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I’ve had a lot of coffee breaks with highly placed peers who expressed concern because our boss was sure our success came down to one or two attributes and seem

I’ve had a lot of coffee breaks with highly placed peers who expressed concern because our boss was sure our success came down to one or two attributes and seemed completely blind to all the ways we saved him from himself. If apathy ever took over the team, we would burst into flames because of all of these details. There’s a great old aphorism that sounds like sarcasm if you don’t understand this: “Take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves.” Any halfway sane team is dominated by people who are all too happy to jump on the Big Things. But for want of a nail, the kingdom can be lost. And if you cannot see his importance, and fire the farrier to hire more knights, then everybody loses.

deleted 2y ago
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numpy-thagoras 2y ago
When you see a successful boss, look around for his successful reports. They're always the ones cleaning up the boss' messes. The truth is that we all need to be saved from ourselves at some point (sometimes as education, other times as hard lessons), but tech culture certainly pushes that far with the "gifted visionary" mythos. A gifted visionary's much vaunted "Ideas > Details" only works when the detail people are there to make it work.
- dowager_dan99 2y ago
  >> When you see a successful boss, look around for his successful reports. With a good boss you don't have to look; they hold these people out and highlight their work, those people recursively do the same thing. In true success there's so much to go around.