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Management Debt

This post by Ben Horowitz is well worth the read as he discusses a few types of management debt, where a short term decision has long term consequences that you’ll have to expend energy to repay.

This quote stuck out:

Companies execute well when everybody is on the same page and everybody is constantly improving. In a vacuum of feedback, there is almost no chance that your company will perform optimally across either dimension. Directions with no corrections will seem fuzzy and obtuse. People rarely improve weakness that they are unaware of. The ultimate price you will pay for not giving feedback: systematically crappy company performance.

If you’ve read “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”, you’ll remember he talks about giving feedback all the time so that when you have to give feedback it’s not exceptional (he also talks about how this is not a normal human capacity). When you don’t set up systems for this feedback eventually you end up with a rudderless ship. There’s a reason that systematized feedback methods (the dreaded yearly review, among others) exist in almost every organization.

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