Leadership #
“leadership is holding a vision long enough for someone else to realize it for themselves.”
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You can’t “fake it” at this level. One of the most impressive things IMO about this exec was his ability to know, at a fairly low level, what every department and org in the company was doing, and to diagnose their strengths and weaknesses very quickly. We’d have quarterly day-long meetings where every department would present, and his ability to quickly hone in on critical low-level details was extremely impressive. I think he would have failed if he had just thought that his job was to “brush with broad strokes”. (Aside, this did NOT mean he was a micromanager, it just meant that he had a very good understanding of the details across many departments).
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It’s important to put some structures in place where departments are forced to show some accountability for speed. For example, one metric that I actually hated at the time, but later learned to appreciate the purpose, was that individual departments were judged on the number of A/B tests they ran per month. I hated this metric at the time because I felt it was easily “gamed” - departments would run small little A/B tests like button color changes. However, after a while there were a couple of big cultural changes that had taken place: (1) the company built tools and processes that made it easier to deploy and run tests in the first place (better CI/CD pipelines, better analysis tools, etc.) which had the overall effect of letting us ship faster with higher quality, (2) while yes, there was a lot of “gaming” of count of A/B tests run in the beginning, it didn’t take that long for teams to actually run out of tests to game, and people actually put in the hard work of thinking about better tests to run, and (3) it changed our culture to become much more data-driven - it wasn’t perfect, and “data driven” can be a double-edged sword, but it was an improvement.
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