Notes on Mochary’s “The Great CEO Within” (2019)

MichaelA29 May 2021 18:53 UTC
22 points
9 comments5 min readEA link

I want to learn about management, mentorship, running organisations, and things like that. (This is related to my interest in the topics of scalably using labour and improving the EA-aligned research pipeline.) Two people I know who seem skilled at those areas recommended reading The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building, so I listened to the audiobook.

I’d tentatively recommend the book for people who want to learn about running organisations, and maybe people who want to learn about management.[1] But large chunks of the book seem far less relevant to nonprofits than they would be to for-profits (and especially tech startups). Luckily the chapter names typically make this obvious—you may want to just skip many chapters.

This post shares some concrete ideas the book left me with, as well as the Anki cards I made while reading the book. My hope is that this will be a low-effort way for me to help some people to quickly (1) gain some key insights from the book, and (2) work out whether reading/​listening to the book is worth their time.[2]

Note that:

  • I haven’t yet read any other books on these topics, and maybe if I had I’d recommend them instead.

  • You can get an earlier, free, ebook version of The Great CEO Within here.

  • I also have a list of other books on these topics that people I know have recommended; let me know if you’d like me to share that.

A handful of concrete ideas

These are ideas that I now think it may be worth orgs doing, and that I got from The Great CEO Within. I’m not highly confident in any of these. There are some other ideas in the book that also seem good but that I already knew about (e.g., OKRs), so I don’t note them here. I particularly had in mind nonprofit research orgs; maybe I’d have pulled out different ideas if I had different orgs in mind. These are in no particular order.

Idea 1: Decide on, clearly articulate and share, and promote/​maintain the org’s values

  • Possible ways to decide:

    • Just the leadership team decides

    • Send out a survey

    • Think about specific ways specific staff at the org have seemed to act in line with values that the org would like everyone to act in line with

  • Possible ways to articulate, share, promote, and maintain the values:

    • Look out for times when a person acts in a way that’s particularly representative of one or more of the org’s values, then mention this at meetings

      • E.g., manager tells them at the 1-1

      • E.g., team members are paired for 1-1s and give each other this feedback

      • E.g., at team meetings or all-hands meetings

Idea 2: Office hours with the CEO /​ Executive Director /​ President /​ whatever

  • Could also perhaps do office hours for team leaders or department heads, if an org expands enough that that would add value compared to just team meetings

Ideas 3-5: Have an internal wiki + “when you say it twice, write it down” + document all processes

  • These are three separate but overlapping ideas

  • Regarding an internal wiki:

    • The book recommends using Notion

  • Regarding documenting processes:

A well-run company documents every aspect of its operations, so that its team members can easily step into a new role when needed.

An easy way to do this is: Whenever you find yourself doing something twice, write down exactly what it is that you did. Place these written processes in the company Wiki. This allows the other members of your team to learn from your experience.

Require that all members of the team also follow this practice to share their knowledge.

  • Create a Sheet to track all processes (see example).

  • Ask each Department head to:

    • List the processes in their department.

    • Assign a writer and due date to each process.

      • Space the due dates out so that each writer need only document one process per week.

    • Each write links their process write-up to the spreadsheet, so that you can verify that all have been created.

If you use this process, and spread the writings amongst the whole company, you can likely document every process in your company within 3 months.

These written processes then became your company’s onboarding curriculum. Each new hire reads all the processes they will be asked to do. You can now safely scale your team knowing that they will have effective onboarding.

Ryan Breslow, Founder/​CEO of Bolt shares: “We have noticed that whenever we hire a new manager, they want to instantly bring in their own processes. But then we lose all of our hard-won institutional knowledge that led to the creation of our original process. So, we now require that all managers use the existing Bolt processes for at least 3 months before making any changes. After they know our system in this way, they are free to make the changes they want to. And yet most make relatively minor changes after that.”

  • Regarding “say it twice, write it down”:

Whenever you find yourself saying something for a second time (to a second audience, or in a second situation), it is highly likely that you will end up saying it again and again in the future. To vastly improve the quality of the communication, and reduce the amount of time that you spend communicating it … write it down.

Then, the next time you need to communicate that message, you can simply share it in written form. If it is something that all members of the team should know and remember, put it in a company-wide Wiki. If it is truly seminal to the organization, post it on a wall for all to see.

[...] Once you see this system working for yourself, start encouraging others in your company to do likewise. Everytime you see a question answered on Slack (for example), prompt the questioner to document the response in your company wiki.

Idea 6: On a team or org level, the relevant “manager” could explicitly consider which of the following three approaches to use for each nontrivial decision:

  1. The manager makes a decision, announces it to the team, and answers questions.

  2. The manager writes or assigns someone to write a “strawman” (a hypothetical answer designed to inspire discussion), invites the team to get feedback, and facilitates group discussion.

  3. The manager invites the team to a meeting where the dilemma is discussed from scratch.

  4. Like 2, but with part or all of the process happening asynchronously (e.g. via Slack/​docs), rather than in meetings.

  5. Like 3, but with part or all of the process happening asynchronously (e.g. via Slack/​docs).

(I got the first three of those possible approaches to decision-making from The Great CEO Within. I thought of the final two possible approaches in light of having worked for remote orgs and during COVID.)

My Anki cards

Mochary highlights three ways to make a decision:

  1. The manager makes a decision, announces it to the team, and answers questions.

  2. The manager writes or assigns someone to write a “strawman” (a hypothetical answer designed to inspire discussion), invites the team to get feedback, and facilitates group discussion.

  3. The manager invites the team to a meeting where the dilemma is discussed from scratch.

What are 2 things Mochary says about “top goal time”?

  1. It should be about 2 hours per day

  2. It should ideally be at the start of the day

(You can read more about this here.)

What does grade-level planning (GLP) involve?

Creating a detailed definition of every position and seniority level in a company, along with compensation metrics for each position and level, then sharing this throughout the company

[Managers must not deviate from this when deciding about promotions/​raises]

Mochary distinguishes between four “zones”:

  1. Zone of incompetence

  2. Zone of competence

  3. Zone of excellence

  4. Zone of genius

Mochary distinguishes between three types of information flows (for meetings etc.):

  1. Accountability

  2. Coaching

  3. Transparency

ACT

Explained in Chapter 23 here. I don’t think I understand how coaching and transparency are meant to be distinct.

[1] I’ve roughly ranked The Great CEO Within as the 29th most useful to me of the ~52 EA-relevant (audio)books I’ve read since learning about EA.

[2] In other words, I intend this as a lower-effort alternative to writing notes specifically for public consumption or writing a proper book review. See also Suggestion: Make Anki cards, share them as posts, and share key updates.

This post expresses only my personal opinions, not those of my employers, as should always be assumed unless I specify otherwise.

MichaelA29 May 2021 18:53 UTC
22 points
9 comments5 min readEA link