To manage that many people, it seems to me you need clear, concrete instructions.
To me, that sounds very wrong. I don’t think you can manage big organizations by giving clear concrete instructions from the top as that means that the people involved with object level reality would often have too little room to adapt to the object-level reality of what they are doing.
It might still work well at the current size of Lightcone but the management of >100 people organizations is a lot about setting the right incentives.
I agree. This sounds like a manifesto for how to be effective at <100, and in a way that some people won’t like, but that’s fine for a “startup” to filter on things like that since you don’t need to hire a lot of people and can be pickier. Lots of this sounds like stuff that will blow up if there’s more than a Dunbar number of humans around.
Interesting—I interpreted this section differently, and yet I think it ultimately cashes out as agreeing with your comment about incentives.
In my reading, the clear concrete instructions are about the priorities, and about how to communicate. From the rest of the post I understood clearly that this means instructions like:
Priority 1 this week is X. In any decision with a tradeoff between X and Y, choose X.
Work on X for the next 4 hours after this meeting. Do not work on anything else.
Schedule miscellaneous meetings on Tuesdays. Do not schedule them on any other day.
Etc.
I think this cashes out as setting good incentives because these kinds of instructions make it very easy to evaluate the goodness of decisions, going as far as to effectively make a bunch of them automatically. I feel like we always have an incentive to go with the easy decision, and always have an incentive to follow instructions, which neatly screens off some bad things. In this way, the incentives are properly aligned.
Imagine Tesla implementing those rules. Whatever priority you set as X, it likely doesn’t make sense that both the people putting solar tiles on people’s roofs and the people writing code for automated cars work on X.
To me, that sounds very wrong. I don’t think you can manage big organizations by giving clear concrete instructions from the top as that means that the people involved with object level reality would often have too little room to adapt to the object-level reality of what they are doing.
It might still work well at the current size of Lightcone but the management of >100 people organizations is a lot about setting the right incentives.
I agree. This sounds like a manifesto for how to be effective at <100, and in a way that some people won’t like, but that’s fine for a “startup” to filter on things like that since you don’t need to hire a lot of people and can be pickier. Lots of this sounds like stuff that will blow up if there’s more than a Dunbar number of humans around.
Interesting—I interpreted this section differently, and yet I think it ultimately cashes out as agreeing with your comment about incentives.
In my reading, the clear concrete instructions are about the priorities, and about how to communicate. From the rest of the post I understood clearly that this means instructions like:
Priority 1 this week is X. In any decision with a tradeoff between X and Y, choose X.
Work on X for the next 4 hours after this meeting. Do not work on anything else.
Schedule miscellaneous meetings on Tuesdays. Do not schedule them on any other day.
Etc.
I think this cashes out as setting good incentives because these kinds of instructions make it very easy to evaluate the goodness of decisions, going as far as to effectively make a bunch of them automatically. I feel like we always have an incentive to go with the easy decision, and always have an incentive to follow instructions, which neatly screens off some bad things. In this way, the incentives are properly aligned.
Imagine Tesla implementing those rules. Whatever priority you set as X, it likely doesn’t make sense that both the people putting solar tiles on people’s roofs and the people writing code for automated cars work on X.