Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…on obedience but low on values. So these are the people that you don't want to be. And what you notice is that a lot of CEOs have done well because they follow the ‘dharma’ of the founders quite well. They have not diluted the dharma of the founders who have started these companies, and managed to sustain that. And a lot of CEOs have this need to say, "Oh, I'm going to change the company forever and it'll be my identity and I will change the logo and I'll change the name and I will do all sorts of things." But maintaining ‘dharma’, where I will say that “These principles were given to me and I'm going to sustain this and make it even bigger," comes from the humility of saying that there is something that was built with some pure form factor, and I think therefore that character stays on. And therefore we have the characters of Brahma and Shiva, the founder and destroyer. That's the thing. But sustenance is the harder one. And therefore our avatars keep happening over time and different hurdles come and then different levels come. But when you think about the archetype of, at least the Indian CEOs, I've seen that they are fabulous at moving between Krishna and Rama all the time. They can play this consistently, and therefore they keep evolving and keep making these companies bigger and bigger. And I think we'll see a lot more of this in years to come, because now they have the role models of these individuals who have done well. But the key principle is that if you ask the founders, they will love these CEOs if they're around because they maintain the dharma. For example, what Tim is doing is maintaining the dharma of Steve Jobs because if he had tried to change the dharma of Steve Jobs and the values of the company, it's very hard to imagine it sustaining itself forever. Wow, what an answer. What I love about this is this combination of using a two by two and Indian mythology. It is like the microcosm of you, which is philosophy and tech. And so I love that and it makes a lot of sense that that's where your mind goes. Something else this makes me think about is, I read this book a long time ago, Jim Collins ‘Good to Great’ or one of his early books about leadership, and he talks about level five leadership I think. Here level five leaders are ones where it's not about them, it's about the business and they can disappear in the future and things will work great. Yes. And I feel it is very hard if you believe that your identity needs to have its own position and legacy, and therefore a lot of time chasing status causes disruption because you will say that “Oh, this doesn't have my signature in it.” And therefore accepting the religion and trying to be the Pope of it or the father of it is better than trying to say, "Oh, I need to have my variant of religion." And that's where the creative destruction starts happening.…

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