I donāt 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 āOperationsā is not used in the same way outside EA. In EA, it normally seems to mean āeverything back office that the CEO doesnāt care about as long as itās 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. Iāve 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 donāt 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, Iāll caveat this by saying I work in operations for a large (by EA standards) organization that might have more ānormalā operations due to its size.
The term āOperationsā is not used in the same way outside EA. In EA, it normally seems to mean āeverything back office that the CEO doesnāt care about as long as itās 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 donāt think this is fully accurate ā my impression is that āoperationsā 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 Iād expect in EA, which is basically working on admin /ā finance /ā HR /ā legal compliance, etc and some intersections with fundraising/ācomms. At lots of small nonprofits (like EA ones), these jobs are staffed necessarily generalists ā 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. Iāve worked at a bunch of US nonprofits outside of EA and all of them had staff with titles like āOperations Directorā or āOperations Coordinatorā who basically did the same thing as Iād 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 Iāve 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 donāt 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 Assistantās 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 āadministrative expense ratioā) 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 donāt think this is necessarily intentional, but a pretty undesirable effect of having fewer ops staff. I donāt 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 āoperationsā and your point about the COO being āOperatingā rather than āOperationsā 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 Iād argue they probably shouldnāt 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 shouldnāt be managers.
Yeah, I definitely agree with thatāI think a pretty common issue is people entering into people management on the basis of their skills at research, and they donāt 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 āsupports the organization with specialized advisory and support functions.ā
My vague impression is that this labelling/āterminology is fairly common among high-level management types, but that people in general likely wouldnāt 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 isnāt a single term (although Iām 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 donāt know of any term used to cover all of them with the meaning of āsupporting the core work.ā Iām not aware of any label that is used outside of EA analogous to how āoperationsā is used within in EA.
This feels wrong to me in every non-EA company I worked at, fwiw. E.g. Google doesnāt 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 Iāve worked at. Not only is it not true that āthe COO normally has the highest number of people reporting to them after the CEO,ā 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 doesnāt 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 wasnāt clear. My claim was not āEvery organisation has a COO); it was āIf an organisation has a COO, the department they manage is typically front-office rather than back-office and often the largest departmentā.
For Apple, they do indeed manage front-office operations: āJeff Williams is Appleās chief operating officer reporting to CEO Tim Cook. He oversees Appleās entire worldwide operations, as well as customer service and support. He leads Appleās renowned design team and the software and hardware engineering for Apple Watch. Jeff also drives the companyās health initiatives, pioneering new technologies and advancing medical research to empower people to better understand and manage their health and fitness.ā
For Amazon, I couldnāt find a COO of the entire company though it looks like they exist for the business units.
I donāt 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 āOperationsā is not used in the same way outside EA. In EA, it normally seems to mean āeverything back office that the CEO doesnāt care about as long as itās 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. Iāve 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 donāt 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, Iāll caveat this by saying I work in operations for a large (by EA standards) organization that might have more ānormalā operations due to its size.
I donāt think this is fully accurate ā my impression is that āoperationsā 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 Iād expect in EA, which is basically working on admin /ā finance /ā HR /ā legal compliance, etc and some intersections with fundraising/ācomms. At lots of small nonprofits (like EA ones), these jobs are staffed necessarily generalists ā 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. Iāve worked at a bunch of US nonprofits outside of EA and all of them had staff with titles like āOperations Directorā or āOperations Coordinatorā who basically did the same thing as Iād 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 Iāve 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 Assistantās 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 āadministrative expense ratioā) 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 donāt think this is necessarily intentional, but a pretty undesirable effect of having fewer ops staff. I donāt 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 āoperationsā and your point about the COO being āOperatingā rather than āOperationsā 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 Iād argue they probably shouldnāt 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 shouldnāt be managers.
Yeah, I definitely agree with thatāI think a pretty common issue is people entering into people management on the basis of their skills at research, and they donāt 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 āeverything that supports the core work and allows other people to focus on the core work,ā while outside of EA operations is the core work of a company. Although I wish that EA hadnāt invented itās own definition for operations, at this point I donāt see any realistic options for it changing.
Is there a word in the rest-of-the-world that means āeverything that supports the core work and allows other people to focus on the core work?ā
I have an answer for this now: line functions and staff functions. Line functions do the core work on the organization, while staff function āsupports the organization with specialized advisory and support functions.ā
My vague impression is that this labelling/āterminology is fairly common among high-level management types, but that people in general likely wouldnāt be familiar with it.
I took a minute to think about what sort of org has a natural distinction between ācore workā and ānon-core-workā.
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 isnāt a single term (although Iām 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 donāt know of any term used to cover all of them with the meaning of āsupporting the core work.ā Iām not aware of any label that is used outside of EA analogous to how āoperationsā is used within in EA.
āadministrationā ? 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 doesnāt 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 Iāve worked at. Not only is it not true that āthe COO normally has the highest number of people reporting to them after the CEO,ā 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 doesnāt 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 didnāt have a CTO, which surprised me.
Sorry if I wasnāt clear. My claim was not āEvery organisation has a COO); it was āIf an organisation has a COO, the department they manage is typically front-office rather than back-office and often the largest departmentā.
For Apple, they do indeed manage front-office operations: āJeff Williams is Appleās chief operating officer reporting to CEO Tim Cook. He oversees Appleās entire worldwide operations, as well as customer service and support. He leads Appleās renowned design team and the software and hardware engineering for Apple Watch. Jeff also drives the companyās health initiatives, pioneering new technologies and advancing medical research to empower people to better understand and manage their health and fitness.ā
For Amazon, I couldnāt find a COO of the entire company though it looks like they exist for the business units.