This week’s episode of SWS contains a podcast with Reid Hoffman, another podcast describing the story of Mars Inc. and a summary of a HBR essay on the work of effective general managers.
Welcome back to this week’s episode of Ctrl+V: Stuff Worth Sharing. As always, I have read and listened to far too much media. The highlights of my weekly consumption I want to share with you.
🎧 Reid Hoffman on the Diary Of A CEO podcast
This insightful conversation of the PayPal and LinkedIn co-founder was very intriguing to listen to.
Reid shared the impact strategy board games in his childhood had on his life, got into detail how he sees hiring employees as a manager’s job and which are the requirements for jobs at LinkedIn (e.g. working from home after dinner).
A big part of the interview also got into AI and the dangers of it for the future, and into smart risk-taking.
At the end, Reid shared recommendations on when to hyper-scale and took Uber as an example. He further shared the importance of a supporting family for founders and how they will help them on grow businesses.
🎧 The Story of Mars Inc. on the Acquired Podcast
The other (nearly 4 hours long) podcast I listened to this week was about the history of Mars Inc. on the Acquired Podcast. As always, Ben and David got into all the interesting and not well-known details of the company. In this case, it was very hard for them, as Mars Inc. is not very open to the outside.
It all started with the founder getting into the candy business. Shortly after the start, they’ve created Snickers, named after a horse and inspired by the food Roman soldiers ate thousands of years ago (eggs, peanuts, and sugar for getting energy).
Mars was a business of scale, they’ve already produced 20 Mio. Snickers per year in the 1920s by automating and optimising processes in an industry, which was very focused on manual labour back in the days. An interesting fact is that Mars did not patent any of their inventions to not tip off competitors.
When the founder was getting settled and tried to live off the fruits of his hard work, a fight broke out between him and his son, who told him “I want to conquer the whole damn world”.
It all ended with the son leaving the US and moving to the UK. As the son inspired the father to create the Milky Way (inspired by the idea to put a milkshake into a candy bar), the father allowed him to bring with him the recipe (but not the brand name) to the UK. There, the son started to sell the candy bar known as Milky Way in the US under the brand name Mars.
The podcast also got into details on how the daily business in the factories work: Even before it was invented by Toyota, Mars had something similar to the Toyota Production System (TPS), where every worker could stop the complete operation if he or she detected quality issues. The focus on quality was one of the pillars of the business.
Another interesting fact about the inner working is the despise of meetings. Mars hated meetings, which lead to every office building had only a few meeting rooms and those without any doors to keep meetings short and transparent.
Every employee was treated the same. There were no executive parking spots and no single room offices.
Before Meta made it popular to have all the desks in big, open one-room offices, Mars had already established it in all of their office buildings.
In the podcast, many of the different Mars brands and their histories were presented. This includes the rivalry between Mars and Hershey and the founding of M&Ms (which stands for Mars and Murray) with the selling point of chocolate not melting into your pockets and was in the beginning only sold to soldiers during WW2.
Mars also created pet food companies (today known as Pedigree or Whiskas), operates multiple pet clinics and also founded Uncle Ben’s Rice.
In the 1970s, Forrest Mars retired from the business and tried to go into his well-deserved retirement. This did not last long, as after some years he founded yet another candy company.
📚 What Effective General Managers Really Do by John P. Kotter
This essay from HBR by John P. Kotter explains how managers can get more efficient by including activities like hallway chattering into their daily work.
He mentions the two fundamental challenges managers face: “Figuring out what to do despite an enormous amount of potentially relevant information, and getting things done through a large and diverse set of people despite having little direct control over most of them”.
To solve these challenges, Kotter sees two ways: First, to implement flexible agendas and second, “broad networks of relationships”. Flexible agendas allow managers to quickly react to ad-hoc events, while broad networks always get them to the relevant people with influence over certain topics.
The article goes into detail on the two areas of agenda setting and network building.
Agenda setting includes having a loose strategy with objectives, while also being flexible enough to react to the day-to-day events which arise in every organisation.
Network setting, on the other hand, helps managers to “implement and to help update the agendas”. By doing this, general managers often “influence people by simply asking or suggesting that they do something, knowing that because of their relationship, he or she will comply”. This way, the manager can enforce his or her agenda without the enforcers getting direct orders from them.
This leads to twelve patterns general managers show that are defined in the essay:
- Spending most of their time with others
- Not only spending their time with their bosses or subordinates
- Great range of topics in their daily conversations
- Asking many questions
- Big agenda-setting decisions are made in the GM’s mind.
- Using humour and nonwork discussions to gather information and build relationships
- Spending time on seemingly unimportant (to them) topics
- Rarely ordering others
- Spending lots of time influencing others
- Don’t plan their day in detail and rather react to ad-hoc events
- Short and disjointed conversations
- Work long hours (most of the GM’s studied worked around 60 hours per week)
The article shows these patterns on real examples and the detailed schedule of one manager which was tracked for the reader to get a feeling of the practical implementation of the patterns.
One key learning is that short, spontaneous conversations are typically much more effective as planned meetings.
Another one is that often it is better to stop hiring external managers and rather build up a base of potential internal managers who already have a big network in their pocket which enables them to enforce certain agendas much quicker than without it.
The essay ends with an inspiring paragraph: “Time-management experts still tell managers to compose lists of priorities and to limit the number of people they see. However, the successful ones I watched rarely did so. They “wasted” time walking down corridors, engaging in seemingly random chats with seemingly random people, all the while promoting their agendas and building their networks with far less effort than if they’d scheduled meetings along a formal chain of command”.
Even though the article was published in 1999, I think that it is still an important read for everyone managing people.
That’s it for this week’s episode. Thank you for reading this far. As I invest much time and effort in these writings (without any AI writing my posts), I’d be glad if you could subscribe, like or share this post 🙂