Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent by Sydney Finkelstein

Author:Sydney Finkelstein
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-08T14:00:00+00:00

Hire People and Get Out of the Way

As a young writer, comic book legend Stan Lee once worked on a comic strip that used the phrase pogo stick in the punch line. His editor told him that the phrase wouldn’t resonate with rural audiences, and instructed Lee to change the gag so that the punch line had the phrase roller skates instead. In Lee’s opinion, this was a big mistake; roller skates deflated the entire joke. Lee changed it anyway, though, to please his boss.

Lee wasn’t happy to have made the change, in the end, and it taught him a valuable lesson: the importance of effective, fearless delegation. As a boss, you need to give subordinates real responsibility, and you can’t stand over them, second-guessing and editing. “When you hire an artist to do a job, you let him do the job,” Lee said.27 At Marvel Comics, Lee would take a largely hands-off approach; like other superbosses, he would be quick to hand real responsibility to enterprising young people. One writer, Jim Shooter, was made editor in chief of Marvel comics at the age of twenty-seven.28

Superbosses are able to constantly and rapidly propel their protégés to new heights because they are the consummate delegators, relinquishing a degree of authority and oversight that would make many ordinary bosses cringe. Gene Roberts allowed writers and editors absolute freedom to follow stories as long as they adhered to certain quality standards. On one occasion during the mid-1980s, reporter Don Drake hatched a plan to cover the rising risk of AIDS in a story called “AIDS: A Day with a Global Killer.” Drake’s idea was to send reporters all around the world—to Thailand, an African village, a pharmaceutical company, a factory manufacturing prophylactics—to show what was going on with the disease of AIDS at a particular moment in time. Roberts’s response? Go for it! He authorized a dozen reporters and half a dozen photographers to travel around the world for the story. On the appointed day, the stories rolled in, and Drake and a fellow reporter found themselves unexpectedly overwhelmed. Without direction from Roberts, the entire newsroom stopped what it was doing and spontaneously pitched in, enabling the story to make deadline with seconds to spare. When an entire team pitches in to solve a pressing problem, and when the response is unprovoked by an edict from up top, you know you’ve got an incredible culture coursing through the business, shaped by a superboss.29

Superbosses possess the deep, underlying trust that is essential to effective delegation. “Norman Brinker gave us incredible autonomy,” one former senior manager told me. “We definitely had the ability to fail.”30 Ron Gilbert, who worked in the games division of Lucasfilm during the late 1980s and 1990s, agreed: “One of the best things George Lucas did for us was to leave us alone. He just kind of gave us the resources to go off and create and come up with things.”31 As a group, superbosses believe that their people are fully

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