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I'm sensing a shifting in the winds where, whether or not they like it, more and more technocratic leaders are going to find themselves in charge. Because the charismatic type leaders are simply not trusted anymore, and the tech-lash critical crowd generally lacks the competence.
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For example, I've been fairly open in my views about what I consider the essential vacuity of the AI risk/ethics crowd, but even if I'm wrong and they're right about everything, they still lack the skills to go from criticism to actually running AI-based tech companies.
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So like it or not, it will be neither the TED-talking visionaries nor the moral-panicking AI ethicists who run things. It will be people who actually hands-on understand what is still an extremely challenging technical field.
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I suspect one reason I have a career at all is that this stream of people has been slowly growing, and they are NOT too afraid, embarrassed, or humiliated to ask for help with management and leadership stuff because their identities/egos are actually anchored elsewhere
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ie they are not attached to being the person in the room who knows the most about leadership/management stuff. It's simply a problem to be solved and cleared away so they can get to what they actually ARE attached to and want to be seen as knowing the most about.
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When I talk to a technocratic leader about say an re-org challenge for example, they are happy to just discuss it as a problem that can be modeled, mapped, thought through, with options identified and experiments tried. It' an easy conversation. No egos getting in the way.
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When I talk to a charismatic (or wannabe-charismatic) non-tech/shallow-tech leader otoh, there is a constant tension where they seem to need validation of their leadership/management ideas in yes-man mode. It's kinda exhausting and usually doesn't work out at all.
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the overconfident ones, of course, don't seek help at all from the likes of me, but the interesting ones are the ones who think they know everything there is to know but are insecure and looking for validation or therapy around it rather than feedback/sparring to test it
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Not sure where I'm going with this, but I'm obviously biased and in favor of accelerating/amplifying a trend that is good for what I do. But I think there is also an objective case that we're overdue for an era of quiet, obscure, technocratic leadership.
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Besides my usual shtick of figuring out how to get such people already in leadership positions to find and hire me, I've also started thinking about how to kinda boost the pipeline so to speak, and kinda try to increase the chances of CTOs/VPEs going CEO etc.
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And even further down the line... today's engineering team leaders, program managers, directors etc. are the CTOs/VPEs of 2025 and the potential CEOs of 2030. What can be done to set them up for success against the... functional competition from CMOs, VP Sales types, CFOs...
Replying to
(I don't mean to come off totally partisan... I *have* been hired a few times by non-tech leaders but it's been like 10%, so the odds of me doing better improve heavily if more engineers start getting the top jobs)
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I'm trying to figure out if I can craft a sort of early-career tech leadership consulting offering that doesn't degenerate into "coaching" or "career advice" for people who are not actually driven enough to get anywhere bigger.
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I've never tried to cultivate a clientele at the tech middle management/IC layers because people at those levels neither have the org clout to hire me without sign-off from superiors who are likely to say no, nor enough personal wealth to hire me personally
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But a bigger reason is that 95% of the people at those levels lack the ambition and drive, and frankly technological taste/depth to actually aspire to the executive suite and get there (same is true of 95% of technical founders of startups). Identifying the 5% to bet on is hard.
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If I could figure out a *reliable* way to identify the 5%, I'd offer more affordable consulting services (in some sort of less custom/bespoke form) to them. I'd expect to make it back in 5-10 years when they are in senior/wealthier positions and able to pay me my comfy rates 😎
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Yeah, "drive" really isn't the right word. That makes it seem like I'm talking about careerist grinders who were A+ students and went to MBA schools.
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Replying to @vgr
Maybe drive isn’t the best proxy, so you’re searching in the wrong spaces for that 5%
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No, what I mean is something like "the conviction of arrogantly held technical tastes and the courage to think big technically." Or something like "people whose technical ambitions will scale to whatever size the problem itself is capable of growing to."
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Like if you have arrogant opinions about paper planes and you are actually talented at airplane design, even the sky is not the limit. Helicopters on Mars is the current limit.
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The kind of technical person who bores me, even if very talented and skilled, is the kind who is so respectful of boundaries they develop no intuitions outside their own area. They'll hold forth on say power subsystem design, but be boringly predictable/uninsightful beyond that.
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They might end up as say technical fellows or senior principal engineers at best, if they work hard in their silos, but will likely never end up CTO/VPE and though I might enjoy talking to them if their speciality is interesting to me, I have no expectations of gigs from them.
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But I think if I'm going to take a shot at identifying and betting on the 5% now is the time to do it... just need some good ideas on how to find them, and what to actually offer them
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Oh, yeah... fell for that a couple of times early on. Complete time-waster people. An extra occupational hazard for me given that my main source of leadgen is still the gervais principle series, which is basically management satire :D
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Replying to @theshteves and @vgr
technical types that scoff at “management stuff” are the false positives here
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An interesting but neither necessary nor sufficient indicator is signs of slightly crackpot tastes/inclinations, but well managed. You need a streak of that, but you can't really succeed if you let your freak flag fly too early in your career. You have to earn the right.
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Another is anyone with strong Andy DuFresne in Shawshank Redemption vibes. Still waters run deep affect. There's probably a handful of "types" here but I don't want to fall into a pattern recognition trap. This is more of a system 2 filter problem, not system 1.
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The patterns matter, but there's far too many banal objective criteria. Like knowing their technical shit instead of just thinking they know it, being in a field with technical complexity looming and room for a technocrat star career... mental-health issues under control...
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But to bring it back around, why dabble in maker shit? Well, mainly because I'm in the mood for other reasons, but also because it's the crucible where tastes of good technocrat leaders are shaped, and the tech stack has changed so much in 20y, my own tech tastes are out of tune.
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By contrast, charismatic types etc. tend to have their tastes shaped by more... social stuff. Like biographies and things.
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One model I'm thinking through is something like "clinics" -- topic-specific learning/growth support in a handful of areas where I've noticed early-stage tech people generally have gaps. Not obvious ones like "marketing" but kinda oblique. Kinda like installing missing libraries.
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But the big thing you sadly can't provide from outside is the primary criterion of "scalable tastes." If your paper plane opinions really don't scale to Mars helicopter opinions, you're not going anywhere very interesting and nobody can do anything about that.
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