Item — HN Reader

If you look at the world's must successful military initiatives, many of them practiced "maneuver warfare" in which individuals were given broad goals and the ability to use their initiative to attain them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuver_warfare

Decisions should be made by those with the best information. Sometimes that person is not the leader, and opportunities should just be seized by someone at a low-level. When this happens, leadership should back these initiatives. My favourite example of this is the Battle of Arsuf during the Third Crusade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Arsuf

Richard the Lionheart of England spent weeks slowly marching down the coast with his heavily armoured cavalry/infantry, getting harassed by Saladin's faster cavalry. His army of 10k men could not attack and break formation, since Saladin's cavalry was faster and could pick off Richard's men.

Richard's goal was to wait until Saladin's horses got tired, and when that opportunity arose, charge and catch him while he was slow.

After a few weeks of nothing, suddenly one of his units (the Knights Hospitallier), led by Baldwin le Carron, started to charge on Saladin. Richard the Lionheart had no way of knowing if this was a good idea (to this day we don't know why Baldwin made his decision) but he immediately backed the charge with all 10k of his men and defeated Saladin's army.

This wasn't being lazy or poor management. Richard understood that he did not have the information needed to execute his strategy, so he delegated it to his officers.

When Baldwin le Carron made a decision Richard didn't understand, Richard didn't ask for a Jira ticket or a design doc, so he would have more information to make his decision (as a "good" manager should). He trusted his subordinates and won.

I believe software engineers are getting the wrong idea about a company being in "war mode".

If one reads military strategy, a proven tactic for leaders is outlining strategy and trusting your subordinates to execute it, because feeding information upwards takes too long.

5 comments

> When this happens, leadership should back these initiatives.

this requires trust in the "low-level" people. It also implies that the "low-level" people have sufficient power at their call to execute those initiatives, without directly involving the leadership.

This works if leadership is not under threat from the low-level people (e.g., in a democracy, where your survival is not contingent on kinship with the military's cooperation).

> He trusted his subordinates and won.

So this is why i suspect this does not work in most modern organizations : the leadership does not (or cannot) trust their subordinates to make the correct choices. In other words, the leadership doesn't want to cop the cost of a wrong decision in the hands of the "low-level" people, and insist on seeing evidence/plan/etc (which basically means they're not really deligating the decision down, but pushing the decisions up!).

This supports my hypothesis that poor management is driven by very human anxieties.

The Roman Army also left a lot of decision power to their lower levels, at least on a tactical level. They most definitely were not a democracy in the modern sense.

> Decisions should be made by those with the best information.

Sounds a lot like the Chevron Deference doctrine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40820949

"Leaders" who are overwhelmed, completely out of their depth, or both, become control freaks. They can't trust themselves, so how could they possibly trust others?

This might be a bit of an isolated example. Numerous battles against the Mongols and Turks in the middle ages start with a haphazard charge, followed by the cavalry getting out of position and completely crushed.

Seems like the success in this specific instance relied on trust between Richard and Baldwin that the latter wasn't leading the Crusaders into a classic Turkic trap.

A few kilometers into the charge, Richard called for a halt to the advance, relying on his own knowledge of Turkic/Mongol strategy. Some of his leaders kept going anyways and died, though most of his army quickly obeyed. That maintained the victory since he didn't get pulled into the trap you mentioned.

Trust cuts both ways. Senior leadership needs to be trustworthy, so when the time comes to make a decision based on information you can't easily reveal to employees, they follow you.

You need to tell people to take the initiative to charge, and cut them off before they die.

That's a difficult balance to strike. But it's how you pull off a victory against an army twice your size thousands of miles from home.

The US Marines tend to greatly value delegation. In one instance, a Colonel boarded a helicopter to direct a rescue operation. It ended his career as it was clear he either did not have the ability to delegate or had not sufficiently prepared his troops.

However, the US military actually trains leaders - extensively. And it also trains people to work in coordinated units. The more well trained a unit is, the more broadly a commander can give orders and expected a good result. There's a lot of context embedded in the training and the doctrine that informs the training.

That's because in military operations your failures tend to be existential.

Companies with monopoly positions have no such outlook on their operations.

Except for Scott Forstall, apparently.