The War-time Operator
Founder-mode isn't the only option for companies entering wartime.
An oft-misapplied concept
Ben Horowitz has a piece called War-time CEO / Peace-time CEO. It’s an excellent read, with plenty of insights.
I’ve found though that many who read it come away with the over-simplified impression that it’s all or nothing - either you’re always directly involved in everything with no process during war-time or you’re always delegating everything into a perfect process during peace-time. That’s not what the piece says, yet the conclusion seems to be common.
The consequence of that simplification chain leads to people bucketing Operators into peace-time and bypassing operations completely once war-time rolls around.
In reality - there’s a messy middle where operators excel, helping companies navigate the uncomfortable period between the two extreme states of peace-time and war-time and ensuring war-time doesn’t break things that didn’t need to break.
When war-time hits, people at companies don’t just shift suddenly, ready to execute. Their operations don’t magically optimize themselves. The structure doesn’t remodel automatically. People often just stay stuck in peacetime operations, or start jumping ship, deteriorating the situation further.
Transitioning to war-time is a massively disruptive event, and the default mode is to break many things and keep them broken in the name of moving fast and breaking things.
In reality - moving fast and breaking things is irresponsible when your alternative option was to move fast and not break things.
After the break
Afterwards, it requires leadership and change to put back together - skills that are, by the time they are needed, gone from the organization.
Some companies brute-force their way through crisis. Few have people with the depth in putting the pieces back together. They do the best they can, but suffer losses that didn’t need to be lost, sacrifice gains that didn’t need to be sacrificed. They survive, but at a higher cost than they actually needed to pay.
Surviving is not thriving. It takes another skillset entirely to take a company in a crisis and thrive. That’s where effective wartime operators can help companies excel in times of turbulence, all while supporting providing a structure that can leverage the benefits founder-mode brings.
Thriving is thriving
What do wartime operators actually do?
Understand the entire system and its influences and pulling the key levers - first, second, and third order effects providing leverage
Focus on the high leverage to maintain high effectiveness for effort, which critically matters in crisis.
Make effective, rapid decisions and communications to prevent ambiguity and alignment drift
Don’t allow delays to fester for more than minutes - measure wait times in seconds.
Supervise, and in some cases step into, execution to ensure sufficient quality and speed as context dictates
Be more attentive to specific key details - but spend your energy on the things that really matter.
Improve efficiency of operations and execution, ensuring economy of limited resources and effort, including violating bypassing operations when needed
Maintain the minimum bar of operations necessary to keep things from creating new fires and adjust the rituals that don’t provide the ROI.
Rally teams around challenges to maintain and increase morale through difficult times
People won’t be motivated because everything is calm, people will be motivated because the waters are choppy and they are showing their strength
Change perspectives to see and capture opportunities, lifting team out of ruminating on failures
Doing better the next time should be baked in to the culture.
Focus teams on the critical priorities, factoring in urgency, importance, risk, effort, and a dozen other tradeoffs rapidly
Instead of ‘everything is critical’, focus on what is actually critical
Preserve and improve organizational knowledge for the post-crisis transition
The company needs to survive its survival.
This is different than peace-time operations. In a crisis context, you don’t get effective outcomes through taking actions that align with the traditional peace-time management that seems the default of much of the advice out there:
“Get everyone’s opinions so they feel included and bought in”
”Give people stretch goals so they can grow”
”Get data and evidence on processes before acting to make good decisions”
“Leave 20% time for self-directed education and training to support teams“
“Let people define the ‘how’ so that you don’t micromanage and ruin autonomy“
“Let the team run some experiments to see what happens”
This ‘sage advice’ just contributes to the spiral during wartime.
That’s not to say the outcomes they achieve aren’t important: buy-in is still important, growth is still important, good decisions are still important, leveraging individual skills is still important, understanding effects is still important. It’s just during a crisis, you have to achieve the same outcomes differently. The mechanism must change with the operating environment,
If you follow a peace-time playbook during war-time, you’ll feel good about your ideals but your organization will fail.
This is where a lot of leaders that step in during crisis fail to mitigate losses or recognize further gains - they ditch the peacetime practices without necessarily preserving the outcomes with wartime variants. As a result, people leave, morale suffers, costs increase, and it makes it that much harder to get through the tunnel, if they do at all.
I expect to see more crises
Company stabilization and transformation during existential stress has historically been a very, very small subset of lifecycle events.
Most of the time, it’s been limited to fairly predictable stages:
Startups going through different lifecycle phases, from build to MVP to scale-up
Companies getting disrupted by internal or external market shocks
Already fragile organizations that suddenly become hit with the wrong combination of events simultaneously - key departures, client churn
With the advent of AI, I expect to see far more crises at companies.
External malicious actors can expose a company’s secrets more rapidly. The opportunity for internal mistakes increases ten-fold due to increased risk surface area and system connectivity with LLMs. People secretly burnt out from worry both due to macro-economic and industry trends suddenly encounter the straw that breaks their back. Acceleration of output and execution can overwhelm those downstream of the value chain. Deception and bypassing of traditional governance controls such as in hiring has become easier for even unsophisticated actors.
Everything is more flammable now - and there’s more and more people running around with flamethrowers. Unresilient organizations will burn.
Leaders would do well to apply their peacetime methods to help alleviate some of the potential risks, but also prepare their wartime toolkit before the inevitable crisis occurs.
What can leaders do to prepare?
That’s the magic question, isn’t it?
Train your teams on wartime principles - adaptability, pro-activity, willingness to step across boundaries, initiative
Train your teams on leveraging AI - a tool is less scary once people figure out how to leverage it
Train your teams on a forward-looking mindset - AI isn’t coming to replace their jobs, it’ll help them expand their roles and opportunities
Automate downstream for an increase in scale - whether that’s reviews, delivery artifacts, etc. - make sure your downstream processes can operate at the scale of an ever-increasing input while maintaining the bars you have
Build in buffer - some organizations have done cuts to run leaner and more efficient, but some have overdone it to the point of creating systemic fragility - there’s no room to handle acute disruption in a perfectly efficient organization. A wrench in a gear will break the whole system without backup gears.
Map your system - dependencies exist everywhere in an organization. You want to know what you need to do, how it needs to happen, and what their dependencies are. That way, you are aware of key risks - and can mitigate them pro-actively.
Build resilience - your team needs to embrace adaptability, change, and direct intervention, not fight against it. Prepare their mindsets ahead of time, bake in collaboration vs. hand-offs.
Aim for efficiency - Teach people how they can do their jobs faster and more efficiently. The key: don’t be overly efficient. Build the capability but never fully saturate it.
Build teams that work well together but also can work independently and fully own end-to-end things by themselves, while keeping others in the loop.
Build up the capability to project out plans into the future, but with an understanding that no plan survives contact with reality and rapid changes may be required.
Build up rapid ways to collect feedback and input from the team, while still ensuring that decision-makers are clear and there’s an understanding that it’s not a vote.
Build up a tolerance for being told ‘how’ while providing space for improvements to occur after efficient execution achieves the goal.
What does this enable?
Turns out, effective war-time operations enables more effective founder-mode.
If effective war-time operations are set up, it enables a leader to apply their founder-mode to exactly where it is needed and provide leverage. Instead of throwing the entire organization into chaos, they can focus and push forward key leverage points while the rest of the company operates tightly, effectively, efficiently, and with stability - providing the structure necessary to direct and leverage founder-mode efforts in the places it is needed most.
Not all operators can do this
A thing that is true from that article - many, many operators established their careers solely in peace-time contexts.
The phrase “sweet summer child” comes to mind.
When hit with crisis, their operations break, and they fall into chaos. They can’t handle the stress, they don’t have the skills to execute, and they try to delegate in a time when it requires direct intervention and complete rework of the established processes.
These folks fall behind. Their organizations become almost useless as they attempt to preserve instead of transform. They are rightfully and more effectively replaced by war-time founder-mode leaders.
Like the piece said, it does require true understanding of management and leadership fundamentals, and a flip in mindset. At the same time - it doesn’t require throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
All other things held equal, in wartime, effectiveness can be stack-ranked for war-time:
Peace-time operation is less effective than founder-mode which is less effective than a war-time operations which is less effective than war-time operations supported by war-time operations.
Put another way - you go from ‘bad’ to ‘good’ to ‘great’ to ‘excellent’.
Wartime operators provide can help a company entering crisis to preserve the outcomes that matter while changing the mechanisms that achieve those outcomes to operate fast enough for the new environment. Effective war-time operations can reduce the friction and heavy costs of war-time and even leave the company better than it was in peace-time.
Gefroh is a product and engineering leader in Kirkland, Washington. He often writes about Leadership, Management, Operations, AI, and Product Engineering. He has never actually watched Game of Thrones.