
How Square Defangs Difficult Decisions - mgav
http://firstround.com/review/square-defangs-difficult-decisions-with-this-system-heres-how/?ct=t(How_Does_Your_Leadership_Team_Rate_12_3_2015)
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pbreit
This reminded me of the preposterous "RASCI" at Ebay.

I never know what to think of articles like this where the subject matter
basically is an example of the opposite. Square probably has some of the worst
decision-making amongst peer companies. It had pretty much a monopoly on new
age SMB card present credit card processing and has appeared to throw much of
that away by deciding to go into all sorts of unrelated businesses. It ceded
$5b of market value to Stripe. Has been ridiculously slow to expand
internationally and bring out Apple Pay devices. And continues to burn
precious resources on unrelated, losing businesses like food delivery. And now
SPADE? Serenity now.

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icelancer
Completely agree. Square promised and promised an API for payments and I
bothered them and bothered them when my business was small and fledgling. They
never delivered, Stripe stepped in, and then Square half-assed it with the
Marketplace. Now I ship seven figures through Stripe and I'm sure many other
businesses do as well. There is no reason this should be the case.

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chillydawg
Voting with wallets is a magical thing :)

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BinaryIdiot
This entire article should have stopped after this quote: "Consensus means no
ownership. What’s important is not that everyone agrees, but that everyone is
heard and then the right person makes a decision."

The rest just reads like typical, big company bullshit non-content. But the
first few paragraphs? I agree with that a whole lot. After being in many,
many, many meetings where multiple people "own" something and it's almost
impossible to get anything done. But one owner? Even if you don't entirely
agree with the direction it's at least crystal clear.

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windowsworkstoo
Yep, well said. Decisions in 10 minutes or the next one is free. 50/50 calls
decide by a coin flip, otherwise the right call is always obvious

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marcusgarvey
This reminds me of what I've heard about MasterCard. Their CEO wanted to
empower any employee to come up with good ideas. So, if an employees sends an
idea to their manager and the manager doesn't respond, the employee has the
right to do it. But it sounds like the recipe for a shitshow, so I'd love to
know if this is really the case.

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EliRivers
This is similar to one of the most effective techniques I have for decision
making. I send an eMail to the people or person who holds the responsibility,
stating "I'm going to carry out this action tomorrow; <describe decision I've
made and action I'm taking>. This is your chance to stop me."

It is fantastically effective.

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Terr_
"My assumption about the big vague spec document is that you currently are
asking for {X} and that your end goal is {Y}, therefore I'm planning to do
{Z}."

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ISV_Damocles
Anyone else read this article as an advertisement of Gokul Rajaram to other
companies?

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pluckytree
I’ve seen a lot more success with the "hire smart people and get out of the
way" methodology of managment. If you allow people the freedom to work
together and make their own decisions in a mature manner, you don’t need these
childish techniques for making decisions. In practice, this probably makes
people feel like they are in some bizarro world than that they are an adult
entrusted with real responsibility.

A manager’s role can be reduced to keeping people on track and helping settle
contentious decisions, whether by mediating or making the decision themselves.

If I was interviewing for a company and I found out they used techniques like
this, I would get up in the middle of the interview and walk out.

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clarkevans
I think the process described has a flaw -- it has the role of "Approver" and
requires the Owner to "Run your decision and the process by the Approver."
This is problematic, since, at that point, the Approver becomes the new Owner,
and, the Decision will be formed in a way that the Owner thinks the Approver
will recognize (and perhaps not the form they believe in). In effect, this
statement invites micro-management. Interestingly enough, the author knows
this approach is problematic, because they say immediately after, "Again, the
default of the Approver should be to monitor the decision process, not
result."

Alternatively, a Vision/Retrospective process might work better, where by the
Owner's manager (the business structure) provides the higher-level vision and
then looks at the Owner's decisions and executions in retrospective. If the
poor decisions are consistently being made, it's a problem of vision or
staffing. Asking the owner to get approval for each decision removes the
owner's necessary authority, and hence undermines their ability to forge
consensus and execute with needed autonomy.

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eitally
Regardless of the framework jargon, this process is something most successful
executives internalize pretty early on in their careers. Besides being common
sense, it becomes obvious very quickly that, except in edge cases, making
quick decisions transparently based on as much data as is available will lead
to the best result. Even if the best result means iterative failure until the
actual best outcome is reached. A lot of people don't believe this at first
and pretend the "gut feel" method is best. Don't fall into that trap. In the
best case you'll have the same decision outcome, but you'll have alienated
your organization in the meantime. In the worst case, you'll have made a
terrible decision... and also alienated your organization.

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stephen
Makes sense (other than the awkward "Defangs" word in the title; I guess using
"Makes" was too clear and boring).

Reminds me a bit (just in terms of having an explicit process) of Andy Grove's
Ideal Decision Model: Free Discussion, Clear Decision, Full Support.

In particular, I liked the Full Support stage of Andy Grove's process.
Granted, could devolve into "fall in line or you're output" in weak cultures,
but in stronger cultures I think it makes sense to acknowledge that everyone
needs to accept/support a decision, whether it was their pick/favorite/etc.,
for the decision to be successful.

That tangent aside, I also liked the Square notes@ email list.

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dpeterson
Actually, when I get successful I want to publish bullfu__ery like this as
though it's valuable information

