Sample from the edge to get the real story

At South Park Commons fireside last night, Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks and CBO of Google for 10 years, described his version of management by walking around: Regular Zoom calls with a rotating sample of 50 employees.

How does the CEO of a $150B company have time to chat with 50 random employees?

He makes time!

When you look at the practices of successful founders and CEOs, the pattern is remarkably consistent:

• Distrust of filtered or aggregated information
• Explicit bypass of middle management
• Direct sampling from the operational edge

Six other examples (among dozens):

Bill Hewlett & David Packard, HP Founders // Coined the term “management by walking around:” Visiting as many departments as possible -- without appointments or scheduled meetings -- to talk with line workers to understand how the business was operating on the ground.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO // "Top 5 things" email: Employees email Jensen (or a list lists he monitors) the top 5 things on their mind. It's how he first uncovered the nascent opportunity for GPUs in machine learning. A couple updates from the edge mentioned experiments academic researchers were running on GPUs.

Andy Grove, Intel CEO // While structured 1:1s were key to his approach, walking through the office or fab was an essential complement. An employee with a 2-minute concern could share it in the moment. Over the course of an hour, Grove would gather a dozen or more such datapoints.

Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO // Doesn’t even bother sampling from the organization, seems to actually work (or live?) on the factory floor for periods of time.

Steve Jobs, Apple & Pixar CEO // Famous conversations in the elevator or bathroom: What is your job? What are you working on? Why is it important?

Jim Casey, UPS CEO // When traveling between meetings, Casey would have his driver to stop by UPS trucks so he could ask: How are the deliveries going? What’s frustrating? Where are we letting our customers down?

These are all careful solutions to the information scaling problem.

In the companies I've built and advised, skip and skip-skip meetings are critical. Your direct reports will give you a varnished, stage-managed version of reality, filtered at multiple layers, with all bad news suppressed.

Same principle externally: Before the fireside, Nikesh had already taken 3 customer meetings that day.

Sample from the edge to get the real story.