Maybe I misinterpreted Pauls blog post, but what i got was: Mangers != Leaders, Leaders != Managers. Management and Leadership need to be well understood in any organization. Good Mangers can be good leaders. The CEO is often the manager of the leadership. This is effectively what they teach in the Harvard MBA.
Yeah I think you did. You can't just switch founder for leader. A great leader would inspire the organization to work productively and effectively, but that's not what distinguishes the founder. The founder would make sure the organization is actually working on the most effective thing, and I think what Paul tries to convey is that one of the tools the founder uses to accomplish this is crossing the organizational tree (i.e. skip-level meetings).
I think the founder not only motivates people to work on the correct thing by doing this, but the founder also directly experiences feedback from working with people lower on the org chart, enabling them to steer the company with more accurate information.
But what scale are we talking about? I've scaled from zero to IPO a couple of times, I've never seen past a few k people, airbnb is at 38,000. The only real world stuff I know to get about leadership and management at 38,000 people is learnings from harvard. I thought Brian was saying he manages his leadership team tightly, not that he spends a lot of time with ICs? I think that's conventional advice, manage your leadership team well? What is skip level at this scale? CEO going to sr. director level? I don't mind having lunch with a VP but I can't imagine doing work with them from the C level?
To my mind the CEO job at scale is 4 things - Keeping the fight fair-- The leadership and executive management should argue viciously, The CEO should make sure these conflicts remain constructive and aligned with company goals
Holding the vision true-- There's a risk of mission drift, continually reinforce and refine the company's vision, make sure all leaders remain aligned with longterm goals
Enforcing strategic adherence-- A strategy is only as good as its execution. ensure the leadership team not only understands the strategy but implements it across all levels of the organization. Manager of Leaders
Deal with the real world-- Q-calls, investor relations, supply chains/vendors/etc.
This is often the problem I have with business advice, it's general but not generally applicable. Scale matters probably most in the context, followed by the type of business.
Okay, I've only scaled to 30 people so far, so anything I say is just me interpreting things I read.
I imagine from what I read about Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Jensen Huang is that all three of them have/had unconventional management style in the sense that they're often amongst the IC's. Obviously you can't do that with all of your 30.000 employees, but I think they're just picking the teams that are most crucial at a certain point.
For example if Steve Jobs is managing Apple while launching the iPhone, I imagine he's talking to the VP of Sales in the management meetings, but he's not on the sales floor, nor is he sitting with MacOS dev teams or making sure motivations are high in the customer service department. But I bet you could find him in weekly iPhone design team meetings, and maybe he'd be shown progress on iOS every month and have a 3-hour brainstorm with a core team of senior devs on that team. Maybe they'd pull him into procurement meetings to make sure the capacitative touch screens would be made in the quantity they needed.
You'd have your VP's, directors and senior management making sure the ship sails, but you'd have the founder CEO present where they can have most impact, which just isn't in those top level meetings.
"Their partnership began when Jobs appointed Ive as Apple's senior vice president of industrial design in 1997. Ive described their daily routine, saying, "We worked together for nearly 15 years. We had lunch together most days and spent our afternoons in the sanctuary of the design studio."
This is a great talk by Brian on why he is CEO, he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about designers not being CEOs from what I gathered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6h_EDcj12k
No, PG knows what a "leader" is and knows how to choose his words. He is identifying the difference between professional managers and founders in the context of running an org
