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I think this makes sense. It’s consistent with the Mythical Man Month’s concept of building a supporting cast around the specialist.

In a startup it may be faster to do everything yourself. Once you operate at scale, every hour of low value activity sucks away an hour of high value activity. I don’t respect folks who are incompetent without their admins, but I also disrespect managers too stuck in the weeds to lead.

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That's exactly what I thought of as well, and that seems to be something that founders sometimes struggle with as their companies grow: learning to work through people when at one point in time, you did everything yourself.

> I don’t respect folks who are incompetent without their admins

Yet this is exactly what the article is proposing.

If you don't do, say, Powerpoint, with enough frequency, you are effectively incompetent at it. Insourcing this to an admin practically guarantees you will be incompetent at it.

Steve Jobs had Apple create iPreach (Keynote) because Powerpoint wasted so much of his time ...

It’s a matter of degree. There are things that someone can do from a skills standpoint, but shouldn’t from a priority standpoint. (For many execs PowerPoint is in this bucket)

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