A few weeks ago I watched a talk by Keith Rabois called, How to Operate. Keith is a venture capitalist with Khosla Ventures, the former COO of Square, and a member of the PayPal Mafia.

The talk was primarily geared towards startups, but much of what he talked about could be applied to any organization where people are managed. So whether you’re an architect, real estate developer, or governmental organization, I bet you’ll find the lessons relevant.

One in particular that stood out for me was the idea of barrels and ammunition.

For a lot of organizations, the thought is often that by adding more people you’ll be able to increase output. More people = greater velocity. But Keith’s reasoning is that most people are actually ammunition. And just like in war, it doesn’t exclusively matter how much ammunition you have. You can only shoot through the number of barrels you have. Output depends on barrels.

So who exactly are barrels?

Barrels are the kind of people who can take something from idea all the way through to completion, while at the same time taking a group of people along with them. They are, in other words, your leaders.

But, they are difficult to find.

There are fewer barrels than ammunition. And, the culture of the organization itself will impact every person’s ability to be a barrel. Here’s how Keith puts it:

Barrels are very difficult to find. But when you have them, give them lots of equity. Promote them, take them to dinner every week, because they are virtually irreplaceable because they are also very culturally specific. So a barrel at one company may not be a barrel at another company.

That’s something for you to think about as you start your workweek.

Image: Flickr

Startup guru Paul Graham writes really interesting essays. Judging by the date stamps on his website, he’s been easily doing it for more than a decade. And he’s gotten really good at it – everyone in the startup community reads them. Whenever he posts one, I know I read it. No question. 

His most recent essay is called: Mean People Fail. And in it, he argues that the structural changes that have happened in our economy have also meant a reversal in the correlation between “meanness” and success. I know that might sound a bit funny, but hear him out:

For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. For most of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. And in most of them meanness was not a handicap but probably an advantage.

That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum. Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things.

That has always been the case for thinkers, which is why this trend began with them. When you think of successful people from history who weren’t ruthless, you get mathematicians and writers and artists. The exciting thing is that their m.o. seems to be spreading. The games played by intellectuals are leaking into the real world, and this is reversing the historical polarity of the relationship between meanness and success.

This makes sense to me. But the other reason I find this interesting is because I’ve wondered before if I should be more of an asshole in my professional life. Some people are really good at being assholes. I’m not. It’s not in my nature. When I manage and work with people, I’d rather try and create intrinsic motivation as opposed to using some form of brute force. In my view, the latter burns social capital.

So if you happen to be of the same mindset, you might like to hear that you’re probably sitting on the right trend line. Don’t be mean.