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 big contributors to national wealth – will require the U.S. to have more than its share of the world’s human capital.
This is why calls to “just train Americans” instead of recruiting skilled immigrants ring so hollow. Of course the U.S. needs to train its own skilled workers, and it should constantly be striving to improve its education system and to direct students toward the fields where they’re needed most. But at the end of the day the U.S. represents only 4.2% of the world’s population, while China represents 17.4%. China has a much bigger talent pool than America because it’s simply a much bigger country. If the U.S. wants to match China’s gigantic pool of human resources, it must supplement domestic talent by recruiting from abroad. Mathematically there’s simply no other option.
The Oral History of Gremlins [Alan Siegel/The Ringer] – Besides being an amazing nostalgic read about a fun movie from my childhood, this oral history has a few moments that reminds you how fragile the creative process is, and what great leadership/insight looks like. Excellent products – whether they are films, software, cars – are full of collaboration, but not consensus or compromises. Spielberg is amazing.
For example, on casting the male lead
Galligan: They had to take the tape and they had to FedEx it to Spielberg. Apparently when Spielberg saw me put my head on her shoulder, he turned to Joe and he said, “Stop the tape. Just turn it off.” And they were like, “What?” Joe and Mike thought he wanted to discuss something. And he got up, started walking out. And they said, “What?”
Dante: Steven turned to me and said, “We’ve got to cast him. He’s already in love with her.”
And a particularly weird speech that everyone was trying to get Director Joe Dante to cut
Dante: They said, “Well, we’ll get Steven to make you cut it out.” So they went to Steven and said, “Make him cut it out.” And Steven said, “It’s his movie. I don’t even get it. I don’t know what it is he likes about it, but it’s his movie. Leave it in there.” So it stayed in the movie.
Robert Putnam Knows Why You’re Lonely [Lulu Garcia-Navarro/New York Times] – Putnam, who wrote the brilliant Bowling Alone to describe the increased lack of IRL community in the US, is back with an update. While I recalled his general thesis, this interview reminded me about the importance of Bridging community alongside Bonding community. In his words,
Ties that link you to people like yourself are called bonding social capital. So, my ties to other elderly, male, white, Jewish professors — that’s my bonding social capital. And bridging social capital is your ties to people unlike yourself. So my ties to people of a different generation or a different gender or a different religion or a different politic or whatever, that’s my bridging social capital. I’m not saying “bridging good, bonding bad,” because if you get sick, the people who bring you chicken soup are likely to reflect your bonding social capital. But I am saying that in a diverse society like ours, we need a lot of bridging social capital. And some forms of bonding social capital are really awful. The K.K.K. is pure social capital — bonding social capital can be very useful, but it can also be extremely dangerous. So far, so good, except that bridging social capital is harder to build than bonding social capital. That’s the challenge, as I see it, of America today.
Enjoy!