This seems like an excellent essay, that is so good, and about such an important but rarely named and optimized virtue, that people will probably either bounce off (because they don’t understand) or simply nod and say “yes, this is true” without bothering to comment about any niggling details that were wrong.
Instead of offering critiques, I want to ask questions.
It occurs to me that a small for-profit might plan to have the CEO apply One Day Sooner and then the COO Never Drops A Ball, and this makes sense to me if the business is a startup, isn’t profitable yet, needs to grow fast, recently took huge loans and wants high ROI, or similar contexts to this.
By contrast, once a giant source of profit has been found, and “not killing the golden goose” takes priority, I would guess that the CEO should be doing this Never Drop A Ball thing, while some other person (the CSO? the CTO? the CFO? all of them aimed at different projects the CEO thinks are important?) does One Day Sooner.
Does this make sense? Do you think the CEO should pick between these two modes? What about CEOs that aren’t in either mode?
Another question: how do these two different approaches differ in their approach to delegation? My hunch is that Never Drop A Ball delegates by finding someone who can do “Never Drop A Ball” and then assign them to some “zone” and basically play “zone defense”, with higher levels of management handling things that don’t land in any named zone and/or handling huge exceptions inside of a zone that require extra resources. I have no clear idea how to delegate “One Day Sooner”. Do you?
“Never Drop A Ball” reminds me a lot of work ticket systems and/or bug tracking systems. Is that similarity spurious in your opinion, or on the right track?
Work ticket systems are one of the main examples of this I’ve worked with, that’s the right track! Early in my career I worked IT for a university, and the ticket system was core to how the IT department operated. Every user report should create a new ticket or be attached to an existing ticket. Every ticket should be touched ideally once a day unless it was scheduled for a future date, and if a ticket went untouched for a whole week then that indicated something had gone horribly wrong. That’s because the failure we really wanted to avoid was something like “the projector in room 417 hasn’t been working for two weeks, the professors can’t show slides, and nobody in IT knows about this.” It’s pretty easy for that to happen.
Bug tracking can be a little different, as software is a bit more likely to say ‘eh, we don’t care about that bug, mark it as Won’t Fix/leave it on the backlog indefinitely.’ My guess is this is a matter of asymmetric payoffs/counting up vs counting down. Or a matter of department. Some departments are going to weigh new features equally against fixing bugs, while your Q&A team is going to have a different institutional view.
how do these two different approaches differ in their approach to delegation? My hunch is that Never Drop A Ball delegates by finding someone who can do “Never Drop A Ball” and then assign them to some “zone” and basically play “zone defense”...
Yeah, Never Drop A Ball delegation is often by category. To use the school field trip example, it’s straightforward to say the first grade teacher is in charge of getting all the first graders back safe, the second grade teacher is in charge of getting all the second graders back safe, and so on. A convention might have a treasurer (in charge of never dropping a reimbursement request or payment that needs to be made) and a tech lead (in charge of never losing a projector or microphone) and a community safety contact (in charge of never dropping a harassment complaint.) And like you said about higher management, the principal or convention chair are the people who catch problems that don’t cleanly fit a category and operates as the fallback for lower levels. The main fail case here is when a problem is doesn’t have someone obviously on that zone. One way to try and fix that is to say all unhandled problems are the domain of the organization President/CEO/Director, though this comes with its own problems.
From what I’ve observed, delegating One Day Sooner works best with tasks.
Examples:
The CTO of a company picks a software engineer or team lead, and says “We don’t currently have a mobile version of the website. I’m assigning that to you; get it done ASAP. Use the desktop version for copy and as a style guide. Tell me what resources you need and I’ll make sure you get them.”
As a convention is opening up, the organizer realizes they don’t have any lanyards. They ask the organizer group chat whether anyone is free, someone volunteers, and then the organizer says “awesome, we need at least five hundred, ideally they’re mostly black but with a couple hundred of other colours.”
The overall commander of a military operation picks a military company, and says “I want a base established in this area. I’m assigning it to you, get it done by next week. Tell my staff if you need any special equipment, here’s your liaison with the air force if you need them.”
(I have way more experience with software engineering and convention running than military exercises, if someone shows up and says that’s not at all how the military works then probably I’m just wrong.)
It occurs to me that a small for-profit might plan to have the CEO apply One Day Sooner and then the COO Never Drops A Ball...By contrast, once a giant source of profit has been found … I would guess that the CEO should be doing this Never Drop A Ball thing, while some other person (the CSO? the CTO? the CFO? all of them aimed at different projects the CEO thinks are important?) does One Day Sooner.
If the small for-profit is sufficiently small, I expect everyone in the organization is in One Day Sooner mode almost all of the time. Someone should have their eye on some important paperwork that must get filed, but most of the energy should be on the mission goal. (It would not surprise me at all if there are otherwise successful startups that, sometime in year 3, had to ask “wait, who filed the taxes for this last year?” followed by a quiet expletive.) This is going to vary based on the purpose and scale though. Like, I think a community hospital is generally in Never Drop A Ball mode. There just isn’t a way to sprint really fast, work super hard, and fix all the broken bones before taking a rest. Someone’s going to walk in ten minutes after you sent the last patient home with a new broken bone.
I currently don’t think there’s a generic answer here, it’s going to vary based on what you’re trying to do and how big you’re organization is. If I had to guess, I’d guess an ideal division is the CEO in One Day Sooner mode, and their executive assistant in Never Drop A Ball mode.
What about CEOs that aren’t in either mode?
I mean, I’m cheerfully willing to call these two modes a false but useful dichotomy, and there’s other ways to work. Off the top of my head, Maker vs Manager Schedules; and like Maker vs Manager, sometimes making the distinction clear to people helps them understand.
That got a bit long, but I hope it helps! Thank you for the commentary :)
This seems like an excellent essay, that is so good, and about such an important but rarely named and optimized virtue, that people will probably either bounce off (because they don’t understand) or simply nod and say “yes, this is true” without bothering to comment about any niggling details that were wrong.
Instead of offering critiques, I want to ask questions.
It occurs to me that a small for-profit might plan to have the CEO apply One Day Sooner and then the COO Never Drops A Ball, and this makes sense to me if the business is a startup, isn’t profitable yet, needs to grow fast, recently took huge loans and wants high ROI, or similar contexts to this.
By contrast, once a giant source of profit has been found, and “not killing the golden goose” takes priority, I would guess that the CEO should be doing this Never Drop A Ball thing, while some other person (the CSO? the CTO? the CFO? all of them aimed at different projects the CEO thinks are important?) does One Day Sooner.
Does this make sense? Do you think the CEO should pick between these two modes? What about CEOs that aren’t in either mode?
Another question: how do these two different approaches differ in their approach to delegation? My hunch is that Never Drop A Ball delegates by finding someone who can do “Never Drop A Ball” and then assign them to some “zone” and basically play “zone defense”, with higher levels of management handling things that don’t land in any named zone and/or handling huge exceptions inside of a zone that require extra resources. I have no clear idea how to delegate “One Day Sooner”. Do you?
“Never Drop A Ball” reminds me a lot of work ticket systems and/or bug tracking systems. Is that similarity spurious in your opinion, or on the right track?
Work ticket systems are one of the main examples of this I’ve worked with, that’s the right track! Early in my career I worked IT for a university, and the ticket system was core to how the IT department operated. Every user report should create a new ticket or be attached to an existing ticket. Every ticket should be touched ideally once a day unless it was scheduled for a future date, and if a ticket went untouched for a whole week then that indicated something had gone horribly wrong. That’s because the failure we really wanted to avoid was something like “the projector in room 417 hasn’t been working for two weeks, the professors can’t show slides, and nobody in IT knows about this.” It’s pretty easy for that to happen.
Bug tracking can be a little different, as software is a bit more likely to say ‘eh, we don’t care about that bug, mark it as Won’t Fix/leave it on the backlog indefinitely.’ My guess is this is a matter of asymmetric payoffs/counting up vs counting down. Or a matter of department. Some departments are going to weigh new features equally against fixing bugs, while your Q&A team is going to have a different institutional view.
Yeah, Never Drop A Ball delegation is often by category. To use the school field trip example, it’s straightforward to say the first grade teacher is in charge of getting all the first graders back safe, the second grade teacher is in charge of getting all the second graders back safe, and so on. A convention might have a treasurer (in charge of never dropping a reimbursement request or payment that needs to be made) and a tech lead (in charge of never losing a projector or microphone) and a community safety contact (in charge of never dropping a harassment complaint.) And like you said about higher management, the principal or convention chair are the people who catch problems that don’t cleanly fit a category and operates as the fallback for lower levels. The main fail case here is when a problem is doesn’t have someone obviously on that zone. One way to try and fix that is to say all unhandled problems are the domain of the organization President/CEO/Director, though this comes with its own problems.
From what I’ve observed, delegating One Day Sooner works best with tasks.
Examples:
The CTO of a company picks a software engineer or team lead, and says “We don’t currently have a mobile version of the website. I’m assigning that to you; get it done ASAP. Use the desktop version for copy and as a style guide. Tell me what resources you need and I’ll make sure you get them.”
As a convention is opening up, the organizer realizes they don’t have any lanyards. They ask the organizer group chat whether anyone is free, someone volunteers, and then the organizer says “awesome, we need at least five hundred, ideally they’re mostly black but with a couple hundred of other colours.”
The overall commander of a military operation picks a military company, and says “I want a base established in this area. I’m assigning it to you, get it done by next week. Tell my staff if you need any special equipment, here’s your liaison with the air force if you need them.”
(I have way more experience with software engineering and convention running than military exercises, if someone shows up and says that’s not at all how the military works then probably I’m just wrong.)
If the small for-profit is sufficiently small, I expect everyone in the organization is in One Day Sooner mode almost all of the time. Someone should have their eye on some important paperwork that must get filed, but most of the energy should be on the mission goal. (It would not surprise me at all if there are otherwise successful startups that, sometime in year 3, had to ask “wait, who filed the taxes for this last year?” followed by a quiet expletive.) This is going to vary based on the purpose and scale though. Like, I think a community hospital is generally in Never Drop A Ball mode. There just isn’t a way to sprint really fast, work super hard, and fix all the broken bones before taking a rest. Someone’s going to walk in ten minutes after you sent the last patient home with a new broken bone.
I currently don’t think there’s a generic answer here, it’s going to vary based on what you’re trying to do and how big you’re organization is. If I had to guess, I’d guess an ideal division is the CEO in One Day Sooner mode, and their executive assistant in Never Drop A Ball mode.
I mean, I’m cheerfully willing to call these two modes a false but useful dichotomy, and there’s other ways to work. Off the top of my head, Maker vs Manager Schedules; and like Maker vs Manager, sometimes making the distinction clear to people helps them understand.
That got a bit long, but I hope it helps! Thank you for the commentary :)