Management

“Managers use power and authority to get people to do a job they know can be done. So we need managers at hotels, at fast food restaurants, someone to make sure that the subway's running on time, that's management. Leadership is voluntary. You can't require peo…”

“One, it lowers the need for human management, right? If you look at any company, you end up with these very long tails of managers, managing managers. Before anyone does any actual work. And AI, because it takes the communication barrier down so much, we can s…”

“What, for most tech companies, AB tests have done have been the safety blanket for management.”

“So we don't have management at this company. I think it's technically everybody reports to meet, but we don't do one-on-ones. We don't have scheduled meetings.”

“As you scale up, if you're the CEO of a business, like you just literally don't have time to go and like look at every single thing that every single person in the company has done. And so you need to create like better automated checks and balances to oversee…”

“From what I've seen, 99% of the time, you know exactly what to do. The number of truly, truly difficult questions that require you to know some sort of advanced theory, or advanced philosophy, or run some huge amount of calculations that are very non straightf…”

“What do they say? Praise in public and criticize in private. I fundamentally disagree with that notion. I think what you have to do is establish enough trust among the team so that you are comfortable critiquing and debating in public. But when you're in priva…”

“The concepts of management are easy. Like, The, you need an eighth grade education maybe to kind of understand management. It's not like physics. It's pretty simple. But the psychological part of it is extremely difficult, particularly for a young person to be…”

“Every person who has had that idea of, oh, I don't need managers, we can have a flat structure, learns that they were wrong. You know, it might seem that, again, management gets a bad name from big companies where you've got, you know, pointy haired bosses jus…”

“So a really good example is there's a big complaint that it's like, well, how can I have an AI do this? Like, I can't trust that they're going to do it well. So I just do it myself. And I'm just like, yeah, that's exactly what every first time manager says. Yo…”

“Management is going to know who in the organization is actually doing work, what work they're doing, and what the result of that work is through AI. That is the future of management, and you take out all bias, All, you know, loyalty, and the AI is going to do …”

“Management is like the easiest thing to do with AI.”

“The really good way to do it, I find, is I talk, talk to former employees... The human capital exhaust is kind of indicative of what's inside.”

“I'm a very likable person. People like me. And I guess I thought that would magically translate into being a good manager and spoiler alert, it does not.”

“I think as a business grows larger and scales up, you know, you need to be more and more creative because all the sort of low hanging fruit are done with. And you've got to keep creating value. So I think you actually need to be, that's when management turns f…”

“Consultants are trained to tell the management what it wants to hear. Very rarely does a consultant make a recommendation to a top management Which actually would make the top management realize that, you know, what its prejudices were wrong.”

“In the trap is that they think that, oh, it's our, it's just a fundamentally a great business and we're going to layer in technology and make it an even better business. And the tough truth is that a company is basically as good as its management.”

“We're at about fifty-fifty, so we're okay. And everyone's staying. No one else is going.”

“One thing I've certainly observed is if you try to professionalize management at the top level, everyone below you will try to do the same thing. And that's how you end up with nine layers, you know, or nine is nice, like, 20 layers. So if you tell, if you as …”

“I think one of the lessons in management over the last decade has been that You know, managers are people leaders in that it is micromanagement that it is bad to get into the details. I think this is like an anti pattern because it creates disengaged and like …”

“If you're really having difficulties, then, you know, the management always feels, oh, all we have to do is do what we're doing better and we'll be okay. But the answer really is, is that no, you've got to start doing things differently, all right, because wha…”

“If you think that there's two, 2000 hours in a year, give or take, you know, that's assuming a 37 and a half hour work week, but you, as management, you're working two, 2000 to 3000 hours a year. A board, On average, is probably putting in 200 to 300 hours of,…”

“The most important thing is when you do join a board is that you're not there to manage day to day, and that transition and that shift is so, so important. If you want to be an operator, then, ah, it'll be challenging for you to be on a board and be independen…”

“And the universal law of management I've seen is the higher up you are in the organization, the less you really know about what's going on.”

“Around 15, it starts to become difficult without having someone to help you to manage it.”

“You hire a founder from Seed, and, like, what you're looking for up front and the creativity you need can actually be very at odds with what you need from real management later on, and, you know, it used to be that the founders would come up with ideas, and th…”

“How long and how many people they've managed is indicated by how many people they fired. Because if you've never fired anyone, then you haven't managed very many people for very long, unfortunately.”

“If a challenging business and brilliant management, it's likely the business's reputation remains intact. I think that was a good example, which is I really liked the CEO, but I the business itself was challenged and the reputation of the business remained int…”

“A lot of this stuff you can do, even when you're not a manager, some stuff you can't write. You probably can't fire someone and learn those skills without actually being a manager and being in that role. But a lot of things like hiring, like mentoring, like wo…”

“Sometimes the reason, you know, there, you can't easily become a manager is because your company just isn't growing, right? It isn't a need to have a new manager unless The current manager leaves or unless somebody, you know, departs the company and a new role…”

“I guess the other observation about a good board, in my opinion, a good board member is that they understand their role in the process, and it's one of oversight. It's not one of execution and management. You know, their job is to make sure the organization is…”

“One of the things we find is that it's not about just the overall level of, let's say, feeling appreciated. So we find that feeling appreciated is a very good signal. But it's not just the overall level of being appreciated. It's the difference between how man…”

“And if you find that people are complaining equally at management and at the level of the employee, this is not as a bad signal as if management is not complaining and employees are complaining much more.”

“The reality is that management's hard and you really have to learn it just like a skill and craft like everything else.”

“The idea that, that a board will discipline management is, is just an absolute fantasy. And that's a core kind of element of the logical structure that guides the workings of the capital markets, the equity markets, and the widely held publicly traded companie…”

“We started with asset owners on a hundred percent and management can vest in if certain milestones are reached over a very long period of time to something that will be meaningful to them and keep them part of the fold.”

“Management is the act of achieving goals through the work of others. You know, managers are not people that actually are supposed to be doers. They're supposed to be designers and they're supposed to be clarifiers.”

“At some point you get enough people that you need to really coordinate work Amongst people who are not just like joined at the hip talking to each other all the time, completely on the same wavelength. And that's when structure and hierarchy and some kind of m…”

“When you have a lot of people who have seen success at these very small stages and they're, they believe incorrectly that the thing that made them successful was just like, well, we just got these smart people together and let them do what they thought was rig…”

“Ultimately, you're kind of a game designer as a manager and as a leader, and you want to design the best game that both aligns company incentives and employees desires. And the real way to understand people is kind of through this deeper substrate level where …”

“I realized that management is a noble profession. Because every day a good manager goes to work and does her best to help everybody in the organization to succeed more productively and rewardingly than they were able to do that before.”

“It's important for me to have depth in one part of the company, because the company has a uniform culture, and so I have a context for anything I'm hearing about, and in a few ways I can calibrate, because when they talk about the area where I have a lot of de…”

“If you hire the right HR person, as I said, they're an extension of the CEO. HR comes in to kind of, you know, I think you said this before in one of your blog posts, kind of quality assurance against management.”

“So there's always room for sales, for marketing, for management, including in the distant future. Computers will not be doing that for us anytime soon.”

“I don't think there's a way to necessarily optimize being a manager because it is, it's a, it's an open-ended system and an ill-posed problem in a sense You just, you can't get there from here, but you can, in most cases, incrementally improve”

“I think that administer, being a good administrator is one of the world's most difficult jobs because part of it's a, it's, it involves vision and It involves being able to inspire people. It involves being able to be a little Machiavellian yourself, because y…”

“We know who the crummy players are long before the management ever finds out.”

“Essentially, management started with zero of the company, and the investors with a hundred percent.”

“A great board member is one who focuses on a 100,000 foot level because they can't possibly know the details of the business. And I think being an outsider, they can hold the mirror up to management to make sure they're being intellectually honest about their …”