Really interesting, and something I’ll need to come back to. Just to pick out one bit:
Often, it’ll involve people doing things that just aren’t that enjoyable: management and scaling organisations to large sizes are rarely people’s favourite activities; and, it will be challenging to incentivise enough people to do these things effectively.
I’ve seen variations on this theme in a few posts, and it doesn’t resonate with my own experience. In a genuinely influential management/ops role, there’s a great deal of satisfaction to be had in seeing your organisation become more effective—if what that organisation is doing is highly worthwhile. I worry a bit that the tone of ‘yeah this isn’t glamorous, but someone has to do it’ is putting off talent in the area. If an attraction to EA is around doing the most good, and this area is a bottleneck, there seem much more positive framings to be used.
One other question—I’ve seen quite a few posts trying to set what to do with EA’s increased resources through inductive reasoning. I’ve seen less around examining what others have done successfully or unsuccessfully in terms of embedding sustainable growth and development (e.g. Singapore), managing very large amounts of money effectively (e.g. Norway’s sovereign wealth funds), or increasing the ability to spend money quickly and well (e.g. getting ‘shovel ready’ engineering plans ready to go), and seeing what lessons can be drawn. None of those map on perfectly to EA’s situation, but they should be instructive. Is this research happening, and if so, how are the conclusions being brought together and acted on?
I was also surprised to be seeing management and scaling organisations described as “rarely people’s favourite activities”, this seems to be a strong claim. For me, it’s the most motivating activity and I’m trying to find an organisation where I can contribute in this area.
Couldn’t agree more, Rob. Perhaps my perception is coloured by my own experience and circle of friends, but there certainly seems to be a subset of people out there who genuinely enjoy scaling organisations. I think this is particularly the case in the for-profit sphere, where feedback loops are sometimes instantaneous thus leading to increased satisfaction among the scale-up types.
As a caution, onlookers should know that there tends to be a large supply of would-be management advice or scaling advice whose quality is often mixed. This is because:
It is attractive to supply because this advice is literally executive or senior managerial work, so appears high status/impact/compensation.
It is attractive to supply because it moves into organizations where often the hard operational work and important niches have been developed successfully. In reality, it is often this object level activity that is hard and in “short supply”.
Even in successful organizations, staff are often working around management/CEO or succeeding at their tasks despite leadership (it’s not that leadership is bad it’s that it provides many things in complicated ways).
Like other meta work, it can be (extremely) difficult to understand if you’re good or bad. In particular, for scaling, the feedback loops can be very long.
Like other meta work, there can only be so many “cooks in the kitchen”. In general, it is normal to scale or add more object level work, but for meta or managerial work the slots are limited (think of the reasons orgs only have have 1-2 CEOs) and more management can be negative.
To see this, look at the general opinion of “management consulting” and how rarely these services are actually used by small, highly effective companies and organizations that I think are similar in profile to EA orgs.
I suspect that when they are used, it’s because of great respect and trust for specific principals, and not because “management” can be easily sprinkled onto an existing organization.
Another issue is that “management” is a word that means many different things. As a very positive thing, and to an unusual degree, even junior EAs perform major management roles in EA organizations.
Maybe the source of more management talent or activity would be to promote or “tap on the shoulder” inside EAs. There should be caution about creating external processes.
(The following sentence can be it’s own misread) but it’s possible the OP meant that, given the necessary quality/culture/approach/familiarity, there is a shortage of specific, action ready and trusted talent whose deployment has high upsides and low downsides.
It’s useful to separate out consultancy/advice-giving versus the actual doing. I would say though that a successful management/operations setup should be able to at least ameliorate the feedback issue you mention (e.g. by identifying leading and/or more quickly changing metrics that are aligned and gaining value from these).
I think your comment and sentiment is great. My response wasn’t directly related.
I guess I’m more concerned about “by catch” or overindexing. For example, activity and discussions that are wobbly about getting into management and scaling, “Great Leap Forward”, sort of style.
Honestly, the root issue here is that I have some distrust related to the causes and processes about this post, the NB post, all of which seems to be related to discussion and concerns that might originated or closely involve the EA forum. I am don’t think these have the best relationship to reality[1]. It seems healthy for the issues to settle down.
I think the discourse on funding/optics has been slightly defective or tinged. This caused Will, SBF to pop onto the forum. This presence is fantastic, great and should continue, but maybe in this instance, different processes or events could have occurred, so they could have used their valuable time and public presence to communicate to EA about something else.
Really interesting, and something I’ll need to come back to. Just to pick out one bit:
I’ve seen variations on this theme in a few posts, and it doesn’t resonate with my own experience. In a genuinely influential management/ops role, there’s a great deal of satisfaction to be had in seeing your organisation become more effective—if what that organisation is doing is highly worthwhile. I worry a bit that the tone of ‘yeah this isn’t glamorous, but someone has to do it’ is putting off talent in the area. If an attraction to EA is around doing the most good, and this area is a bottleneck, there seem much more positive framings to be used.
One other question—I’ve seen quite a few posts trying to set what to do with EA’s increased resources through inductive reasoning. I’ve seen less around examining what others have done successfully or unsuccessfully in terms of embedding sustainable growth and development (e.g. Singapore), managing very large amounts of money effectively (e.g. Norway’s sovereign wealth funds), or increasing the ability to spend money quickly and well (e.g. getting ‘shovel ready’ engineering plans ready to go), and seeing what lessons can be drawn. None of those map on perfectly to EA’s situation, but they should be instructive. Is this research happening, and if so, how are the conclusions being brought together and acted on?
I was also surprised to be seeing management and scaling organisations described as “rarely people’s favourite activities”, this seems to be a strong claim. For me, it’s the most motivating activity and I’m trying to find an organisation where I can contribute in this area.
Agreed, I love management and improving organisational systems, and was really surprised by this comment!
Couldn’t agree more, Rob. Perhaps my perception is coloured by my own experience and circle of friends, but there certainly seems to be a subset of people out there who genuinely enjoy scaling organisations. I think this is particularly the case in the for-profit sphere, where feedback loops are sometimes instantaneous thus leading to increased satisfaction among the scale-up types.
As a caution, onlookers should know that there tends to be a large supply of would-be management advice or scaling advice whose quality is often mixed. This is because:
It is attractive to supply because this advice is literally executive or senior managerial work, so appears high status/impact/compensation.
It is attractive to supply because it moves into organizations where often the hard operational work and important niches have been developed successfully. In reality, it is often this object level activity that is hard and in “short supply”.
Even in successful organizations, staff are often working around management/CEO or succeeding at their tasks despite leadership (it’s not that leadership is bad it’s that it provides many things in complicated ways).
Like other meta work, it can be (extremely) difficult to understand if you’re good or bad. In particular, for scaling, the feedback loops can be very long.
Like other meta work, there can only be so many “cooks in the kitchen”. In general, it is normal to scale or add more object level work, but for meta or managerial work the slots are limited (think of the reasons orgs only have have 1-2 CEOs) and more management can be negative.
To see this, look at the general opinion of “management consulting” and how rarely these services are actually used by small, highly effective companies and organizations that I think are similar in profile to EA orgs.
I suspect that when they are used, it’s because of great respect and trust for specific principals, and not because “management” can be easily sprinkled onto an existing organization.
Another issue is that “management” is a word that means many different things. As a very positive thing, and to an unusual degree, even junior EAs perform major management roles in EA organizations.
Maybe the source of more management talent or activity would be to promote or “tap on the shoulder” inside EAs. There should be caution about creating external processes.
(The following sentence can be it’s own misread) but it’s possible the OP meant that, given the necessary quality/culture/approach/familiarity, there is a shortage of specific, action ready and trusted talent whose deployment has high upsides and low downsides.
It’s useful to separate out consultancy/advice-giving versus the actual doing. I would say though that a successful management/operations setup should be able to at least ameliorate the feedback issue you mention (e.g. by identifying leading and/or more quickly changing metrics that are aligned and gaining value from these).
I think your comment and sentiment is great. My response wasn’t directly related.
I guess I’m more concerned about “by catch” or overindexing. For example, activity and discussions that are wobbly about getting into management and scaling, “Great Leap Forward”, sort of style.
Honestly, the root issue here is that I have some distrust related to the causes and processes about this post, the NB post, all of which seems to be related to discussion and concerns that might originated or closely involve the EA forum. I am don’t think these have the best relationship to reality[1]. It seems healthy for the issues to settle down.
I think the discourse on funding/optics has been slightly defective or tinged. This caused Will, SBF to pop onto the forum. This presence is fantastic, great and should continue, but maybe in this instance, different processes or events could have occurred, so they could have used their valuable time and public presence to communicate to EA about something else.