to leave a bad impression to their bosses, and etc. So naturally they will design a system to shield themselves from such perceived failures, and so come the committees, processes, documents, and what not.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

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surgical_fire 2y ago

> It’s very aspirational to work somewhere where you see leadership from across the company working towards high-conviction success. No. I've been there. It's absolutely awful. Quite often those that "lead by conviction" are just narcissistic sociopaths. Their awful decisions are coated by a veneer of self-importance, and their conviction has no basis on reality.

cheema33 2y ago
> Quite often those that "lead by conviction" are just narcissistic sociopaths. Hell to the yes. I have also worked at places where the leader was afraid of making critical decisions and tried too hard not to offend anyone. Both are bad. Like most things in life, middle ground works best.

roenxi 2y ago

These organisational topics are important and there are dynamics here that the article doesn't emphasis on what and why this "Bureaucrat Mode" happens. When companies are founded, there must be people involved who can execute a large chunk of the value chain single handily (if not the entire thing). Like a restauranteer who can buy ingredients, cook them, put together an interesting menu, engage in entertaining chit-chat, knows how to advertise and is good with finances. In a large company though accountability matters a lot more and comparative advantage becomes a factor. It is also hard to hire great generalists (50% chance someone has a specific skill, that combination above is already approaching 1:100, let alone being good at something). So you specialise - there is a procurement specialist, a chef, a menu designer, a hostess, etc, etc. Shortly after that transition there are still old hands around in leadership positions who know the entire value chain, but they slowly leave the business. Eventually there is a group of subject matter experts who execute the known chain really efficiently but no longer have personal or even institutional knowledge of how to set up a valuable new process because they specialise (theory of comparative advantage style logic kicks in). At this point, the dictatorial centralised nature of the company becomes a problem. If change is required, it depends on a tiny pool of leaders who are personally unclear on how the thing they control works at the micro level because they don't have the skillset required to set up new businesses. The only safe option is to iterate on the existing process, the company simply isn't capable of radical change any more. Or if it is, success will be more of a fluke than a predictable thing.

Xeamek 2y ago

"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” The idea that there is no good reason or value in those big bureacratic machines is equally naive as idea that it just has to be that way. Everything is case-by-case and 'big corpo ALWAYS bad' mentality is just stupid

photonthug 2y ago

What attempts have been made to mathematically model bureaucracy? I’ve been wondering about this for a while but casual searches mostly lead to dead ends about something like data driven policy, or bureaucracy leveraging models but not itself being modeled.

lemonwaterlime 2y ago
Historically, threads from systems theory via Jay W. Forrester (“Industrial Dynamics”) and organizational psychology via Gareth Morgan (“Images of Organization”) are good places to start. You can then trace them to more modern treatments for insights.

frinxor 2y ago

Good read! Reminds me of the Gervais Principle https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... , which is also a fantastic (and much longer) read with a similar lifecycle of the “corporation”

junto 2y ago

I got to be honest. I read the text in the screenshot and assumed your post was political and aimed at a globally well known “politician”.