Peacetime CEO / Wartime CEO (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Peacetime CEO / Wartime CEO (2011)

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23 pointsandsoitis55 comments

God I hate this essay. Every time the economy goes south people repost it. I've had ceos send it to me in the past. If you are running mega corp then sure. This all very well may be true. But for just about anyone else its insane to not plan for bad years.

Save in the good years and build a war chest so instead of having 3 incredible years where you're going to Cabo for corporate retreats and you all get 250% bonuses and then 1 year where you layoff 15% of your staff...

Just have 4 fine years where you are profitable.

A "wartime" business person is a hilarious idea. Gotta feel manly somehow, I guess!

Yes. A few billion dollars wartime CEO.

War is a business

I cringe when I see businesses using the vernacular of war to describe really mundane, essentially riskless goals. One company I was at had a "war room" dedicated to... increasing MRR to the arbitrary goals they'd set that quarter. They put a sign on the door. Another CEO told us in an all hands that the company was on a "war footing" until we found product market fit, and he'd use phrases like "total war" all the time. Jesus Christ, we're nerds trying to make money for investors.

It also can be actively harmful to accomplishing the mission. It removes the sense of proportion needed to wisely weigh tradeoffs.

It suggests that people play out roles in the Drama Triangle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovrVv_RlCMw) instead of focusing on building things, solving problems, and helping each other learn.

Yes its very cringe and only appeals to a certain section of people.

At a previous company I worked at, they took this even further, organizing themselves into "squads" (teams) which were part of "platoons" (orgs). Someone that interviewed pointed out that this was pretty aggressive/warlike terminology and wondered why they used it and they didn't really have a good answer.

> certain section of people.

Veterans who are used to the terms?

More likely non-veterans trying to sound serious

I suspect people who actually went through the military would instantly spot this as ridiculous larping

I'd guess grown-up mall ninjas who never got closer to serving than TV shows.

"Squads" I don't really have a problem with - it's just "team", and is often used in sports outside the US in the same way "team" is here. Technically - it's the full roster from which the team on the field is selected - but meh, close enough.

"Platoon" feels pretty out of place. I'd have trouble not laughing every time I said it.

While using military terminology in non-military organizations is cringy, there's a good reason that military allusions come up frequently in business writing. Armies were the first large scale organizations in history and suffer from the same failure conditions except with much higher stakes. Large businesses (and similarly large governmental functions apart from the military) are much more recent inventions. The most important similarities though are a focus on logistics, team structures and specializations, as well as decision making frameworks. As a result of that, a lot of business writing is in some sense descended from military writing. And modern military writing continues to be a valuable source of wisdom in a business context because of those similarities (one of the best management books I've ever read is "Turn the ship around!" by L. David Marquet about reforming the dynamics of a nuclear submarine crew).

(Of course that doesn't stop people from cargo-culting the military without thought given to the specific context.)

Poking fun at what other people choose to hold important is childish, imo.

Because, ultimately what people choose to value is subjective, and there’s no right or wrong.

Put another way, what you perceive as valuable is equally hilarious from many others’ valid perspectives.

As long as they’re not hurting anyone, people are free to choose their own adventure.

They are not free from criticism of it though.

The idea of a “wartime” person is anchored in machismo. It romanticizes, and excuses, really crappy behavior that is long-term destructive.

Calling something a “war” is a convenient justification for all sorts of terrible, foolish actions. The “war on drugs” or the “war on cancer” are good examples. Cancer doctors would try to one up each other in how extreme they could be in their treatment of breast cancer, and it turns out a lot of those tactics, such as literally tearing out pectoral muscles down to the bone, don’t actually help patient survival. But the “wartime” framing made that kind of action without thinking okay.

So I disagree that framing things as if they are war doesn’t hurt anyone. It has. And the framing deserves critical attention, so we can find a better framing for a challenging time that requires sacrifice and effort that doesn’t turn into “the ends justify the means.”

EDIt: More on [reframing the war on cancer](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8749321/) and why it can be harmful.

Agreed, I think it’s useful to discuss whether war framing is an effective tool to create desired outcomes, but that’s beside my point. I’m addressing OP’s implication that it’s ‘hilarious’ to think running a business is worthy of a war-time framing.

This isn't just a Godfather reference?

Yeah, this. It's even quoted in the article. Picking the terminology from mafia movies is more cringeworthy than picking it from analogies to government, of course...

the idea that Page needed to step up as "wartime consigliere/CEO" in 2011 because Google was staring down existential threat if it didn't do stuff drastically differently to stave of the threat from social media is also quite funny in hindsight.

It's also funny because Google didn't change one bit since then. Stevey's Google platform rant is every bit as relevant today as it was in 2011 when it was published.

Could we add (2011) to the title?

This is from before Ben's 2014 book "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" which popularized the concept. I was expecting the link to be e.g. a new essay from Ben / a recent analysis of the concept.

Done. And thanks for motivating why you would find it useful. Makes sense to me.

Reid Hoffman extends this idea in an interesting way by talking about how you need different types of teams depending on what stage the company is at. One team to storm the beach, another team to capture the city, and another team to hold and police the city after.

In both the case of the teams and "wartime" vs "peacetime" leaders I don't think one is better than another, just different skillets for different situations.

I've sometimes heard it called the "Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners" due to this article: https://medium.com/org-hacking/pioneers-settlers-town-planne...

Basically, different people are best suited to different stages of the organizations growth. I can see how that might also apply to the CEO in crisis vs not-crisis mode.

I like this analogy even better, thanks for sharing.

A wartime CEO doesn't usually start the wars.

False dichotomy.... After being at many successful and unsuccessful companies there's definitely different vibe, on one side you as an individual are allowed creative freedom to design+deliver a large project... on the other theres a lot of fear blame, time sunk into these "core" projects eg going mobile or video First or changing Clouds or cost cutting.. they often turn out to be illconsidered wastes of time, the pretence for war is a poor excuse for this lizard brain/ groupthink/ just doing what said manager likes to do

  Peacetime CEO does not raise her voice. Wartime CEO rarely speaks in a normal tone.

Utter crap. Business people trying to compare themselves to the godfather movies to excuse their asshole behavior. Lessons from the school of Steve Jobs Worship.

I recently came across Aswath Damodaran's youtube and I like his characterization of CEOs compatible with company maturity better. A visionary CEO is a wrong fit for a mature, stable-state company.

Real Wartime CEO's say things like: "Any employee whose home was destroyed by the Russian Army may live in the office for free."

Not to make everything about him, but this peacetime/wartime lens of viewing the world is interesting to think about in light of Elon Musk taking over Twitter. You can make a case that part of Twitter's big problem in the last decade or so is that their company has been operating in sort of a relaxed peacetime mode when they really needed to be operating in a wartime frame of mind due to their lack of profitability. Elon's real challenge might be successfully dragging a kicking and screaming company into a focused wartime frame.

I think this is certainly true. But my understanding of Twitter - and this may be flawed - was that it was always a mission driven company over a profit driven one. Elon said he wanted to continue that tradition, but with the debt load Twitter is literally in an existential crisis.

So this begs the question, can Twitter be successful being “twitter”? My guess is no, Musk can make a lot of money going after video or micropayments, or X or whatever (well this has yet to be seen, My gut says Twitter is in a worse position then anyone realizes when you combine all the factors, but some people work best backed into a corner, and he’s backed by investors with deep pockets) but the free speech public square open forum has to be a passion project. There’s too many constraints otherwise.

Ship of Theseus adjacent, when does Twitter stop being “twitter”?

> Ship of Theseus adjacent, when does Twitter stop being “twitter”?

When the users that people are interested in - politicians, news organizations, certain brand accounts, celebrities - go away. The problem for Twitter is that politicians and celebrities don't really want to hang around on a platform where they have to deal with abusive content all the time.

> The problem for Twitter is that politicians and celebrities don't really want to hang around on a platform where they have to deal with abusive content all the time.

Maybe. At a certain point, that's probably true, but are we close to that?

Sometimes you have to look at what people do, not what they say.

It costs a celebrity nothing to say nice things about seeking peace and love and opposing hatred and wanting to fight all of the "hate speech" and "cyber-bullying" they see. In fact, they gain social capital for saying these things, so if you're a celebrity, you're effectively "leaving money on the table" by not talking in a certain way about certain topics.

But it costs a celebrity a lot to actually leave a platform where they have some world-shaping influence. My guess is that most celebrities would figuratively crawl through a field of broken glass to get their fix of attention and kudos from their supporters.

> My guess is that most celebrities would figuratively crawl through a field of broken glass to get their fix of attention and kudos from their supporters.

Yeah I think the network effects are stronger than anyone would like to admit. I think Twitter has a lot of challenges going forward and my analytical read of the situation says he’ll fail, but my gut says he’ll succeed, now it just remains to be seen — succeed at what?

Instinct is jet fuel to help work through uncertainty.

I think most of my instinct is just fear of going against the “smart money” support of Elon.

A couple of months ago Elon posted some notes on usage that indicated that the users with huge followings were in fact going away. This was later confirmed by a leaked internal research document[1]. So yes; we are close to that and quite possibly are at that point already.

It's not clear to me that any of the changes he's made so far are oriented towards reversing that flow. It's possible that he didn't actually care about that, I suppose.

1. https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweet...

> Sometimes you have to look at what people do, not what they say.

At least in the "science bubble", I've seen a lot of people say they are fed up and moving to Mastodon. And particularly regarding COVID, it's clear why: they already had to fight insane amounts of trolls and deniers before Musk bought Twitter, and now Musk has made clear he's going for the radical-libertarian interpretation of "free speech" - evidenced by a ton of far-right trolls coming back or, worse, getting the real blue checkmark [1].

That means that the sane voices providing facts and context slowly leave, which is objectively bad as it allows misinformation to go uncontested, and leading more people to leave.

FFS, even here on Hacker News one can clearly see on any debate that touches COVID that positions advocating for continuing combatting the pandemic get downvoted.

[1] https://twitter.com/TabitaSurge/status/1592895889575915523

> positions advocating for continuing combatting the pandemic get downvoted

NOTE: My goal here is not to abjudicate Covid or any other contentious topic, but to try and give a brief explanation of the disconnect between people in the "science bubble" and those you call "far-right trolls".

You've never actually been disagreeing about science. You've been disagreeing about risk-management decisions.

What I think a lot of scientists have gotten wrong, particularly in the last few years with covid but also with bigger topics like climate change, is that science is a totally different field from risk-management.

A scientist can give you data about the world via the scientific method. A scientist can tell you that Covid is ~X% lethal for a woman at 57 years of age or that a medical treatment is ~Y% effective when administered within 48 hours of infection, or that a medical treatment poses ~Z% risk of complications.

But a scientist can't tell you what decisions to make in light of that data. A scientist can't use science to tell you objectively whether or not it's worth ruining the world economy and social cohesion to fight a particular illness, or whether or not some individual who experiences X% risk of a disease should take a medication with a Y% risk of complications. That decision making process is never science: that is risk-management.

Unfortunately, much of the politicized science in the last few years has taken the form of risk-management. You have scientists on very difficult topics saying things like "The science says we must do X, Y, and Z" when this is false. An objectively correct human action or decision is never the outcome of any science experiment.

While I think you're absolutely correct in theory there are a lot of people on the risk management side using bad data to argue the opposite. Personally I know for people in my life it's not enough to discuss the fact that the COVID Vaccine may or may not be as effective as the media says, we're not talking percentages of effectiveness, but they'll send me articles with no data implying that vaccines kill kids (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170075/). Or Articles like Alex Berensons misleadingly taking half of a graph from a 40 page report out of context: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/nov/30/alex-beren...

I think there's a pretty narrow set of people actually trying to have the debates you mention, and I agree the world would be a much better place if we did.

I suspect it's because if you want an audience, it's really hard to get people excited about a few percentage points of different risk.

Looking at some content there, „abusive“ is relative to say the least.

I think Twitter can continue to operate and even be profitable. But without completely adding a new product offering it's hard for me to imagine it growing to be worth a lot more than what Elon paid for it.

> I think Twitter can continue to operate and even be profitable

Im curious to hear more on this, in my mind the biggest problem with adding a new product offering would be diluting the text based content which may drive people to more “entertaining / TikTok” content than text content, I think one reason Twitter works as the public square is _because_ text is low effort for celebs/politicians/journalists/etc. Hard to imagine journalists driving as much traffic to their articles over video, especially if you go the Instagram route of starting to prioritize video over classic format (text/images) Again twitter as public square, not Twitter as some yet to be defined TikTok rival)

I just think there's a limit to how far optimizing the code and cutting costs is going to get him. I heard twitter was making a push to be more worldwide in its reach which could maybe work I guess. As it is though I don't know how much more he can drive usage of this product. I don't have any real product ideas for them myself. But they either need to drive ad revenue or come up with a compelling paid option. Maybe they can build on tweetdeck and make that a premium $$ feature? Maybe they start charging for api access.

It is more public now but Elon has always operated this way. A book about paypal: The Founders, describes their constant war to survive and he obviously thrives in that environment.

Which is why the Elon Twitter doomsayers are not likely to be right in the end. He has a method and it is rough and certain type of employee that fits his operating style.

Twitter culture just the complete opposite which is why there is such an internal war.

Companies often seem to employ terms related to armed conflict to heighten the sense of urgency and action.

In reality noone working at a software company is "getting their asses shot off" or even "goes to war".

Stop using silly terms like that in business. We are not here to murder people or commit genocide, using this vernacular diminishes and marginalizes the immense suffering of humans caught in an actual war for any reason.

I get it, war seems "cool" from far away and action movies/games, but I can assure you it is not.

edit: fix typos

The analogy is apt because war is an existential threat for the nation. Similarly, competition is an existential threat to the business.

I don’t think this is about war being cool so much as competition in the market place can kill your business just like an invading army can conquer your territory.

It’s about then mindset that you should adopt. Do you suppose that it’s ok for a business to let’s it’s competitors take its clients and market share? No of course not. You have to fight to keep it and take theirs. If you are equally matched then you will likely find equilibrium in the market. If you aren’t then someone is going to get eaten.

>it’s ok for a business to let’s it’s competitors take its clients and market share?

I wonder when businesses are OK with that? Seems like something you would like to avoid always, not just when "at war" (whatever that means - did someone declare war on you?)

> using this vernacular diminishes and marginalizes the immense suffering of humans caught in an actual war for any reason.

I don’t know that anyone (or at least a sizeable number of people) in an actual war views it this way.

What is the causal link in your mind?

Should we also ban the phrase “I’m starving”? What about “I’m sick and tired…”? Upping the intensity factor, what about “the underdog annihilated the #1 ranked player”?

Yeah I see this argument a lot in the infosec industry where military terms are used quite a bit, but its never passed the sniff test. Usually the argument is that the toxicity, shitty work-life balance, and lack of minorities all comes from ex-military people or whatever, meanwhile:

- RTFM, flaming, and calling people noobs comes from IRC culture

- The OSCP (_the_ standard red team certification) is 48 hours long, the company offering it currently woman-led

- The most common background in my experience for minorities in this industry is ex-military

Im not saying we should ban any phrases, just using war talk when the worst that happens to you is you got to find another job is silly IMO. Feel free to use any ohrases you like, this is just my personal opinion, not here to police anyones speech.

Upvoting because words matter. You forgot to mention the fetishization of conflict we seem to have here in the US.

Related, I've seen many business leaders overuse sports analogies in talk. (I don't really follow sports that much.) The message ends up being very white male cis, and not inclusive. It muddies the message, especially in tech companies with a diverse group of employees.

+ international folks, who have no clue what American "football" is, where many of these terms come from.

The need to like/watch sports and be fluid in this vernacular has been the no.1 reason why I have been put off from any foray into management, tbh. Its so childish to hear grown men (its generally always men) engage in banter around sports. Just because its been the norm doesn't mean its ok.

> white male cis

I think this stereotyping is unnecessary and divisive. I mean, there’s whole countries that are not run by white men! Plenty of white men hate sports, and are not trying to be alpha males. Most US sports analogies go over my head, because we play different sports in New Zealand!

Please, could someone from a country that is not run by white males comment on the sports madness (or lack thereof) of their own business leader culture?

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