Let chaos reign and then rein in chaos

Let chaos reign and then rein in chaos. - Andy Grove

Alert strategic leadership is cognizant of the important role of both induced and autonomous processes in strategy-making, tolerates a sufficient level of uncommitted resources and looseness in control to continue to maintain a portfolio of autonomous initiatives, and is able to select at the right time those that need to be converted to the discipline of the induced process in order to cope with nonlinear strategic dynamics.1

Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.234

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. Let Chaos Reign, Then Rein In Chaos - Repeatedly: Managing Strategic Dynamics For Corporate Longevity, also Wiley Online Library ↩

  2. You and Your Research, by Richard Hamming, search "interruptions". ↩

  3. Sam Altman on Choosing Projects, Creating Value, and Finding Purpose, 24:15 ↩

  4. From Startup to Scaleup with Reid Hoffman and Sam Altman, 09:05, chaos when scaling up ↩