I don’t work in ops or within an EA org, but my observation from the outside is that the way EA does ops is very weird. Note these are my impressions from the outside so may not be reflective of the truth:
The term “Operations” is not used in the same way outside EA. In EA, it normally seems to mean “everything back office that the CEO doesn’t care about as long as it’s done. Outside of EA, it normally means the main function of the organisation (the COO normally has the highest number of people reporting to them after the CEO)
EA takes highly talented people and gives them menial roles because value-alignment is more important than experience and cost-effectiveness
People in EA have a lower tolerance for admin, possibly because they elevate themselves to a high level of importance. I‘ve worked with very senior and very busy company executives in the normal world and they reply to my emails. Yet in EA, it feels like once you have 2 years of experience in EA, you are too important to read your own emails and need somebody with 1 year of experience to do it for you
EA has so many small organizations and there seems to be so much reinventing the wheel, yet when it comes to specialists there are none
Managers within EA don’t seem to realise that some things they call operations are actually management responsibilities, and that to be a manager you need to be willing to less or maybe none of the day job, e.g. the CEO of a large research organisation should probably not do research anymore
I agree with several of your points here, especially the reinventing the wheel one, but I think the first and last miss something. But, I’ll caveat this by saying I work in operations for a large (by EA standards) organization that might have more “normal” operations due to its size.
The term “Operations” is not used in the same way outside EA. In EA, it normally seems to mean “everything back office that the CEO doesn’t care about as long as it’s done. Outside of EA, it normally means the main function of the organisation (the COO normally has the highest number of people reporting to them after the CEO)
I don’t think this is fully accurate — my impression is that “operations” is used widely outside of EA in the US nonprofit space to refer to 90%+ of what ops staff in EA do. E.g. looking through a random selection of jobs at US nonprofits the operations jobs seem similar to what I’d expect in EA, which is basically working on admin / finance / HR / legal compliance, etc and some intersections with fundraising/comms. At lots of small nonprofits (like EA ones), these jobs are staffed necessarily generalists — you have to do all those functions, but none might be a full-time job on their own, so you find one person to do it all. I’ve worked at a bunch of US nonprofits outside of EA and all of them had staff with titles like “Operations Director” or “Operations Coordinator” who basically did the same thing as I’d expect those roles to do at EA organizations. I think EA likely just took this titling from the US nonprofit space in general, though EA does have some unusual operations norms (e.g. being unusually high touch).
I think that there is definitely a different use of this term in a lot of for-profit contexts (e.g. business operations) but I’ve also seen it used the same way there sometimes. And, COO usually stands for Chief Operating Officer, not Chief Operations Officer, and those are definitely different things.
Managers within EA don’t seem to realise that some things they call operations are actually management responsibilities, and that to be a manager you need to be willing to less or maybe none of the day job, e.g. the CEO of a large research organisation should probably not do research anymore
I agree that operations at EA organizations do lots of things that might often in other contexts be done by managers, and your specific example might be correct, but I also think that sometimes, especially in a nonprofit context, a large amount of admin burden is placed on programmatic staff, and it can be good to design systems to change this. That being said, the examples from the original post (e.g. dealing with emails for someone) sound more like an Executive Assistant’s role, or just bad?
I think that lots of nonprofits outside of EA are under weird kinds of pressure (e.g. Charity Navigator rates charities on “administrative expense ratio”) to not have particularly high operations costs. And an easy way to do this is to shift those expenses to managers (e.g. managers doing more paperwork). I don’t think this is necessarily intentional, but a pretty undesirable effect of having fewer ops staff. I don’t think EA organizations are under the same pressure, and that seems generally good.
Thanks for this! You might be right about the non-profit vs. for-profit distinction in ‘operations’ and your point about the COO being ‘Operating’ rather than ‘Operations’ is a good one.
Re avoiding managers doing paperwork, I agree with that way of putting it. However, I think EA needs to recognise that management is an entirely different skill. The best researcher at a research organization should definitely not have to handle lots of paperwork, but I’d argue they probably shouldn’t be the manager in the first place! Management is a very different skillset that involves people management, financial planning, etc. that are often skills pushed on operations teams by people who shouldn’t be managers.
Yeah, I definitely agree with that—I think a pretty common issue is people entering into people management on the basis of their skills at research, and they don’t seem particularly likely to be correlated. I also think organizations sometimes struggle to provide pathways to more senior roles outside of management too, and that seems like an issue when you have ambitious people who want to grow professionally, but no options to except people management.
I have an answer for this now: line functions and staff functions. Line functions do the core work on the organization, while staff function “supports the organization with specialized advisory and support functions.”
My vague impression is that this labelling/terminology is fairly common among high-level management types, but that people in general likely wouldn’t be familiar with it.
Most organizations do not divide tasks between core and non-core. The ones that do (and are probably most similar to a lot of EA orgs) are professional services ones
I think there isn’t a single term (although I’m certainly not an expert, so maybe someone with a PhD in business or a few decades of experience can come and correct me).
Finance, Marketing, Legal, Payroll, Compliance, and so on could all be departments, divisions, or teams within an organization, but I don’t know of any term used to cover all of them with the meaning of “supporting the core work.” I’m not aware of any label that is used outside of EA analogous to how “operations” is used within in EA.
This feels wrong to me in every non-EA company I worked at, fwiw. E.g. Google doesn’t even have a COO for the whole org, the COO for Google Consumer Hardware is the closest role I can find on a quick search.
Outside of EA, it normally means the main function of the organisation (the COO normally has the highest number of people reporting to them after the CEO)
I was surprised by this claim, so I checked every (of the 3) non-EA orgs I’ve worked at. Not only is it not true that “the COO normally has the highest number of people reporting to them after the CEO,” literally none of them even have a COO for the whole org.
To check whether my experiences were representative, I went through this list of the largest companies. It looks like of the 5 largest companies by market cap, 2 of them have COOs (Apple, Amazon). Microsoft doesn’t have a designated COO, but they had a Chief Human Resources Officer and a Chief Financial Officer, which in smaller orgs will probably be a COO job[1]. So maybe an appropriate prior is 50%? This is a very quick spotcheck however, would be interested in more representative data.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. My claim was not “Every organisation has a COO); it was “If an organisation has a COO, the department they manage is typically front-office rather than back-office and often the largest department”.
For Apple, they do indeed manage front-office operations: “Jeff Williams is Apple’s chief operating officer reporting to CEO Tim Cook. He oversees Apple’s entire worldwide operations, as well as customer service and support. He leads Apple’s renowned design team and the software and hardware engineering for Apple Watch. Jeff also drives the company’s health initiatives, pioneering new technologies and advancing medical research to empower people to better understand and manage their health and fitness.”
For Amazon, I couldn’t find a COO of the entire company though it looks like they exist for the business units.
I don’t work in ops or within an EA org, but my observation from the outside is that the way EA does ops is very weird. Note these are my impressions from the outside so may not be reflective of the truth:
The term “Operations” is not used in the same way outside EA. In EA, it normally seems to mean “everything back office that the CEO doesn’t care about as long as it’s done. Outside of EA, it normally means the main function of the organisation (the COO normally has the highest number of people reporting to them after the CEO)
EA takes highly talented people and gives them menial roles because value-alignment is more important than experience and cost-effectiveness
People in EA have a lower tolerance for admin, possibly because they elevate themselves to a high level of importance. I‘ve worked with very senior and very busy company executives in the normal world and they reply to my emails. Yet in EA, it feels like once you have 2 years of experience in EA, you are too important to read your own emails and need somebody with 1 year of experience to do it for you
EA has so many small organizations and there seems to be so much reinventing the wheel, yet when it comes to specialists there are none
Managers within EA don’t seem to realise that some things they call operations are actually management responsibilities, and that to be a manager you need to be willing to less or maybe none of the day job, e.g. the CEO of a large research organisation should probably not do research anymore
I agree with several of your points here, especially the reinventing the wheel one, but I think the first and last miss something. But, I’ll caveat this by saying I work in operations for a large (by EA standards) organization that might have more “normal” operations due to its size.
I don’t think this is fully accurate — my impression is that “operations” is used widely outside of EA in the US nonprofit space to refer to 90%+ of what ops staff in EA do. E.g. looking through a random selection of jobs at US nonprofits the operations jobs seem similar to what I’d expect in EA, which is basically working on admin / finance / HR / legal compliance, etc and some intersections with fundraising/comms. At lots of small nonprofits (like EA ones), these jobs are staffed necessarily generalists — you have to do all those functions, but none might be a full-time job on their own, so you find one person to do it all. I’ve worked at a bunch of US nonprofits outside of EA and all of them had staff with titles like “Operations Director” or “Operations Coordinator” who basically did the same thing as I’d expect those roles to do at EA organizations. I think EA likely just took this titling from the US nonprofit space in general, though EA does have some unusual operations norms (e.g. being unusually high touch).
I think that there is definitely a different use of this term in a lot of for-profit contexts (e.g. business operations) but I’ve also seen it used the same way there sometimes. And, COO usually stands for Chief Operating Officer, not Chief Operations Officer, and those are definitely different things.
I agree that operations at EA organizations do lots of things that might often in other contexts be done by managers, and your specific example might be correct, but I also think that sometimes, especially in a nonprofit context, a large amount of admin burden is placed on programmatic staff, and it can be good to design systems to change this. That being said, the examples from the original post (e.g. dealing with emails for someone) sound more like an Executive Assistant’s role, or just bad?
I think that lots of nonprofits outside of EA are under weird kinds of pressure (e.g. Charity Navigator rates charities on “administrative expense ratio”) to not have particularly high operations costs. And an easy way to do this is to shift those expenses to managers (e.g. managers doing more paperwork). I don’t think this is necessarily intentional, but a pretty undesirable effect of having fewer ops staff. I don’t think EA organizations are under the same pressure, and that seems generally good.
Thanks for this! You might be right about the non-profit vs. for-profit distinction in ‘operations’ and your point about the COO being ‘Operating’ rather than ‘Operations’ is a good one.
Re avoiding managers doing paperwork, I agree with that way of putting it. However, I think EA needs to recognise that management is an entirely different skill. The best researcher at a research organization should definitely not have to handle lots of paperwork, but I’d argue they probably shouldn’t be the manager in the first place! Management is a very different skillset that involves people management, financial planning, etc. that are often skills pushed on operations teams by people who shouldn’t be managers.
Yeah, I definitely agree with that—I think a pretty common issue is people entering into people management on the basis of their skills at research, and they don’t seem particularly likely to be correlated. I also think organizations sometimes struggle to provide pathways to more senior roles outside of management too, and that seems like an issue when you have ambitious people who want to grow professionally, but no options to except people management.
I agree that this is weird. In EA operations is something like “everything that supports the core work and allows other people to focus on the core work,” while outside of EA operations is the core work of a company. Although I wish that EA hadn’t invented it’s own definition for operations, at this point I don’t see any realistic options for it changing.
Is there a word in the rest-of-the-world that means “everything that supports the core work and allows other people to focus on the core work?”
I have an answer for this now: line functions and staff functions. Line functions do the core work on the organization, while staff function “supports the organization with specialized advisory and support functions.”
My vague impression is that this labelling/terminology is fairly common among high-level management types, but that people in general likely wouldn’t be familiar with it.
I took a minute to think about what sort of org has a natural distinction between “core work” and “non-core-work”.
A non-EA example would be a Uni research lab. There are usually a clear distinction between
research (core work)
teaching (possibly core work, depending on who you ask)
and admin (everting else)
Where the role of admin seems similar to EA ops.
Most organizations do not divide tasks between core and non-core. The ones that do (and are probably most similar to a lot of EA orgs) are professional services ones
I think there isn’t a single term (although I’m certainly not an expert, so maybe someone with a PhD in business or a few decades of experience can come and correct me).
Finance, Marketing, Legal, Payroll, Compliance, and so on could all be departments, divisions, or teams within an organization, but I don’t know of any term used to cover all of them with the meaning of “supporting the core work.” I’m not aware of any label that is used outside of EA analogous to how “operations” is used within in EA.
“administration” ? but that sounds quite unappealing, which is why I think the EA movement has used operations.
Administration definitely sounds less appealing, but maybe it would be more honest and reduce churn?
This feels wrong to me in every non-EA company I worked at, fwiw. E.g. Google doesn’t even have a COO for the whole org, the COO for Google Consumer Hardware is the closest role I can find on a quick search.
I was surprised by this claim, so I checked every (of the 3) non-EA orgs I’ve worked at. Not only is it not true that “the COO normally has the highest number of people reporting to them after the CEO,” literally none of them even have a COO for the whole org.
To check whether my experiences were representative, I went through this list of the largest companies. It looks like of the 5 largest companies by market cap, 2 of them have COOs (Apple,
Amazon). Microsoft doesn’t have a designated COO, but they had a Chief Human Resources Officer and a Chief Financial Officer, which in smaller orgs will probably be a COO job[1]. So maybe an appropriate prior is 50%? This is a very quick spotcheck however, would be interested in more representative data.Notably, they didn’t have a CTO, which surprised me.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. My claim was not “Every organisation has a COO); it was “If an organisation has a COO, the department they manage is typically front-office rather than back-office and often the largest department”.
For Apple, they do indeed manage front-office operations: “Jeff Williams is Apple’s chief operating officer reporting to CEO Tim Cook. He oversees Apple’s entire worldwide operations, as well as customer service and support. He leads Apple’s renowned design team and the software and hardware engineering for Apple Watch. Jeff also drives the company’s health initiatives, pioneering new technologies and advancing medical research to empower people to better understand and manage their health and fitness.”
For Amazon, I couldn’t find a COO of the entire company though it looks like they exist for the business units.