Jack Dorsey is best known as the creator of Twitter and as the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company. His Essentialist approach to management is a relatively rare one. At a dinner I attended recently where he spoke, he said he thinks of the role of CEO as being the chief editor of the company. At another event at Stanford he explained further: "By editorial I mean there are a thousand things we could be doing. But there [are] only one or two that are important. All of these ideas . . . and inputs from engineers, support people, designers are going to constantly flood what we should be doing. . . As an editor I am constantly taking these inputs and deciding the one, or intersection of a few, that make sense for what we are doing."
An editor is merely someone who says no to things. A three-year-old can do that. Nor does an editor simply eliminate; in fact, in a way, an editor actually adds. What I mean is that a good editor is someone who uses deliberate subtraction to actually add life to the ideas, setting, plot, and characters.
From "Essentialism - The Disciplined Pursuit of Less", a brilliant book by Greg McKeown.
No comments:
Post a Comment