There is one gap that I identified for which I am ultimately responsible as CTO, culture, that I would like to cover and help us adjust. It relates to what we expect out of managers at Nexar.

Most “traditional” hi-tech career management approaches follow the up-or-out career model for the management track. Sometimes it was explicit (you were actually managed out if you did not promote), and sometimes it was passive (you stalled and received zero salary increases). The rationale of the model was to pick the best managers out of the system. “Best” in this model means those that are able to:

  • Scale themselves to manage larger teams
  • Accept and deliver on bigger responsibilities.
  • Become tremendously astute and sharp at cutting down to the chase
  • Boil down things to very simple choices, so that decisions can be made really quickly
  • Thrive at corporate politics, which are necessary to push an agenda.

These managers are generals, and in fact the troops respect them highly, as they are powerful by authority, and there is a certain aura of threat. I call these managers the “Generals”. When you consider the early armies of the Chinese Empire, these are exactly the type of individuals that would go up the military ranks.

As Generals gain in their tactical execution knowledge, they sharpen strategic thinking and accept and deliver bigger responsibilities, they have less time to be in the details. And most times, they don’t need to nor should they. A bottom-up synthesis of problems and solutions is usually better for making larger complex decisions than diving into a lot of detail that would otherwise hide the signal amongst all the noise. The model is designed for the Generals to find amazing lieutenants who make the General successful. A high performance team (HPT) can help the decision making and quickly adjust course. It’s an extremely powerful management model, that in fact scales really well. That’s why it’s popular.

However … Generals are for peacetime. (Horowitz talks about a similar concept in the context of the top executive management - wartime CEO and peacetime CEO).

When companies go through distress and war comes, most existing Generals get shaken up, set aside at the war theatre. New blood is quickly promoted to higher responsibility. Those who have not been sitting at the board room and still have a very operational hat and mindset are promoted to quickly iterate at the field. This is because, in distressed situations, the winning strategy is to continuously observe and change action. In 9 out 10 combat situations, the F-16 beat the MIG-29, despite the MIG being a faster plane, with much better technology and weapons. But the pilots in the F-19 knew that, and continuously acquired a strategy, observed, and adjusted their behaviour, whereas the MIG-29 proceed according to plan. This is no different in the business and technology world.

I had been worried about us not being able to scale our organisation: hire fast enough, train fast enough, develop software fast enough, scale our system fast (and cheaply), and provide a competitive Service Level Agreement to our customer. I had been thinking that we need Generals, with some technical chops, but that as people promote up, they need less technical chops, and more quick decision making, on bigger decisions. While I think learning how to make bigger decisions faster, and better, sometimes with partial information is a critical skill, I’ve also come to realise that not having technical chops is a handicap in the culture we want to build. Hence the General model won’t work for us. We don’t want to scale with Generals.

We want to scale with Heroes.

Meta (Facebook) is probably one of the few hi-tech companies that enforces the need for any new hire, at any level, including SVPs, to take a feature and implement it into production in their first 3 weeks at the company. While this may seem extreme and counterproductive, at least according to the “classic book of business” since these managers time could be better spent solving 100x more problems across tens of teams than focusing on coding something into production, it is a forcing function into making everybody a Hero. You know that when things get rough, even the SVPs will roll up their sleeves and start looking at monitoring charts, doing network analysis, looking at database profiling and inspecting the code.

John Williams is probably one the best modern composers alive, and a huge part of his success is that he’s not just a composer, he is a conductor and virtuoso pianist. These SVPS are no just a great composer, they are also the best conductors and exceptional players.

The manager we want at Nexar is the Hero. The Hero exhibits most traits of the General but differs in others:

  • It manages large organisations by influence, not authority.
  • Heroes are respected for their know-how, their wins, and looked up as a role model.
  • Heroes don’t want to manage large orgs. In fact the initially refuse. They just happen to manage them because they like the adventure it represents. The org is a tool, not an objective.
  • Heroes have continued internal doubts about their own abilities and capabilities, and go through periods of failure.
  • Heroes always bounce back, external triggers always help the Hero come back up stronger than before. External triggers are usually competitive attacks, incidents, etc. that force the Hero into Hero mode.
  • Heroes seem lucky to leverage external triggers to win, time after time. “We were lucky this time” would be something you will hear over and over from a Hero.

They are the Heroes. Heroes are admired and inspirational. Everybody looks up to them. We want our managers to be Heroes. And we want our individual contributors to keep being Heroes.

Nexar’s team is strong because with Heroes it quickly goes through the journey:

  • We do not like problems and try to keep away from them
  • But when faced with problems we quickly react to them
  • We don’t develop contingency upon contingency to avoid problems, becoming highly conservative, but rather we plan for success and deal with failures
  • We are quick to observe, quick to analyse, quick to react
  • We don’t want hierarchies, we want details
  • We want everybody to provide solutions, not meta-approaches for how to come with solutions
  • We celebrate wins, and even better frequent wins

To finalise this positioning post, although Generals are good for certain organisations and times, they are not what we need at Nexar. Although being able to abstract yourself from many details and work on principles may be useful at IBM or Google, it’s not at Nexar. We want every manager to be a Hero. Our employees expect their managers to be a Hero and look up to them.

We are and will continue to grow into the future as a team of Heroes.

In order to deepen this culture of Heroes, we want all R&D hires to code something into production within 3 weeks. Take something small from the backlog, usually a bug, and work on getting it through production. And this must happen within 3 weeks. The main task ahead of us is that we will need to sharpen our onboarding, make our tools more accessible, and document things through so that anybody can quickly get productive and learn our systems.

Be a Nexar Hero!