Peter Thiel’s Unorthodox Management Philosophy of Extreme Focus

http://blog.idonethis.com/post/37113345206/peter-thiels-unorthodox-management-philosophy-of

by ca98am79 • 14 years ago

110 62 14 years ago

blog.idonethis.com

ckluis• 14 years ago

If you recommend this then your customers wouldn't need a todo list :)

MrMan5• 14 years ago

let's see more Elon Musk worship, less Peter Thiel worship.

(SpaceX + Tesla) > (losing huge amounts of investors' money on hubristic hedge fund bets + lucky VC investments).

As far as I can tell Thiel's successes are mostly based on tapping his social network. White guys already know how to do that, in theory.

chollida12• 14 years ago

> (losing huge amounts of investors' money on hubristic hedge fund bets + lucky VC investments).

Wow, dammed if he does and damned if he doesn't in your eyes.

If he picks a winner it's luck, if he picks a loser, then no luck involved, that was all him.

As someone who sits on the side of trying to pick the winners i can assure you it's extremely hard and alot of work goes into it.

You may not like Peter, but let's try to give some credit where credit is due. He's clearly done many things right in his life.

His idea's might not be worth dismissing out of hand.

> As far as I can tell Thiel's successes are mostly based on tapping his social network. White guys already know how to do that, in theory

Classy

calinet63• 14 years ago

His ideas about "picking" maybe, but then, why the hell are we listening to the rest of them?

MrMan5• 14 years ago

No disrespect to someone I have never met. I am frustrated that you pretend there is a symmetric equivalence between macro hedge fund investing and the world of private placements. Mathematically it couldnt be farther from your silly damned if you do solipsism. It is not Thiel I mind, it is his accolytes.

chris_mahan3• 14 years ago

It takes money to make money. The investors knew this. Don't feel bad about it.

paulsutter2• 14 years ago

Paul Graham goes a step further in his Startup=Growth essay, focus the entire company on a single goal: growth rate. I didn't realize the analogy till now. Thanks for bringing this up.

kitcar• 14 years ago

Growth rate of what? Revenue? Gross Profit? Profit Margin? Users? Active users? Length of user session? etc...

Focusing on growing one of those metrics can result in the minimization of others -

phillmv• 14 years ago

If you're at the stage of your company's lifecyle where you're in YC, then all metrics of users. Users, users, users.

dreamdu5t• 14 years ago

Users. Even if you have absolutely no chance in hell of monetizing you can get shitloads of VC money if you have traction.

paulsutter2• 14 years ago

I have an idea, why dont you read the fucking essay, and come back and let us know? He gives crystal clear guidance and its pretty smart.

Alternately, since you're obviously a ninja rockstar, you could show us all what a great entrepreneur you can be by disregarding his advice.

calinet63• 14 years ago

A classic sociopathic anti-reality extremist viewpoint. I've seen this type of thinking run companies into the ground. It is myopic and will be detrimental to any real-world situation in the long run.

Thiel is chock full of this BS, and his success should be disregarded as anything other than the statistical anomaly that it was.

QuantumGood• 14 years ago

Rabois says "I resisted some of this approach during the PayPal years, I am now a proponent of it and have even devised a theory of why it is crucial"

Being anti-Thiel is not a shortcut to actually evaluating something on its own merits.

http://www.quora.com/PayPal/What-strong-beliefs-on-culture-f...

sskates• 14 years ago

Care to at least share your experience instead of only attacking Thiel?

michaelochurch3• 14 years ago

Thiel has some hits and misses. I actually agree with him in this one. Most people in the corporate world end up split between several tasks (coming from several different managers, who may or may not be different people) and put forth a mediocre performance on all of them. That may be fine in a big company, but it's fatal in a startup.

The main problem with a single-priority system is the question of who sets the priority. If the employee is autonomous and trusted (e.g. open allocation) it can work. In a traditional managed environment, you already start out with 2 priority sets: the manager's goals, and the employee's career interests.

danek3• 14 years ago

I'm guessing you either had a really bad day and are venting on the internet, or peter thiel did something awful to you in your past?

In what ways in Thiel full of BS?

In what ways is this type of thinking myopic and detrimental?

In what situations would you advise someone not to spend their time working on the most important thing they could be doing?

Cl4rity• 14 years ago

This actually isn't extremist or crazy, it's common sense. Multitasking is a myth and you really can only focus on one thing at a time. By adopting this philosophy, you'll probably get a lot more done, quickly. Once your one task or goal is accomplished with that hyper focus, you move onto the next one. It's really the best, and arguably the only way, to work. Again, our brains don't do more than one task at once with any efficiency.

stephengillie4• 14 years ago

Absolutely refusing to handle anything but that #1 priority is also its own cage. What if the #4 priority suddenly catches fire? If you change your focus to #4, isn't that just multitasking?

Multitasking is a myth on one level, but so is this hyperfocus. There must be room for task switching, for thoughts, for interrupts, and for breathing.

chimeracoder• 14 years ago

> What if the #4 priority suddenly catches fire?

Then it may (or may not) become your #1 priority!

> If you change your focus to #4, isn't that just multitasking?

No, because you have to question which should be the new #1 priority: the old #4 or the old #1? You can still only do one thing at a time; we only have one body and one brain[1].

[1] As of 2012, that is!

calinet63• 14 years ago

I think you're correct at a low-level, but reducing an entire person's thought process on the long term to a single focus? That is extremist. In any sufficiently complex system or company, you will have multiple inputs driving multiple results. You will be dealing with multiple people. Your work will touch the work of others. This may work in an extremely rigid, top-down authoritative structure, but personally I don't believe extremely rigid top-down authoritative structures are effective. Your opinions may differ from mine, but I think autonomy, mastery, and common purpose are far, far more powerful tools.

klochner• 14 years ago

What happens when you need someone else to take an action before you can move forward? It's like blocking IO.

stephengillie4• 14 years ago

This is why it's important to have a todo list with more than one spot, or why it's important to keep another task in the back of one's head.

chris_mahan3• 14 years ago

You do it, and if someone complains, you say you had to get this done in order to continue work. If it's something "out of your area" you treat it as a bug and you make a workaround. Remember: businesses only reward achievement.

stephengillie4• 14 years ago

Remember: businesses only reward achievement.

Which is why failing upward is such an unsuccessful career strategy. I'm with Dogbert on this one.

wedmondson• 14 years ago

I wonder how this works when you need input from a coworker whose number one focus is different than your own. If this coworker, in turn, is reliant on input from you for something that is not your number one focus then you are deadlocked...each waiting for the other to finish but unable to finish until the other has time.

VLM2• 14 years ago

Easy, escalate to a boss who's only focus is making sure you both get your work done. I'm also sure trades and bribes and a informal form of corporate currency changes hands

"I'll purposefully and intentionally reduce my focus from 100% to 99.999% this year by helping you out IF in exchange you'll do something that improves my efficiency in my remaining 99.999% of the time by around a factor of one ten-thousandth"

Its a market driven approach. Plenty of game theory behind it, too.

rhizome2• 14 years ago

Congratulations, you've just invented politics. :)

a-priori• 14 years ago

Followed strictly, how can two people work together in this kind of environment? If I need a bit of someone else's time to allow me to complete my objective, they can't provide it unless it also contributes to their objective, which it likely won't.

VLM2• 14 years ago

"My single objective this year is to work together with a-priori to proactively synergize a sustainable seamless profit focused massively parallel best practice for demonstrating how two HN users can work together while only having one single objective"

MrMan5• 14 years ago

My single objective is to give you $15k to pursue this single-minded goal and to avail you of my social network to guarantee your success, and to blog about it.

michaelfeathers• 14 years ago

Just because everyone has a single objective doesn't mean that two people can't have the same objective.

danek3• 14 years ago

Followed to illogical conclusions, how could anything ever be good? ;)

lsc• 14 years ago

well, what is "one thing"?

I picture my todo list as heirarchical. Like, "grow my business" might be a top level entry... but beneath that, I've got, say, "improve provisioning automation," "Improve marketing," "setup backups," "create new services," then, say, under "improve provisioning automation" then we start seeing, you know, actual programs I could work on.

But, my point is, "One thing" if you don't specify how far up or down that hierarchical list, really can mean a billion things. I mean, even once I have the hierarchical list up, many tasks help with more than one higher level task. I mean, backups, for my own stuff, could improve marketing, but the way I'm implementing backups, I can sell space to people that aren't my current customers, so it's also a new service.

danek3• 14 years ago

I think people are reading this too literally. The 'one thing' isn't your task, it's your goal. You engage in whatever tasks are necessary to achieve your goal in a way that is good for the business. This ensures that each business function is the best it can be.

For example, suppose the next most important thing for your business to do is to reduce marketing spend. you make that someone's goal, and that person focuses on reducing CPA for several weeks. obviously, you don't want this person to divert their time to answer support emails--you want them focused on saving your company boatloads of money.

sixQuarks• 14 years ago

wow, such hate in the comments. I think some people are taking the "focus" theme too far. Focusing on one thing doesn't mean you absolutely ignore everything else. If you're going to ignore co-workers, then you might as well skip taking a shower in the morning, eating breakfast, and all the other things you need to do, and just FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS!

ScottBurson• 14 years ago

I think there are legitimate questions about how this actually works in practice. The blog post provides only a little information.

rhizome2• 14 years ago

You seem to be wallowing in all-or-nothing thinking. "Hate," "absolutely ignore everything else," skip showers. Nobody is saying these things to the extremes that you're interpreting them.

throwmeaway33• 14 years ago

In my rather limited experience this doesn't work.

Ex: Say you are working on just one feature for your company's software.

Most people, including myself, aren't able to sit for 8-10 hours a day in front of the computer working on just one problem. Your brain turns to goo, you start getting easily distracted and your productivity drops through the floor. I'd say at most I can sit in front of a debugger for 3 hours, and that's on particularly good day.

People need to be able to switch their brains to other work when they get overwhelmed or get stuck.

More interesting is the opposite problem of having too many things to do. At some point you never get to focus on any one of feature and you end up not getting anywhere.

chris_mahan3• 14 years ago

When I get in the flow, writing software, I get a day of work done per hour. When I do 5 hours of focused work, I do about 2 weeks worth of work. The slightest distraction throws me off, though, because the context-switching becomes enormous. My favorite (yikes) distraction: having a tool I know and use not be available because of outdated company policy. This throws off everything and loads Anger and Frustration 3.7 in the brain processing center.

michaelochurch3• 14 years ago

The big problem with "one thing" is the extremely political matter of who gets to set a person's "one thing". Is it the employee? (Open allocation.) Or is it the manager? (Then it's dictatorial, and you'll have to offer 30-50% annual raises to keep people.)

I do agree that corporate multitasking often creates mediocrity-- that's painfully obvious-- but you can't actually get singular focus from people unless you give them autonomy. Otherwise, they're already serving 2 masters (their boss's assignments, and their long-term career interests which include getting out from under that boss's thumb) from the gate. So, "one thing only" really only works in an open-allocation environment, in which case you are by definition giving people the authority to decide for themselves if they prefer to take a one-thing-only laser-focus or a more multi-pronged approach. Which makes a hell of a lot of sense, actually, because everyone's different.

The problem with corporate multitasking is that it comes out of a lack of autonomy-- from requirements that come in from all sides and quickly leave the worker overwhelmed not necessarily with the amount of work (although that can be a problem, too) but with the total lack of coherence.

saraid216• 14 years ago

I suspect an organic middle-ground is what most best-cases end up with. One where the manager has veto power, rather than dictatorial power: the employee finds something they feel is their "most valuable contribution" and the manager says, "Yes, that's good. Work on that" or "No, we don't need that" or "Maybe later, but your current focus is this other thing" or "Think about it more and figure out how line it up with our company vision better."

I've found that a number of my bosses have been quite understanding about this sort of thing. (I'm terribly lucky.) I have been able to pitch a new idea and get the nod to work on it. Granted, I've also never done the singular focus thing; I'm still required to pitch in with bug work and sometimes I'm the right person to ask for some random but important distraction.

michaelochurch3• 14 years ago

Open allocation is a middle ground. It's not a free-for-all. People are still expected to lead or follow, and still held responsible for working toward the benefit of the group. What you don't have with OA are those imbecilic internal headcount limits and transfer blocks. You're getting rid of an often useless and sometimes extortionate layer of indirection.

danpoage• 14 years ago

You hit the nail on the head. "Total lack of coherence" is the best way to describe the vast majority of the large corporate environments I have worked in during my career as a software engineer. All this talk of focusing on "one thing" is just more noise drowned out by the conflicting, in many cases contradictory "one things" the average corporate drone will receive from their many layers of superiors on a regular basis. The one unmistakable conclusion that I have taken from this is that corporations do not scale effectively. Everyone can have their "one thing" when your business is small, but once you reach a critical threshold, everyone's "one thing" doesn't make any sense in the broader context - unless, as you state, the leadership is dictatorial. In which case, good luck retaining the best/brightest/most creative individuals that are lifeblood of any successful business. People are not robots; it takes a nuanced leadership style that understands both the business and the nature of how creative individuals work, to truly be a successful leader. But that's not something you can quote in a four paragraph puff piece blog post.

megrimlock• 14 years ago

Dictators can work well when they are insanely talented, motivated, and tuned into their minions. Being a trusted minion of a powerful dictator has provided the most effective, fun, coordinated experiences of my career so far.

On the other hand, they are a single point of failure. When someone succeeds from outside in pushing the dictator out, chaos ensues. Some will thrive under the ensuing autonomy as they see room to advance their own agenda, but many of the most talented will move on if they perceive that the team is in a degraded state. Worst of all, being a trusted minion of the prior dictator leaves you with a suspect role when a new dictator grabs the throne. Experiencing this is somewhat painful and complicates your weighted decision heuristic for what to do with the rest of your life. Will things get better? How long do I wait? Could I possibly reinvent myself to the degree that e.g. patio11 was able? etc.

dkarl• 14 years ago

Another problem is that it's a matter of framing, which is subjective. One guy, if asked to describe what one thing he did this year, might say, "One thing? Oh, god, I did zero things, because I was too busy doing a million things. I spent the first quarter putting out fires while we were scaling up the WhizBar, then I spent a few months looking over the call center's shoulder trying to figure out what they were doing to kill the DoodleBlat after we rolled out the Bilbo feature to production. At the same time we were debugging that thing that made flames shoot out of the Bilbo every Thursday night in the Central Time Zone during Daylight Savings Time. Then I was on that planning committee helping do traffic projections. And of course Q3 was when we did all the work to make the AcmeCorp deal actually work. Ask me about Q4 when it's over because frankly right now I don't even know what I'm doing this afternoon."

The same guy with a different manner of presenting himself might say, "I kept the servers alive all year, asshole. Now get out of my way or they're gonna die while I'm talking to you."

SatvikBeri• 14 years ago

Guy #2 is probably worth 10-40% more to a business, especially as it grows larger.

pvdm• 14 years ago

This makes sense since we are terrible at multitasking.

confluence4• 14 years ago

From the article comments:

> "Successful people become successful despite their methods, not because of them."

I think most of these articles mix correlation with causation.

A better article would state this: to be successful be an upper middle class white male whose parents can afford to send you to Stanford before one of the greatest bull runs in economic history happens in California. Now attribute success to personal habits which have fuck all to do with anything.

These types of articles are complete fucking jokes. Fundamental attribution at work people.

Beware breathless entrepreneurship bullshit - there is oh so much of it.

Next you'll be telling me that getting a mustache makes me Stalin.

z-factor• 14 years ago

> "be an upper middle class white male whose parents..."

You forgot to mention "born in the USA" which excludes at least as many people as any other thing you've listed.

confluence4• 14 years ago

Correct. But I didn't want to rip out too many egos today - I haven't had breakfast yet.

Being alive today is another important factor. 125 billion people have ever lived - it's just sheer luck that one is born today at all.

Hell there were 250 million sperm at conception and by sheer accident each and everyone of us was born - I'm amazed any one of us is even around.

walkon• 14 years ago

To me it sounds like you are using the same illogical mix of correlation and causation assuming that Thiel's success must be solely attributed to luck instead good methodologies, hard work, etc. It is wrong to assume his methodologies must be bogus only because he's been fortunate in other ways.

confluence4• 14 years ago

Sounds like you've never heard of the survivorship bias. I'm sure there were plenty of Peter Thiels out there with the exact same personal habits that failed.

There are a thousand Thiels born everyday. Most are fucked by being born into poverty - of those that aren't - their success is separated by mere path dependent chance.

Humans are similar. Situations aren't.

ryguytilidie• 14 years ago

The last 4 founders I worked for went to: -Stanford -Harvard -Harvard -Oxford

I'm always amazed how people talk about the SV startup community as if it is some sort of equal opportunity venture. These people become founders and meet VCs because of the connections their family has and the connections their school has given them. Whenever I see a specific former boss asked their key to success and they say some super high level touchey feely crap and not "well, my dad knows a bunch of VCs and basically talked them into funding us". Its basically the same as Republican's telling you how hard they worked to get where they are when really they were born on third base and think they hit a triple.

confluence4• 14 years ago

This psychological bias is called the just world fallacy and is a derivative of the aforementioned fundamental attribution error.

It is this phenomena under which the conservatives, republican party, libertarians, and the concept of meritocracy can exist and be honestly entertained and adopted by seemingly well adjusted people. To anyone aware of this bias the preceding philosophies verge on the psychopathic.

On following advice: if it's not listed as a series of facts, it's probably bullshit.

marze• 14 years ago

It would appear Apple is managed in a way that allows employees to have "extreme focus", or a single focus.

Also, Apple as a company seems to do a good job of staying focused on what they think is key.

Thoughts?

Peter Thiel’s Unorthodox Management Philosophy of Extreme Focus

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