Is management slop actually that bad?

2026-10-18

I was at the airport and there was a 3 for 2 management slop deal. I am, of course, referring to the Harvard Business Review! They have a series of books containing articles on various topics:

The ones I got were:

• 10 Must Reads for New Managers
• 10 Must Reads on Communication
• 10 Must Reads on Managing People

I found some articles to be very insightful and to codify some practices and phenomena that I've been working out the hard way. Others were entirely forgettable, I have forgotten what they were about and cannot elaborate.

As a new manager it is funny to observe how much of the advice I can say with confidence is right, I've seen those situations before. There's also advice that I think is right, but there's no way I'd have thought that 3 years ago. There's also, of course advice that is just wrong, but it's hard to separate that from advice that I just can't tell is right.

I think about half the book has some insight and the rest is likely wrong or just not useful. I'll try to break it down into those categories.

Preamble: The title of this blog post - slop or not slop?

A lot of these airport business books are terrible and on the same level as self help books. Some literally are self help books. Here are the practices that this or that CEO used to get successful and here's a gamble that worked out along with a cool story and fantasy you can slot yourself into. I'm not interested in that kind of thing. 5 ways to think about planning. 7 ways to think clearly in a crisis. 5 people who made a billion dollars. This kind of thing is usually a waste of time.

Malcolm Gladwell suffers from this problem, he loves a good story. There are plenty of good stories and I like reading about them, don't get me wrong, they're just airport slop and usually don't teach you very much. There's just too much selection bias.

Harvard Business Review books are supposedly not like that. A lot of the articles are studies or surveys, investigations of trends. One book I read on how to buy a small business was entirely a technical book on the ins and outs of buying small businesses - from raising money, to typical deal terms, to valuations, to what closing the deal looks like. With case studies and so on. That can be somewhat interesting, but most of the studies aren't too insightful.

So although HBR books inhabit the business slop section of the bookstore (and maybe I missed it, but where is the book store in the remodelled JFK Terminal 8? Do Americans not read any more?) they aren't entirely slop.

In a moment of self awareness, I'll now admit that my favourite articles were the ones that confirmed my priors.

New Managers

I really liked this one. This is probably because it confirmed a lot of my priors (I told you) and validated the challenges I faced as a new manager at a big company.

The other problem with this advice is that it probably doesn't apply all that much to a startup or a founder, where the normal rules do not apply.

There is often conflict between how we think things are supposed to be - our performance, the problems we have, the solutions we propose, the performance our teams, behaviours - and how things actually are. The truth is that after surveying a lot of new managers, that's just how it be, you. It do be like that. We're NOT facing unique situations, but that doesn't mean the situations are easy or even simple. They're just not unique.

I'll rapid fire go through a few articles.

Becoming the Boss

This one goes through the common misconceptions that managers have when starting out. A couple of examples that stood out to me:

• You were promoted for being a great IC, so you should be a great manager. This one is particularly bad and hard to shake. It feels bad to go from being a superstar performer IC to a new manager in a new role that you have no experience in. Personally, I've been programming ever since I was 10 years old. That's all I did ever since I found out that it was a thing you could do. So being an IC software engineer was easy and aligned perfectly with what I would do anyway in a vacuum. But being a manager is not like that - people do not manage from the age of 10. It's okay to not be that good at your job on the first day, that's the nature of a job switch. This is intellectually understood by many but actually going through it is tough.

  Having gone through it, I do have to say - it's not that bad at a big company, because you have a safety net. Even if you produce significant negative value, you can always fake it and probably not lose your job.

  Significant numbers of managers at big companies likely produce nothing or negative value.

• Sometimes you aren't the most knowledgeable: it's better to let someone with focus deal with the nitty gritty then just ask questions to make sure they're on track. This one is also allegedly well understood. If you ask someone if they understand this, they'll say yes. They'll even do the right things in a roleplay. But in a real situation they'll still assume they know best and not give team members autonomy to make decisions. They may have more information and make higher quality decisions. Now, that's not to say this is ALWAYS true. It is possible that you're a better decision maker than some people. But the goal is to find where people are better than you and use them, and to develop those who can't make quality decisions into people that can. The goal is NOT for you to be the best at everything.

  There's a subtle point here: this doesn't mean that every team member knows better than you. Sometimes people are just bad at their jobs.

  Be humble, but delegating to people you know are going to make the wrong decision is setting them up to fail. Sometimes you do know better, and your direct reports don't want you to set them up to fail.

  I can't help but read the framing of this article as comfortslop for bad managers. As Steve Jobs said (sorry): who wants to work for someone they can't learn from?

What Great Managers Do

Spoiler: they take advantages of differences in people and unique strengths.

This goes some way to proving an intuition I had before: different people enjoy different things, it's better to have people work on something they enjoy, all else equal. People are more productive when they're having fun. Key evidence of having fun is smiling, laughter, breathlessly telling you about something exciting they made progress on, etc.

But back to misconceptions about what things are "supposed" to be like - I previously kind of thought that managers should fit everyone into moulds of perfect workers. It's not so! There is no single mould.

I view the key task of any manager as conducting an exhaustive search to find what each individual is good at, and what they are particularly intrinsically motivated by.

If you can find intrinsic motivation, things are much easier when leaving people to their own devices on a project - you can be confident they won't be able to leave that stone unturned. Maybe those tedious customer interviews or budget discussions or hiring processes that you hate are actually someone's dream task. They'll do those tasks faster and better than you will. And they'll gain energy from them. It's a win-win and positive-sum to assign tasks to each person's comparative advantage.

Note that sometimes the tasks people enjoy are not the most valuable - the most obvious being that most software engineers prefer rewrites or writing something new over just refactoring what's there.

Before AI, the pithy but still correct cliche is that rewrites are almost always wrong. But now I kind of believe they can be right, sometimes, but they don't push the same button that rewriting used to.

The point used to be that:

• Writing code is the only way to truly understand it since it forces mental model building.
• Reading code allows handwaving.
• Therefore a rewrite at least produces understanding.

Now the picture is muddied:

• Writing code does NOT require understanding
• Reading code still doesn't produce understanding
• Therefore a rewrite, in the absence of tests, likely just destroys value

But rewriting is now much lower cost. Writing new code is now much lower cost. Some engineers just had the part of their job that they enjoyed the most taken away.

This means that some people now get to spend ALL their time working on the part they liked - solving problems, refining requirements into real specs, talking to customers. But others, who merely liked writing code, will get much less joy out of their jobs.

It is a misconception to suggest that the technically strongest people were those who just liked writing code - that has not been my experience at all. There are people who are just good at everything, not because of raw intelligence, but because they're just more determined to get things done.

How leaders create and use networks

This one's about how networking is useful. I think the key point that I draw out of this is that the most effective leaders with the broadest networks are networking all the time BEFORE it's clear what the network is useful for. Strategic networks are extremely broad and the point of them is not obvious...until it is.

People who are introverted balk may view networking as an unpleasant task to complete. It is generally impossible to succeed in this way without extreme discipline and the goal to change yourself and your habits to be more conducive to networking.

I'll give an example. Suppose an executive needs to sell a new budget for some new teams in an area his company has no products in. He draws on networks across the company, industry, outside his industry, to make his point. Perhaps an outside expert can provide figures from consumer surveys or research, perhaps customers of another division have already started to adopt a competitor's products in this new area.

These are people the executive may have met while it seemed like he wasn't working at all. Perhaps he chatted to them down the pub or while on a run.

The danger for introverts is not in seeing and declining opportunities to network. It's in not seeing them at all. I'll give another example. You hear of someone who has just relocated to your office for a new role. It is not related to your role at all. For some introverts this is just information to file away. But to someone in the habit of networking, they'll speak to that person.

Remember Dale Carnegie's immortal advice: be genuine in your interest. This is not some kind of tactic. I actually am interested when speaking to people.

The point of the article is that we don't do this enough. We do part-of-the-job networking at the coalface enough, but not strategic networking. I tend to agree.

Get the boss to buy in

This article is about how to convince your boss of something. It's key and you shouldn't skip over the management chain when making proposals, it's important that everyone is sold on something, making enemies is highly unproductive. Making an enemy of your boss is suicidal or at the very least, highly risky.

There is better advice about convincing people of things out there. My favourite pieces of advice, that are not from this article:

• Make them think it was their idea! This is from Dale Carnegie. The best way is if it actually is their idea - maybe they had a thought or said something that was the genesis of your idea.

• Never engage in a pitched battle on an open field. Convincing people of things isn't done this way. There is a much better article in the communication book on this.

Okay article. It applies most in a highly political structure where there's little trust. I have been in both high trust and low trust situations.

High performance organisations perform better when units have autonomy and can make changes to the plan without sign off.

Organisations where vetoes are possible at every turn tend to be low performance, but they may not be selected against due to e.g. really good salespeople or perhaps just a monopoly. At a startup where it's sink or swim, someone who sinks the boat for political reasons quickly loses their job. Or everyone does. Either way you don't see that situation for long.

Four ways to improve your strategic thinking skills

Not that insightful or memorable. I do not remember anything from it.

This is the X ways to do something kind of article.

How to help without micromanaging

This was a relatively good article, offer help and make it clear that you want to offer help. Ask the employee what help is needed and what is going wrong - they know better than you most likely. Sometimes they don't, but it's still useful to ask.

Here's the kicker - I actually think the most busy managers don't even have time or the luxury of being able to rely on the crutch of micromanaging. If someone gets stuck and you don't offer help, and can't micromanage, then there are two outcomes - the project gets unstuck on its own after the people involved figure it out without help (not the worst outcome) or the project stays stuck and everyone loses motivation or feels abandoned (the worst outcome!).

You do actually have to ask and offer help, but sometimes people won't ask for help because it shows weakness. Everyone is guilty of this - if you need help then that means you don't know how to do the thing.

If there's an impending deadline and it'll just cause some embarassment, then letting that slip as a teaching moment is fine. But if letting that moment slip means that the company fails, or, I don't know, the extinction of humanity, then perhaps it's better that managers intervene early.

Again, behaviour when you have a safety net and when you don't is VERY different.

Communication

I liked a lot of the advice and tactics in this one. The most important advice is on persuasion.

• Speak to everyone individually and work out what they care about BEFORE the big pitch to everyone - the first time people hear about your idea should NOT be the big pitch meeting. Every sale needs a few touch points before the sale is made. Persuasion is a long process.

  I don't really think this advice is "useful" until you've done it the wrong way a few times and really seen that it doesn't work. Example: engineers who believe a cool new architecture is going to solve all of the problems so they make a really detailed presentation on it.

  You have to develop the scar tissue to really understand this advice and apply it. I don't think there's a shortcut for this.

  Sometimes the first meeting is just a casual chat where you set the tone.

• I really like the idea that storytelling is the key to everything. It comes up in this one and in lots of other books. I've already mentioned Malcolm Gladwell. A good story can get anyone to believe in anything. Even if the story is somewhat false, if you tell it to enough people it can actually become true. Stories about leadership, the lessons learnt from a failure, why something succeeded and how we'll replicate it next time.

  Stories being too good are dangerous. A reality distortion field, someone who's TOO good at communicating and convincing, can become totally unmoored from reality. Without a connection to revenue or feedback from customers this can destroy a company. Even worse is when it DOESN'T destroy a company and there's no feedback.

  It's not always a tradeoff, you can have someone who's really great at their jobs AND a good storyteller. But how would you tell that their good jobs aren't just really good stories?

• Being sincere. Just be sincere? Is that good advice? Well I don't know, I think you just have to practice it and get real feedback. People are going to remember the story you told and how it made them feel, even if they quickly forget the content.

I am wary of communicators who are too good. I prefer feedback mechanisms. I don't need someone to communicate revenue going up, it just does. Customers don't need to be particularly good at communicating their feedback if they just sign on the dotted line - that's the ultimate feedback.

Managing People

I really liked this one - it didn't confirm my priors and validate my experiences, it directly challenged several of my behaviours and practices. It's disturbing and provokes reflection when a story is told that matches exactly your experience and the character representing YOU is called out as the problem. Humbling. This happened several times to me.

I won't elaborate, but read the book.

The one I disagree with is that pacesetting always subtracts from the team's energy.

Oftentimes I say something and people think I'm joking or there's no way I believe something is possible. But you can just do things and sometimes people just need to see it once.

With every person, there's a before/after moment with AI where they start getting much more done and much faster. We've seen that recently with a lot of people, but you have to set the pace and order people to do things they won't do on their own. Praise them for it too!

YC partners always say this, I heard Diana Hu and Gustaf Alstromer say this just the other day - it's not that people can't move fast without coming to SF, it's just that they haven't really SEEN what it means to move fast.

A lot of traditional Harvard Business School management advice is really old school. I don't think anyone wants to work for a boss that they can't learn anything from, who doesn't push them hard. Well actually that's completely false, plenty of people don't want to move fast and don't enjoy being pushed.

I have no interest in interacting with those people.