Nat Friedman: preference

Transcript context

…Another one – The cultural prohibition on micromanagement is harmful, great individuals should be fully empowered to exercise their judgment. And the rebuttal to this is if you micromanage you prevent people from learning and to develop their own judgment. So imagine you go into some company, they hired Dwarkesh and you do a great job with the first project that they give you. Everyone's really impressed. Man, Dwarkesh, he made the right decisions, he worked really hard, he figured out exactly what needed to be done and he did it extremely well. Over time you get promoted into positions of greater authority and the reason the company's doing this is they want you to do that again, but at bigger scale, right? Do it again, but 10 times bigger. The whole product instead of part of the product or 10 products instead of one. The company is telling you, you have great judgment and we want you to exercise that at a greater scale. Meanwhile, the culture is telling you as you get promoted, you should suspend your judgment more and more and defer your judgment to your team. And so there's some equilibrium there and I think we're just out of equilibrium right now where the cultural prohibition is too strong. I don't know if this is true or not, but maybe in the 80s I would have felt the other side of this. That we have too much micromanagement. I think the other problem that people have is that they don't like micromanagement because they don't want bad managers to micromanage, right? So you have some bad managers, they have no expertise in the area, they're just people managers and they're starting to micromanage something that they don't understand where their judgment is bad. And my answer to that is stop empowering bad managers. Don't have them, promote and empower people who have great judgment and do understand the subject matter that they're working on. If I work for you and I just know you have better judgment and you come in and you say, now like you're launching the scroll thing and you think you've got the final format wrong, here's how you should do it, I would welcome that even though it's micromanagement because it's going to make us more successful in them and learn something from tha. I know your judgment is better than mine in this case or at least we're going to have a conversation about it, we're both going to get smarter. So I think on balance, yeah, there are cases where people have excellent judgment and we should encourage them to exercise it and sometimes, things will go wrong when you do that, but on balance you will get far more excellence out of it and we should empower individuals who have great judgment. Yeah. There's a quote about Napoleon that if he could have been in every single theater of every single battle he was part of, that he would have never lost a battle. I was talking to somebody who worked with you at GitHub and she emphasized to me, and this is like really remarkable to me, that even the applications are already being shipped out to engineers how much of the actual suggestions and the actual design came from you directly, which is kind of remarkable to me that as CEO you would have.…

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