13 ms·

Delegate or die: the self-employed trap

262 points by DanielRibeiro 14y ago

Sodaware 14y ago
"The E-Myth Revisited" is a great book that deals with this problem (amongst other things).
- maayank 14y ago
  I see it's from 1995. Is there something more updated? With the prominence of programming life-style businesses I'd imagine there are new things to be taught.
  - davidw 14y ago
    It's still a pretty valid book: "Work on your business, not in your business" the problems are the same - technology can help you solve them, but fundamentally it's an issue of how to scale up in terms of people. Here's another one: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004IYISQW/?tag=dedasys-20 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004IYISQW/?tag=dedasys-20 with a cute story, but the concepts are pretty similar. Rob Walling also covers this, briefly and more to the point in Start Small, Stay Small: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003YH9MMI/?tag=dedasys-20 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003YH9MMI/?tag=dedasys-20 Which is also full of real, practical advice for people doing small software businesses.
    - accountoftheday 14y ago
      were the affiliate tags really necessary?
      - davidw 14y ago
        Something I wrote about those a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360330 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360330 I took the time to recommend some books that were very specific to the thread at hand, that I had taken the time to read and evaluate. Getting a few extra dollars to buy more books with, that costs those clicking nothing, seems like a mutually beneficial transaction in that it makes me more likely to read some interesting books I can recommend in the future. So: yes, they were. If you don't like them, don't click on them. If you think my account is a spam account, created for the purpose of spamming HN with affiliate links, feel free to report it to Paul Graham.
        larrys 14y ago
        I don't have a problem at all that you put in the affiliate link and didn't even notice it. Otoh I think the disclaimer that you made above is good and informs people of why you did what you did so it might be an idea to include it. If the parent thought that, I'm sure others did as well. (Of course this might encourage others to do the same who don't put the same effort in that you did to read and evaluate.) This is somewhat similar to when someone at a store makes a suggestion and adds "I'm not on commission". Here you are saying "I am on commission but I use this product and can vouch for it". Nothing wrong with that. (I'd like a suggestion on a learning rails book by the way.)
        sebg 14y ago
        Ruby: [free] http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/toc/ http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/toc/ [free] http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/ http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/ [free] http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/book/ http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/book/ [$$$] The Well-Grounded Rubyist Rails: [free] http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ http://ruby.railstutorial.org/
        davidw 14y ago
        The free Rails Guide is pretty good, actually! You could also get the Rails book with Sam Ruby as an author, but I'm less enthusiastic about it these days, mostly due to the fact that Rails has grown so much, so it covers a smaller set of the system, less comprehensively than it used to.
        davidw 14y ago
        The free Rails Guide is pretty good, actually! You could also get the Rails book with Sam Ruby as an author, but I'm less enthusiastic about it these days, mostly due to the fact that Rails has grown so much, so it covers a smaller set of the system, less comprehensively than it used to.
  - j45 14y ago
    Some of the best books in any subject are often timeless. The book lays out a systemic formula for making your business grow and run more and more with out you so you can work on your business, instead of your business. Also this book has been updated I believe from time to time. It's not worth worrying about in this case because it's not opinion based advice, or based on current trends.
- ngsayjoe 14y ago
  I finished E-Myth Revisited years back ... I'm now on E-Myth Mastery ... many of the concepts of his books requires practical experience, otherwise you might struggle to visualize his concepts ... Following his concepts in the first book i had successfully created a small and profitable company now with about 8 employees ... i'm hoping to learn the skills required to bring my company to the next level! IPO, MNC, Big Corp, etc.
  - arkitaip 14y ago
    I've heard so much good about E-Myth Revisited but I'm not fully convinced that it's any different from all the other biz management literature I've read. Would love to hear what your major take aways are.
    - chromatic 14y ago
      Two ideas struck me from the book. First, thinking like a technician is different from thinking like a manager is different from thinking like a business owner. You may have technical expertise, but that doesn't in and of itself teach you how to manage a business or how to build a business. Sometimes you have to switch hats. You'll almost certainly have to learn the difference between performing a skill, managing people, and building a business. Second, building a sustainable business requires you to create good processes which allow you to get good results from average workers. Gerber calls this the franchise model. Even if you don't want to build a franchise, he argues that the technique works--this means getting knowledge out of the head of the one or two fantastic employees you have (the ones on whom the business relies) into documentation. I ought to write up longer thoughts on the book. I found it frustrating to read but valuable nonetheless.
      - arkitaip 14y ago
        Thanks for sharing your thoughts. The second idea struck a cord because this is essentially the basis for knowledge management, which I've been studying lately and find incredible useful as a source of inspiration on how to run a business.
    - 14y ago
shreyas056 14y ago
reading this felt like reading an Aesop's Fables :). Very useful
- heretohelp 14y ago
  Sivers is one of the few writers on the subject of business/startups that is reliably good. A few reasons this is the case: 1. He's not some professional blogger pontificating on things he doesn't know about. He started a real business and his posts are from his experiences starting and scaling up a successful business. He's not the usual mountebank type you get here. 2. His real business involved selling actual products that made people happy, he wasn't agglomerating eyeballs for wholesale to the advertising industry. The value proposition is very explicit. 3. He thinks like an engineer and applies the rational processes normally demanded of programmers/engineers/etc. to the business. It's not Six-Sigma certification lessons, it's him analyzing and responding to discrete business, engineering, and product problems. You could just bundle up a dump of every post he's made about programming, products, and businesses and sell it as a book and be distributing something far more useful than 99% of what exists on the business advice book market or what gets posted to HN day to day. Toss in a bonus pack of Patrick's advice on business, SEO, A-B testing, statistics, marketing, etc and you've got a great batch of material to start with. The stuff is timeless (relative to the internet) in a way that Norvig's post on his sudoku solver for demonstrating dynamic programming and constraint solving was.
  - kenmck 14y ago
    Agreed. Actually there is a Sivers book, it's called "Anything you want"
  - unreal37 14y ago
    And he has a (pricey) video course on AppSumo.
patio11 14y ago
A few of my savvier (small-ish) software buddies use this system: 1) We have an onboarding Google Doc for everyone at the company. It is grouped into headings. One heading might be, e.g., "Common Customer Support Questions" followed by "Query: A customer complains they can't log into the software. Common phrasings for this: X, Y, Z." Research: "Go to page X in the dashboard [detailed in Internal Tools]. Search for... . If you find the customer, use the password reset tool, then copy/paste the following response to the customer, adding in their first name if you can reasonably guess it. If the tool reports no results, forward email to foo@bar.com and send no response." 2) Every time the proprietor gets tired of a genre of emails, they improve either the internal tools or the business rules to optimize themselves out of that workflow. 3) There is frequently a catch-all rule saying something like "If you have a novel situation and think you can handle it for under $100, do so [see: Getting Access To A Company Card], and fill in why the situation was novel, how you handled it, and what you spent on your weekly report Google doc. Don't worry, we trust you to use your judgement." (This is probably among the best pieces of actionable advice Tim Ferris ever gave.) 4) Capturing this state machine as a Google doc means the business has a memory longer than the individual workers, which is particularly important in a virtual-company sort of situation where you're dealing with VAs/freelancers who a) will often not pan out and b) when they do pan out have an expected lifetime tenure with the company of 6 ~ 24 months only.
- Poiesis 14y ago
  Another solution for this is a wiki instead of a Google doc. I've seen it work well. But the important part is to make it easy to use, easy to search, and easy to update. Then just make sure as many questions as possible are answerable by the wiki. About to type an email with an answer? It better have the link to the wiki in it.
  - larrys 14y ago
    Agree. I also use a personal wiki (twiki) to keep track of all the answers and processes that I have figured out and need to use over time. Started many years ago it's close to 1900 pages at this point.
  - 14y ago
saurik 14y ago
A subtle and yet key thing from this article: the guy delegated writing the answer into the manual; irritatingly, I know that that is a step I would have missed (leaving me now in charge of formatting a manual).
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mixmax 14y ago
This is excellent advice, so often you see great capable people buckling from stress and worse because they don't know how to delegate. The way I prefer to do it is to give everyone a piece of the project that they own. I don't want to know how or when they do their part, I just want to know that it gets done, works and that it plays well with what other people on the project are doing. Recently I was in charge of a live webcast from a rocket launch in the middle of the Baltic Sea. A hard problem for several reasons. It involved high-speed Wi-fi over a 40 kilometer distance by having a parabolic antenna on land that tracks its counterpart at sea; using software written in C to control a videomixer in the middle of the ocean from the Internet, getting the right camera angles, mounting cameras, etc.; setting up a live studio on land where technicians could control videofeeds and move the cameras at sea, webcasting to thousands of users, making sure there was a competent speaker, creating filler videos, getting the logistics about everything right and much more. Also, since this is an opensource project there was no money, and I had to find the crew myself. It isn't really that hard, if only you accept a few things. 1) You're not the smartest guy. There's someone smarter than you that can do whatever part of the project you have trouble with. 2) Let people take ownership of a part of their project and don't tell them what to do. Tell them what the goal is and let them do it however they want. 2) When they do awesome stuff make sure you tell them. People are capable of much more than they think it only they're motivated to so so. 3) Make sure it's fun. 4) Your job as a project manager is to make sure that the awesome stuff people do plays well with the awesome stuff other people do. You're in charge of the interfaces between people. 5) Your job as a project manager is to make sure people can do their job well. That means moving obstacles in the form of meetings, budgets, politics, etc. 5) Don't take credit for what you didn't do.
- DanielRibeiro 14y ago
  Related, and very good, post from swombat's: Making all the decisions yourself[1] [1] http://swombat.com/2011/7/13/taylor-drucker http://swombat.com/2011/7/13/taylor-drucker
- dhimes 14y ago
  number 2 and number 2 are golden. (yes I mean this to be funny, but it's also true. Especially the first #2.)
patrickg 14y ago
More comments from one year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2132591 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2132591
pestaa 14y ago
If you read Dune from Frank Herbert, you might recall Paul observing his father's soldiers doing their jobs in silence due to Leto (the father) giving little to no orders to them. "If you command something once, you'll have to command it again all the time." (Paraphrased as I didn't read the English version.) Apparently, Derek "uncommanded his soldiers."
casca 14y ago
There is a fine balance to be achieved here. If you've read more of Derek's (excellent) posts, you'll know that his complete hands-off style led to the company almost collapsing. Delegating like this is a great step, but a leader's responsibility is to lead, not hide away.
- j45 14y ago
  Management by abdication is one thing, but being able to drive the direction of the company is a key differentiator. There is not much out there that is truly passive income. Reasonably passive income? Much more realistic.
- j_baker 14y ago
  If you've read more of Derek's (excellent) posts, you'll know that his complete hands-off style led to the company almost collapsing. I would like to see these posts. Could you link them?
  - rahoulb 14y ago
    http://sivers.org/trust-but-verify http://sivers.org/trust-but-verify In his book there's also a story about how, when asked which profit share scheme the company should use, he said "you decide" - 6 months later his accountant rang and said all the profits were being shared amongst the employees - so scrapped the scheme and never spoke to them again. I can't find the post on his site though.
    - lusr 14y ago
      Interesting. While I really enjoyed the post, something that stuck out for me was: what if they don't apply your philosophy as you expect? Isn't this how great companies fall down, when the founder's philosophy is lost and replaced by internal politics? Some how you should be able to review the decisions being made without having to waste even more time doing the review.
      - rahoulb 14y ago
lachlanj 14y ago
Thanks for reminding me to step back and look at my business (and read the e-myth again). Read the e-myth many years ago but it's time for another read
chmars 14y ago
Delegation is important but you need the financial capacity to afford it. As a consequence, outsourcing some tasks such as accounting is usually more feasible at the beginning since hiring comes with its own many costs and risks – especially in countries with a more restrictive labor law than in the US.
larrys 14y ago
"The next day, as soon as I walked in the door, someone asked, “Derek, someone whose CDs" To me interruptions are the thing I hate the most. What has worked for me in the past is to insist (despite "open door philosophy") that all questions are queued and asked at a single time, as practical. Sure the person asking wants immediate relief, but there is no reason you need to answer questions according to their schedule, unless it is urgent, if they can be combined with other questions they (or others) have. That's actually one of the benefits of email vs. a telephone call. You can handle it w/o getting interrupted or knocked out of a zone.
- adrianhoward 14y ago
  I've done that to... but you do need to be careful that you're optimising the right thing. I hate being interrupted - but being interrupted often is often a sign that I'm being the bottleneck in one or more processes. If I force people to queue questions into a single time/place I can end up blocking a whole bunch of peoples work. I might be better off - but the system as a whole slows down... and "urgent" can be a hard thing for people to figure out. Like the article - I find using interruptions as a sign that there's a process problem that needs fixing to be a excellent strategy.
- wpietri 14y ago
  I hate interruptions as well, but if you're going to be a manager, I think you have to learn to live with them. Managers exist to support the managed. Front-line employees are the ones doing the actual work, and I think the actual work should always have the highest priority. As Derek demonstrates, the way to reduce interruptive employee questions isn't to hide them by driving people away. (If you do that, people will just make shit up or dither, and both are terrible habits.) It's to keep improving things until they don't need to ask.
j45 14y ago
My experiences: Learn why: Figure out why you do things the way you do. Write it down, make screen casts, whatever. Teach why: The how can always be evolving and updated. Store it in a wiki. Google docs aren't searchable. Don't prematurely automate: Be sure to systemize your business before automating it. If you automate a process that isn't reasonably mature manually, you will have lots of pains.
adrianhoward 14y ago
The step before this one also seems to be hard for many small organisations that I've worked with. Before you can delegate - you have to have somebody to delegate to. I've lost count of the number of folk who slog themselves to the bone long after the time when it would have been sensible to grow the company with a few extra people. For some people having other people in the company, let alone actually letting them make decisions, seems to be a chasm they find it hard to cross.
petercooper 14y ago
This remains still great stuff, but it leaps from the "doing everything yourself" dilemma straight to handling several employees asking you questions, skipping the "first employee" problem. The gap between those two situations remains vast and more reading on going from being time stressed and doing everything to having that first employee would be awesome.

262 points by DanielRibeiro 14y ago

Sodaware 14y ago

"The E-Myth Revisited" is a great book that deals with this problem (amongst other things).

maayank 14y ago
I see it's from 1995. Is there something more updated? With the prominence of programming life-style businesses I'd imagine there are new things to be taught.
- davidw 14y ago
  It's still a pretty valid book: "Work on your business, not in your business" the problems are the same - technology can help you solve them, but fundamentally it's an issue of how to scale up in terms of people. Here's another one: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004IYISQW/?tag=dedasys-20 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004IYISQW/?tag=dedasys-20 with a cute story, but the concepts are pretty similar. Rob Walling also covers this, briefly and more to the point in Start Small, Stay Small: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003YH9MMI/?tag=dedasys-20 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003YH9MMI/?tag=dedasys-20 Which is also full of real, practical advice for people doing small software businesses.
  - accountoftheday 14y ago
    were the affiliate tags really necessary?
    - davidw 14y ago
      Something I wrote about those a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360330 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360330 I took the time to recommend some books that were very specific to the thread at hand, that I had taken the time to read and evaluate. Getting a few extra dollars to buy more books with, that costs those clicking nothing, seems like a mutually beneficial transaction in that it makes me more likely to read some interesting books I can recommend in the future. So: yes, they were. If you don't like them, don't click on them. If you think my account is a spam account, created for the purpose of spamming HN with affiliate links, feel free to report it to Paul Graham.
      - larrys 14y ago
        I don't have a problem at all that you put in the affiliate link and didn't even notice it. Otoh I think the disclaimer that you made above is good and informs people of why you did what you did so it might be an idea to include it. If the parent thought that, I'm sure others did as well. (Of course this might encourage others to do the same who don't put the same effort in that you did to read and evaluate.) This is somewhat similar to when someone at a store makes a suggestion and adds "I'm not on commission". Here you are saying "I am on commission but I use this product and can vouch for it". Nothing wrong with that. (I'd like a suggestion on a learning rails book by the way.)
        sebg 14y ago
        Ruby: [free] http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/toc/ http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/toc/ [free] http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/ http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/ [free] http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/book/ http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/book/ [$$$] The Well-Grounded Rubyist Rails: [free] http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ http://ruby.railstutorial.org/
        davidw 14y ago
        The free Rails Guide is pretty good, actually! You could also get the Rails book with Sam Ruby as an author, but I'm less enthusiastic about it these days, mostly due to the fact that Rails has grown so much, so it covers a smaller set of the system, less comprehensively than it used to.
        davidw 14y ago
        The free Rails Guide is pretty good, actually! You could also get the Rails book with Sam Ruby as an author, but I'm less enthusiastic about it these days, mostly due to the fact that Rails has grown so much, so it covers a smaller set of the system, less comprehensively than it used to.
- j45 14y ago
  Some of the best books in any subject are often timeless. The book lays out a systemic formula for making your business grow and run more and more with out you so you can work on your business, instead of your business. Also this book has been updated I believe from time to time. It's not worth worrying about in this case because it's not opinion based advice, or based on current trends.
ngsayjoe 14y ago
I finished E-Myth Revisited years back ... I'm now on E-Myth Mastery ... many of the concepts of his books requires practical experience, otherwise you might struggle to visualize his concepts ... Following his concepts in the first book i had successfully created a small and profitable company now with about 8 employees ... i'm hoping to learn the skills required to bring my company to the next level! IPO, MNC, Big Corp, etc.
- arkitaip 14y ago
  I've heard so much good about E-Myth Revisited but I'm not fully convinced that it's any different from all the other biz management literature I've read. Would love to hear what your major take aways are.
  - chromatic 14y ago
    Two ideas struck me from the book. First, thinking like a technician is different from thinking like a manager is different from thinking like a business owner. You may have technical expertise, but that doesn't in and of itself teach you how to manage a business or how to build a business. Sometimes you have to switch hats. You'll almost certainly have to learn the difference between performing a skill, managing people, and building a business. Second, building a sustainable business requires you to create good processes which allow you to get good results from average workers. Gerber calls this the franchise model. Even if you don't want to build a franchise, he argues that the technique works--this means getting knowledge out of the head of the one or two fantastic employees you have (the ones on whom the business relies) into documentation. I ought to write up longer thoughts on the book. I found it frustrating to read but valuable nonetheless.
    - arkitaip 14y ago
      Thanks for sharing your thoughts. The second idea struck a cord because this is essentially the basis for knowledge management, which I've been studying lately and find incredible useful as a source of inspiration on how to run a business.
  - 14y ago

shreyas056 14y ago

reading this felt like reading an Aesop's Fables :). Very useful

heretohelp 14y ago
Sivers is one of the few writers on the subject of business/startups that is reliably good. A few reasons this is the case: 1. He's not some professional blogger pontificating on things he doesn't know about. He started a real business and his posts are from his experiences starting and scaling up a successful business. He's not the usual mountebank type you get here. 2. His real business involved selling actual products that made people happy, he wasn't agglomerating eyeballs for wholesale to the advertising industry. The value proposition is very explicit. 3. He thinks like an engineer and applies the rational processes normally demanded of programmers/engineers/etc. to the business. It's not Six-Sigma certification lessons, it's him analyzing and responding to discrete business, engineering, and product problems. You could just bundle up a dump of every post he's made about programming, products, and businesses and sell it as a book and be distributing something far more useful than 99% of what exists on the business advice book market or what gets posted to HN day to day. Toss in a bonus pack of Patrick's advice on business, SEO, A-B testing, statistics, marketing, etc and you've got a great batch of material to start with. The stuff is timeless (relative to the internet) in a way that Norvig's post on his sudoku solver for demonstrating dynamic programming and constraint solving was.
- kenmck 14y ago
  Agreed. Actually there is a Sivers book, it's called "Anything you want"
- unreal37 14y ago
  And he has a (pricey) video course on AppSumo.

patio11 14y ago

A few of my savvier (small-ish) software buddies use this system: 1) We have an onboarding Google Doc for everyone at the company. It is grouped into headings. One heading might be, e.g., "Common Customer Support Questions" followed by "Query: A customer complains they can't log into the software. Common phrasings for this: X, Y, Z." Research: "Go to page X in the dashboard [detailed in Internal Tools]. Search for... . If you find the customer, use the password reset tool, then copy/paste the following response to the customer, adding in their first name if you can reasonably guess it. If the tool reports no results, forward email to foo@bar.com and send no response." 2) Every time the proprietor gets tired of a genre of emails, they improve either the internal tools or the business rules to optimize themselves out of that workflow. 3) There is frequently a catch-all rule saying something like "If you have a novel situation and think you can handle it for under $100, do so [see: Getting Access To A Company Card], and fill in why the situation was novel, how you handled it, and what you spent on your weekly report Google doc. Don't worry, we trust you to use your judgement." (This is probably among the best pieces of actionable advice Tim Ferris ever gave.) 4) Capturing this state machine as a Google doc means the business has a memory longer than the individual workers, which is particularly important in a virtual-company sort of situation where you're dealing with VAs/freelancers who a) will often not pan out and b) when they do pan out have an expected lifetime tenure with the company of 6 ~ 24 months only.

Poiesis 14y ago
Another solution for this is a wiki instead of a Google doc. I've seen it work well. But the important part is to make it easy to use, easy to search, and easy to update. Then just make sure as many questions as possible are answerable by the wiki. About to type an email with an answer? It better have the link to the wiki in it.
- larrys 14y ago
  Agree. I also use a personal wiki (twiki) to keep track of all the answers and processes that I have figured out and need to use over time. Started many years ago it's close to 1900 pages at this point.
- 14y ago

saurik 14y ago

A subtle and yet key thing from this article: the guy delegated writing the answer into the manual; irritatingly, I know that that is a step I would have missed (leaving me now in charge of formatting a manual).

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

mixmax 14y ago

This is excellent advice, so often you see great capable people buckling from stress and worse because they don't know how to delegate. The way I prefer to do it is to give everyone a piece of the project that they own. I don't want to know how or when they do their part, I just want to know that it gets done, works and that it plays well with what other people on the project are doing. Recently I was in charge of a live webcast from a rocket launch in the middle of the Baltic Sea. A hard problem for several reasons. It involved high-speed Wi-fi over a 40 kilometer distance by having a parabolic antenna on land that tracks its counterpart at sea; using software written in C to control a videomixer in the middle of the ocean from the Internet, getting the right camera angles, mounting cameras, etc.; setting up a live studio on land where technicians could control videofeeds and move the cameras at sea, webcasting to thousands of users, making sure there was a competent speaker, creating filler videos, getting the logistics about everything right and much more. Also, since this is an opensource project there was no money, and I had to find the crew myself. It isn't really that hard, if only you accept a few things. 1) You're not the smartest guy. There's someone smarter than you that can do whatever part of the project you have trouble with. 2) Let people take ownership of a part of their project and don't tell them what to do. Tell them what the goal is and let them do it however they want. 2) When they do awesome stuff make sure you tell them. People are capable of much more than they think it only they're motivated to so so. 3) Make sure it's fun. 4) Your job as a project manager is to make sure that the awesome stuff people do plays well with the awesome stuff other people do. You're in charge of the interfaces between people. 5) Your job as a project manager is to make sure people can do their job well. That means moving obstacles in the form of meetings, budgets, politics, etc. 5) Don't take credit for what you didn't do.

DanielRibeiro 14y ago
Related, and very good, post from swombat's: Making all the decisions yourself[1] [1] http://swombat.com/2011/7/13/taylor-drucker http://swombat.com/2011/7/13/taylor-drucker
dhimes 14y ago
number 2 and number 2 are golden. (yes I mean this to be funny, but it's also true. Especially the first #2.)

patrickg 14y ago

More comments from one year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2132591 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2132591

pestaa 14y ago

If you read Dune from Frank Herbert, you might recall Paul observing his father's soldiers doing their jobs in silence due to Leto (the father) giving little to no orders to them. "If you command something once, you'll have to command it again all the time." (Paraphrased as I didn't read the English version.) Apparently, Derek "uncommanded his soldiers."

casca 14y ago

There is a fine balance to be achieved here. If you've read more of Derek's (excellent) posts, you'll know that his complete hands-off style led to the company almost collapsing. Delegating like this is a great step, but a leader's responsibility is to lead, not hide away.

j45 14y ago
Management by abdication is one thing, but being able to drive the direction of the company is a key differentiator. There is not much out there that is truly passive income. Reasonably passive income? Much more realistic.
j_baker 14y ago
If you've read more of Derek's (excellent) posts, you'll know that his complete hands-off style led to the company almost collapsing. I would like to see these posts. Could you link them?
- rahoulb 14y ago
  http://sivers.org/trust-but-verify http://sivers.org/trust-but-verify In his book there's also a story about how, when asked which profit share scheme the company should use, he said "you decide" - 6 months later his accountant rang and said all the profits were being shared amongst the employees - so scrapped the scheme and never spoke to them again. I can't find the post on his site though.
  - lusr 14y ago
    Interesting. While I really enjoyed the post, something that stuck out for me was: what if they don't apply your philosophy as you expect? Isn't this how great companies fall down, when the founder's philosophy is lost and replaced by internal politics? Some how you should be able to review the decisions being made without having to waste even more time doing the review.
    - rahoulb 14y ago

lachlanj 14y ago

Thanks for reminding me to step back and look at my business (and read the e-myth again). Read the e-myth many years ago but it's time for another read

chmars 14y ago

Delegation is important but you need the financial capacity to afford it. As a consequence, outsourcing some tasks such as accounting is usually more feasible at the beginning since hiring comes with its own many costs and risks – especially in countries with a more restrictive labor law than in the US.

larrys 14y ago

"The next day, as soon as I walked in the door, someone asked, “Derek, someone whose CDs" To me interruptions are the thing I hate the most. What has worked for me in the past is to insist (despite "open door philosophy") that all questions are queued and asked at a single time, as practical. Sure the person asking wants immediate relief, but there is no reason you need to answer questions according to their schedule, unless it is urgent, if they can be combined with other questions they (or others) have. That's actually one of the benefits of email vs. a telephone call. You can handle it w/o getting interrupted or knocked out of a zone.

adrianhoward 14y ago
I've done that to... but you do need to be careful that you're optimising the right thing. I hate being interrupted - but being interrupted often is often a sign that I'm being the bottleneck in one or more processes. If I force people to queue questions into a single time/place I can end up blocking a whole bunch of peoples work. I might be better off - but the system as a whole slows down... and "urgent" can be a hard thing for people to figure out. Like the article - I find using interruptions as a sign that there's a process problem that needs fixing to be a excellent strategy.
wpietri 14y ago
I hate interruptions as well, but if you're going to be a manager, I think you have to learn to live with them. Managers exist to support the managed. Front-line employees are the ones doing the actual work, and I think the actual work should always have the highest priority. As Derek demonstrates, the way to reduce interruptive employee questions isn't to hide them by driving people away. (If you do that, people will just make shit up or dither, and both are terrible habits.) It's to keep improving things until they don't need to ask.

j45 14y ago

My experiences: Learn why: Figure out why you do things the way you do. Write it down, make screen casts, whatever. Teach why: The how can always be evolving and updated. Store it in a wiki. Google docs aren't searchable. Don't prematurely automate: Be sure to systemize your business before automating it. If you automate a process that isn't reasonably mature manually, you will have lots of pains.

adrianhoward 14y ago

The step before this one also seems to be hard for many small organisations that I've worked with. Before you can delegate - you have to have somebody to delegate to. I've lost count of the number of folk who slog themselves to the bone long after the time when it would have been sensible to grow the company with a few extra people. For some people having other people in the company, let alone actually letting them make decisions, seems to be a chasm they find it hard to cross.

petercooper 14y ago

This remains still great stuff, but it leaps from the "doing everything yourself" dilemma straight to handling several employees asking you questions, skipping the "first employee" problem. The gap between those two situations remains vast and more reading on going from being time stressed and doing everything to having that first employee would be awesome.