Thanks for writing this. I feel like it’s written with an implication of something like “you can be bad at management but eventually learn”, but I think another theory is something more like “you can win the lottery without being good at math”.
E.g. a common explanation for the success of the PayPal mafia is that they became rich when everyone else in tech became poor, and were therefore able to purchase stakes in a bunch of companies and then just join the most successful or otherwise get an “unfair” advantage. This seems roughly true of Musk, as I understand it.
Another interpretation is something like “executive people management either doesn’t matter, or matters in a way substantially different from how people usually think it should matter.” Successful executives have a wide range of approaches (including, as you point out, some which seem intuitively terrible), and one interpretation of this is that your approach actually doesn’t matter very much. I’ve remarked before that there seemed to be surprisingly few robustly good management practices.
I’m curious whether you have opinions about which of these interpretations are correct, or if there’s something else you take away from these stories?
Thanks for writing this. I feel like it’s written with an implication of something like “you can be bad at management but eventually learn”, but I think another theory is something more like “you can win the lottery without being good at math”.
E.g. a common explanation for the success of the PayPal mafia is that they became rich when everyone else in tech became poor, and were therefore able to purchase stakes in a bunch of companies and then just join the most successful or otherwise get an “unfair” advantage. This seems roughly true of Musk, as I understand it.
Another interpretation is something like “executive people management either doesn’t matter, or matters in a way substantially different from how people usually think it should matter.” Successful executives have a wide range of approaches (including, as you point out, some which seem intuitively terrible), and one interpretation of this is that your approach actually doesn’t matter very much. I’ve remarked before that there seemed to be surprisingly few robustly good management practices.
I’m curious whether you have opinions about which of these interpretations are correct, or if there’s something else you take away from these stories?