Scott Porad

My friend Cody lives on the top very large hill outside the city of Seattle with an absolutely spectactular 270° view.  On Sunday, we were out on his deck enjoying a bottle of wine, discussing how things were at our respective companies.

As those of you who are regular readers know, I work at Cheezburger which is a very small little company and where just about everyone is a jack-of-all-trades.  On the other hand, Cody is a vice president at a Fortune 100 multi-national corporation.  It was interesting discussing the contrast in our jobs and companies.  This led to my better understanding the different roles that exist in a company.

View of Seattle from Somerset

As we saw it, the job of a manager is to direct resources toward completing a task or tasks.  Executives set goals and strategy, and communicate those to managers so that the managers are working on the right set of tasks.

But, the job of an “executive” does not stop at setting the goals and strategies.  In fact, that’s only where it begins: the real job of an executive is to have a system for constantly evaluating and adapting the goals and strategy to the customer marketplace.

As we discussed our most positive and negative work experiences, this distinction became clear by noticing the behaviors of executives, especially in times of crisis.  We saw that in times of crisis, low-quality executives tended to act like managers.  That is, in times of failing goals and strategy the response was to jump in and direct resources.  In part, we speculated, because most execs worked their way up the ranks as managers.

Another way of looking at it is to say that the lower quality executives did not have the skills, or had not implemented systems, for evaluating and adapting strategy.  When business was good, this issue was masked by success.  But, in times of crisis they substituted strategic planning with resource management.  In other words, they winged it.

Interestingly, this realization helped clarify my own thinking from The Peace Bubble post:

At Cheezburger, one of the cultural attitudes we’re working hard to develop is [being] methodical about testing what we do, so that we can learn from it, regardless of whether or not it succeeds or fails.

In other words, to be more successful we want to ensure that we have executive skills in addition to manager skills.  Methodical testing of performance is one type of executive skill.

Yet, in a small company, like a startup, these are not jobs that belong to a specific person because there just aren’t enough people.  As a result, I think it’s healthier not to think about these as jobs, but rather capabilities of the team.