Company leadership and tactical decisions

The other day at work, I received an email from our leadership regarding “new principles for our organization”, linking out to a web page listing the new principles. This ended up being partially a culture document, but mostly a direction document—“we want customers to be able to X” “we want to provide industry standard Y”, etc. While the wish list was pretty explicit and fairly detailed, there were no concrete actions.

At the level that our leadership works at, I believe this is largely the correct thing to do. If you’re trying to set direction for a thousand people, you can’t really specify technical details, and even trying to promote specific strategies is almost always going to end up with suboptimal results. Plus, if you hire smart, motivated people, they’ll find good (or good enough) solutions.

Except in the case of a systemic defect or dysfunction which keeps most or all of your teams trapped in local minima, while there’s a better global minimum available.

I believe this happens in a lot of companies, and I believe it’s happening in mine. The new principles document sets goals that implicitly require a lot of stabilization and polishing of our products—we’re trying to support customer use cases, but our development so far has been a bleeding edge iterate-as-fast-as-possible mess.

In an ideal world, the smart people in my organization would recognize this, and globally collaborate to focus on the stabilization work that’s needed. However, in the real world, my organization has significant social and financial incentives around creating new features and adding functionality, along with an embedded culture of promoting those things. There are almost no incentives around stabilization and polishing of products. This results in only new features and functionality being prioritized. Everything else gets the bare minimum of effort needed to keep our services up, keep things going.

It’s a systemic problem across the entire organization, and it’s one that can’t really be solved at the local level, because of the cultural and financial issues.

This is where our leadership can, and perhaps should step in. Sometimes, direction and veiled hints just aren’t enough. Sometimes, as a leader, you might want or need to make a hard, concrete tactical decision that actually has consequences if you get it wrong, and use that decision to break a logjam or get to a better global minimum. Elon Musk doing a complete switch from carbon fiber to stainless steel for Starship strikes me as a classic example.

The down side, as a leader, is that it’s very easy to get this very wrong. But if your company is suffering some obvious internal logjam, making a top level tactical decision might be the right thing to do.