Harry: You say: “If soldiers trust the general, communication will be vastly more efficient.” What are your biggest lessons on how to create an environment of trust?
Ben Horowitz: It’s a very tricky thing trust. You want people to trust that you’re the right leader and you’re going in the right direction. But you’re going to make mistakes. And then if you try and maintain that initial trust by trying to cover up the mistakes, then you can lose trust when they catch you in that dishonesty. So it’s kind of optimistic in trying to paint a bright future and then being transparent with what’s wrong with the company and what needs to be fixed. Anything that’s wrong with the company where you’re the founder/CEO is your fault. It does get tricky in trying to admit just how flawed you are and talk about how you can go forward.
That was the excellent Ben Horowitz on the the VC:20 podcast with the absurdly long title, “A16Z’S Ben Horowitz on how to create an environment of trust with founders, how and why creating shocking rules is so impactful to culture & what the samurai, Shaka Senghor and Toussaint teach us about company culture building.”
This element of trust is without a doubt a major problem area in defense acquisition. Programs are planned by unaccountable persons throughout the bureaucracy and then programmed into the budget with a slew of performance metrics in the acquisition baseline. Unlike the founder/CEO, problems with that initial plan cannot be traced back to the program manager.
If something goes wrong with the program, the incentives are aligned to cover up mistakes until it enters production. Admission of an error puts the entire program in jeopardy and makes the manager appear incompetent. His or her career is put on the line. Often, the problem can be covered up and the manager leaves before the error is discovered, and by that time the new manager can place blame with the old. The effects of this on the trust with subordinates who are actually making the program work is hard to estimate. More of defense acquisition needs to be viewed through the eyes of everyday people in the program offices and at the contractors.
A better control method is to assume that program managers will make mistakes and build in flexibility to recover. Like founders, many PMs have not done the job before. They should be incentivized to expose errors as quickly as possible, be honest with the team and the highers, and correct course. But that would mean knock-on changes throughout the bureaucracy, because there was a 5 year + budgeted plan and a thousand page contract which was supposed to ensure that events would not change.
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs understand just how limited their foresight of technology and organizations is. Somehow, humility does not equate with incompetence over there. Perhaps government projects rely too much on the infallibility of experts.
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