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Peacetime and Wartime
In peacetime, you know, business kind of has a product that’s working. Customers love it. There’s plenty of money in the bank. There’s not really serious competition. And so what you’re really trying to do is say, okay. How can I take this great opportunity that I have and scale it up? How can, you know, I enable the organization to do more and do it without me getting in the way and slowing it down? And so most management techniques are oriented around this. You have your goals and objectives and OKRs and KPIs, and this is all very, very effective in a peacetime context.
But, sometimes, my mentor, Andy Grove, described this very well in Only the Paranoid Survive. There’s a ten X change in kind of the competition, the supply chain, the financial macroeconomic environment, like something that takes those assumptions and makes them incorrect. Imagine you’ve built an army to fight the Cold War, and you’ve hired generals, and you have a training, set of training techniques and strategies around diplomacy and training that goes with that and so forth. And then one day, you wake up and you’re fighting ISIS, and really nothing — the people you’ve hired, the strategies you have, the goals that you have are all wrong. You don’t have time to necessarily rebuild that whole apparatus. And then everybody who works for you is kind of on the wrong game plan.
Two Ways to Adapt Your Persona
In this scenario, you can’t have a peacetime persona as a leader, and so you have to let go of consistency, is the first thing. It’s better to be right than consistent, and you have to believe that. And everything you’ve told them is wrong. In wartime, the financial plan for the year, the quarterly plan, their goals, everything is wrong. And you have to do it without hesitation or argument. Then realize that, you know, normally, in peacetime, you listen to your people and get, like, really good advice and knowledge about what they’re doing and so forth. In wartime, they have the wrong context. So what they tell you is going to be not that helpful. Most of the direction, maybe all of the direction, is going to have to come from the leader until you get reoriented to the new mission.
And so this means a lot of very fine grained decision making, what feels like micromanagement, but really quickly moving the kind of world from one place to another. When you’re in peacetime, you’re delegating, you’re empowering, you’re doing these kinds of things. When you go to wartime, you’re dictating, you’re making decisions, you’re pushing the organization in a very specific direction with very little input from them. It is a radical kind of change in what they’re used to from you, and it will be shocking a bit, you know, that transition. But it’s you know, it ends up being very, very necessary.
An example, you know, I was on the board of a company that had, you know, lost a huge portion of their revenue during COVID. And in the board meeting, the proposal from the HR department was because we lost so much revenue, the stock dropped, you know, in half of what it was. And, therefore, the offers that we made to employees were worth half what they were worth. And so we have to give all the employees more stock. And that was very, like, peacetime idea. Keep everybody in the boat. We have to retain people, etcetera. But, like, we’re in wartime now. And what I told the CEO is, look, you’re trying to keep everybody in the boat because that’s what you told your team to do, keep everybody in the boat. But your boat is leaking, and it’s three thousand miles from shore and you’re never going to make it to shore if everybody stays in the boat, you need to start throwing people overboard. And if they want to jump, that’s awesome. You’ve got to let them go. This is war. This is no longer peace time.