The Management  

Joel Spolsky, in a guest post at A VC:

Most TV management is of the “command and control” variety. The CEO makes a decision, and tells his lieutenants. They convey this important decision to the teams, who execute on the CEO’s decision. It’s top-down management. […]

Stop thinking of the management team at the top of the organization. Start thinking of the software developers, the designers, the product managers, and the front line sales people as the top of the organization. […]

Administrators aren’t supposed to make the hard decisions. They don’t know enough. All those super genius computer scientists that you had to recruit from MIT at great expense are supposed to make the hard decisions. That’s why you’re paying them. Administrators exist to move the furniture around so that the people at the top of the tree can make the hard decisions.

Later:

And yes, you’re right, Steve Jobs didn’t manage this way. He was a dictatorial, autocratic asshole who ruled by fiat and fear. Maybe he made great products this way. But you? You are not Steve Jobs. You are not better at design than everyone in your company. You are not better at programming than every engineer in your company. You are not better at sales than every salesperson in the company.

I think Spolsky is actually wrong about Steve Jobs. Jobs always said his most valuable skill was his ability to recruit; he hired smart people and then gave them “complete autonomy”–his words, in his biography, about Ives–to do their best work. Where the “dictatorial, autocratic asshole” reputation comes from is way later in the process. After the smart people Jobs recruited did great work, he criticized them ruthlessly, pushing them to do better. As an administrator should.

Jobs was the quality filter at the end of the production chain, and his management style, from what I have read, was exactly what Spolsky lays out in the linked article.

 
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I just received this email: Hi Dustin, I was curious about the Kudos button you mention in your http://dcurt.is/web-standards article. I hovered over it with my mouse pointer, and then it said “don’t move”. I didn’t move. Then it said “... Continue →