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Building Your First Exec Team; Avoiding Micromanagement; Skilled Immigration Should Be Prioritized; Spielberg is a Genius; and More [link blog]
Summer reading for you.
Manage the What, Not the How [Molly Graham/Glue Club] — Molly always has great management essays, riffing off her own experience at learnings at places like Facebook and CZI. This one focuses on finding that right level of direction but not micro management.
It’s tempting to manage how employees work. But in 90% of cases, what really matters is: Did you hit the goal?
To run a successful company, particularly one past a certain size, controlling the “how” is simply not an option. You have to learn to be extraordinary at aliging around the “what” and at coaching people as they go.
How to Build and Run Your Exec Team [Harry Glaser/Modelbit] — We’ve known Harry for a while, and have the pleasure of working with him as investors in Modelbit, so I enjoy his posts, both in a vacuum and as context for the way he’s building this startup. This one is a pretty practical take on how you evolve the exec team and cadence of management during the first phase of hypergrowth. As he writes,
The transition to a real structure with “teams of teams” and executives is fraught for two reasons: First, as the company is going through a transition where employees no longer automatically know everything and everyone, the founders are not going through that same transition. They don’t realize the employees are losing track of all the new people, don’t know the priorities any more, and are feeling disconnected from the mission. This makes the founders slow to add structure and process as they scale up.
Skilled immigration is a national security priority [Noah Smith and Minn Kim/Noahpinion] — It always amazes me that growing skilled immigration to the US isn’t a bipartisan priority. Would certainly be one of my objectives if I served in government. Noah Smith is pretty consistent on making the case for smart immigration policies and here he (and Minn) tackle the ‘competition with China’ angle.
Maintaining a lead in industries like AI, semiconductors, and advanced manufacturing — all things that are essential for national defense as well as…
