I think there's a middle ground. I used to be intensely critical of "doing things just to do things." The more perspective I get, the more I realize that, in a situation where things are not going right by whatever criteria you use to determine that (outside scope here), you need to make changes.

The right way to make those changes, or at least one way and I don't know a better one, is to perturb the system and see how it responds. This is necessarily risky and uncomfortable, and choosing the right things to perturb and the magnitude of those peturbations is a very, very tricky skill.

But ultimately if you're dealing with an opaque system, which most companies are, and you want to make it a more transparent system that can change, that risk and discomfort are necessary side effects.

This is of course very situational, and the methodical method is by far preferred, but if you'll permit a metaphor: you get dropped into an unfamiliar cockpit, and the controls are labeled in some foreign language. The plane is crashing, or at least you don't know if it is. What do you do? You wiggle things and hope that, in doing so, you don't crash, and you take very careful note of what happens.

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michaelt a day ago | parent | next [-]

> But ultimately if you're dealing with an opaque system, which most companies are,

While most companies have elements that are hard to see clearly [1], I would hope 95% of what the company is doing would be transparent to the CEO.

The CEO should easily be able to tell which divisions/projects are profitable, which are on track to hit their goals, how those goals combine into a coherent strategy, which areas are getting the most complaints and refunds, and so on.

[1] intangible concepts like 'innovation' and 'culture' for example

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roenxi a day ago | parent | next [-]

If you can figure out how to turn the "should" in that sentence into "can" then you'll die wealthy. Tracking goals and turning them into a coherent strategy is a major unsolved problem in software engineering.

We accept best-effort from CTOs, but that leads to an industry that is a bit like a comet with a few success stories and a huge burning tail of leadership where they have limited to no ability to understand whether they are on track to achieve their goals and those goals don't come together into a coherent strategy. There is a strong argument that many of the success stories are only good relative to companies that failed even worse than they did and we all had to pick one of these bug-ridden software packages.

It is a lot like the era of the manufacturing industry before the statisticians moved in around WWII. We haven't managed a similar moment in software yet.

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tikhonj a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can never understand complex adaptive systems to anywhere near 95%, and leaders believing that they can—that the map is the territory—leads to some pretty bad dynamics.

	▲	jaggederest a day ago \| parent [-]
		Not just wrong, but confidently wrong! I've done that one myself a couple times too.

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jaggederest a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sadly at many companies that's really not true. The CEO has direct visibility into direct reports and those metrics, but those don't necessarily clearly indicate what changes to the system would do. Largely because they're descriptive, not predictive, in my limited experience. They also tend to be lagging or current indicators, so they tell you what policy was doing last quarter. If those metrics are trending badly, you can't just demand "move X number up" and expect any success.

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torginus 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Any workable management approach relies on not managing down further than your direct reports, and believing what they say. Otherwise you've eliminated that layer of middle management, and have to do their work.

It might happen that this is the correct approach, and how to slice things up is often an eternal argument both on an organizational level and technical level.

Unfortunately that gives a lot of power to the middlemen, whoch they might use against you, but that's how the cookie crumbles.

	▲	jaggederest 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's why sometimes new management comes in and cleans house at the direct report level so they have people they know they can trust.

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scandox 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My internal metaphor for senior management is of a man sitting in a darkened room receiving slips of paper under the door with little messages on them.

That's why founder types have such a massive advantage. They've got a much better mental picture of what's beyond the door.

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jmcgough a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This might be appropriate in some cases, but it's important to consider that you have a finite amount of social capital as a new leader. Once people get sick of poorly thought-out changes it can be hard to keep changing things and get buy-in, and talented employees (who almost always have someone asking to hire them) can be the first to leave.

I'm a fan of Chesterton's Fence [1]. Put effort into understanding the organization and why it's architected the way it is before making changes.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/w/chesterton-s-fence

	▲	jaggederest 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		absolutely. You have to get hearts and minds, and honestly that's the biggest job as any kind of leadership. I think if you say to people "We have to make changes, these are not arbitrary, the company needs to do X soon, and the best way to understand that is to make some short term uncomfortable changes. I want your feedback" etc, if you build trust through connecting your actions to your words, people can accept that. The other part of that is ensuring that it doesn't fall disproportionately on certain sections of the company, and that you provide compensatory benefits like, say, comp overtime, extra vacation, bonuses, whatever is possible.

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tracerbulletx a day ago | parent | prev [-]

A great philosophy for anyone who is pretending to know what they're doing that will still result in the plane crashing because you need to know how to fly a plane to fly a plane, and you need to know how to run a business to run a business.

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jaggederest a day ago | parent [-]

On the other hand, because you've run business A, doesn't mean you have a clue how business B is actually working. I've seen that one more than a few times too.

Sometimes the plane is going to crash and the best you can do is a soft landing.

	▲	xyzzy_plugh 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ok but also one surefire way to crash a plane is to enter the cockpit and start perturbing things.