Ben Horowitz, when he was CEO at Loudcloud/Opsware, required his managers to read H.O. Management. Here's the foreword he wrote for a recent edition:
Thanks, really enjoyed that foreword and it really pushed High Output Management up on my reading list. Plus as a bonus I finally learned the name of "The Peter Principle" (the idea that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their level of incompetence).
Re:What do executives do, anyway?
by sixdimensional on Saturday September 28, 2019 @12:54AM
(#21098538)
The Peter Principle book is awesome too, by the way. Highly recommended!
The peter principle and the dunning kruger effect define the majority of leadership I see these days.
High Output Management is required reading at my startup. But so is Horowitz's book [0], which I think is actually better.
[0]: https://smile.amazon.com/Hard-Thing-About-Things-Building/dp...
I've worked in organizations where the company strategy was poorly defined and this led to confusion and misalignment at the lower levels. I remember talking to some of my coworkers, wondering whether we had an issue with our executive team. It's interesting to think that it's not the role of the exec team to set strategy, and the issue may have been with the management layer below the exec team. Then again, maybe the problem was with the culture/value of diffuse ownership set by the exec team...