Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:29:26 · Eric Ries, Lenny Rachitsky
So a mission controlled company is one where the mission itself has sovereignty. And so if you're feeling a little greedy about grabbing all this power for yourself, that's the time to do something like the Anthropic LTBT. It's very easy to implement at the early stages because you don't need a nonprofit. Let's say you're a want to be Novo Nordisk, you don't actually have to boot up the nonprofit right now. All you have to do is write it into the charter the way Anthropic did. Just say, "10% of the equity is hereby pledged to a nonprofit foundation and 1% of future revenue. The foundation gets a board seat," or whatever you want to say. Those things are really easy. Just write them into your charter, fire and forget and then boot it up later, but make sure you have the right to do it. Now, those are the bare minimum easiest things in the book to do. A total piece of cake. [01:30:10] S1: It's interesting how so much of this is similar to, not similar, but to AGI alignment, finding a way to align AI, finding a way to align your business. [01:30:19] S0: It is not a coincidence. Okay? There's a deep philosophical reason why this comes up. I'll give you the simple version and then we'll do the complicated version. [01:30:27] S1: Okay.
01:30:27 · Eric Ries
[01:30:27] S0: The simple version is who aligns the aligners? This is the number one unsolved problem in AI. It's not the technical. We're making great progress on the technical alignment problem, but we haven't made jack progress on the human alignment problem, which is that we've known since the development of Conway's law decades ago, that software products, the organizational imprint of the humans who make the software shows up in the technical architecture of the software. It's really weird actually. We don't think about it that much, but the org chart is visible in the architecture diagram. Why? Because human values flow from the parent to the child. So that's one reason. We have to make sure that if you're trying to solve the alignment problem, but you can't agree on what the human values are to align to, you're already cooked. But the deeper and more interesting problem, I don't know if your listeners will be familiar with this or not. There's this concept in the scientific literature called emergent intelligence. And I write about it in the book because corporations, organizations are the oldest form of artificial intelligence on the planet. They are an example of this emergent intelligence. The same scientific principle that makes the transformer architecture work and appear intelligent, that same principle is at work in organizations. Organizations are literally super organisms. They're alive in the same way that these models are emergent intelligences. And if you don't know what this is, it can sound very metaphysical and weird and spooky. So if you want a physical demonstration, I promise no metaphysics required. One of my favorite demonstrations of emergent intelligence, I don't know, maybe Lenny, maybe you can link the video. I have it in the book too. There's a video where researchers created this thing they called the Piano Movers puzzle. You remember that famous clip? I don't know if you have the meme of Friends where they're trying to get the couch down the stairwell and he's like, "Pivot, pivot, pivot." People send it to me all the time for obvious reasons. They created a version of that puzzle that they had ants solve. So visualizes like two slits, two walls with a gap in each wall and a big eye beam shaped irregular object. And if you watch a human solve the puzzle, it goes like this.
01:32:37 · Eric Ries, Lenny Rachitsky
They try one thing, they think about it, they rearrange, you go back, you back. You've ever got to do a puzzle like that? You can just tell watching the video that an intelligent person is trying to solve this puzzle because they try logical things that don't work and then they learn. If you give one ant this puzzle, he cannot solve it, obviously, but put a thousand ants in there and they can solve the puzzle. And if you watch the video of the ant colony solving this puzzle, you will swear you can see an intelligence at work because it does just like a human. It tries something, it pauses to consider, it reorients, tries something different, it's spooky. And the researchers found this is what we have to understand for humans. The more ants you put in the puzzle, the faster the solution. But the more humans you add, the worse, unless the humans are very carefully aligned. This is the key lesson for organizational design. We are birthing these things left and right. And if we don't tend to them properly, they develop emergent characteristics that we don't like. We don't want that to be like that. And no amount of founder mode is going to clean that up because you're talking about something that is deep in the DNA of the thing you made. Beware. [01:33:48] S1: What I'm hearing here is we should be hiring more ants for our organizations. [01:33:52] S0: Well...
01:33:52 · Eric Ries, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:33:52] S0: Well... [01:33:54] S1: Eric, we've given people a lot to think about. I think there's a lot of just like, "Oh wow, I should really think about this and take this seriously." What's a final thought, final nugget, final lesson you want to leave listeners with before we get out of here?
01:34:07 · Eric Ries, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:34:07] S0: Let's talk about Mary Parker Follett. I mentioned her in passing and I feel like, "You know what? I bet a bunch of people have never heard of her." So let me give you one more blast from the past. Most people have heard of someone named Frederick Winslow Taylor. Fred Taylor's good friend of mine with a pioneering original management theorist. He wrote The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, and Taylorism was one of the most popular management fads of all time. If you think we have fads now, you should see Taylorism. It was like debated at the Supreme Court. It was front page news in the 19 teens. Taylor, they made movies about him. He was an incredibly famous person. But one of his contemporaries was a woman. Her name was Mary Parker Follett. And her work is so far ahead of its time that if you read it today, you would think this person lived in 2026. She would write things like, "We need to focus on power with, not power over." She said, "The superior and the subordinate together obey the law of the situation," meaning we work together to figure out what the situation requires. We don't just tell the subordinate what to do. She said, "The job of a leader, the hallmark of a leader is, can they create more leaders?" So if someone said that to you right now, you'd be like, "Oh, that's going on TikTok right this second." [01:35:18] S1: Twitter.
01:35:18 · Eric Ries
[01:35:18] S0: Like, "That's awesome. What podcast was that on?" No, she wrote that in 1920. Now, unfortunately, for reasons you probably can guess, she was utterly erased from history. Her work was utterly lost. Nobody studied it at all for most of the 20th century. And then it was totally rediscovered and it was republished in the 1990s. The great Peter Drucker called her the "Prophet of management." So one of her most important concepts is what she called the invisible leader. And I just love this. Just imagine someone, a woman in 1920 going around saying this to people, how it would blow their minds. She would say, "Mr. Rowntree, the owner of the Rowntree Chocolate Factory is not the leader of the Rowntree Chocolate Factory." And people would be like, "Lady, what are you talking about? His name is on the door. His family has owned this thing. What? How? If he's not the leader, who he is? She'd be like, "Glad you asked. Mr. Rowntree is an excellent leader because he's very good at instilling in his people the sense of common purpose of what this factory is about. And the common purpose rather than Mr. Rowntree himself is their invisible leader." And this is maybe the most powerful concept. If you want to manage something as a leader, you have to understand that the most consequential decisions that will affect any organization's life are almost by definition made when no manager is present. You think you made the decision when you told everybody we're going to build a high quality product. "Our vision is this, our plan is this," but you're not there when the product managers and the designers and the engineers make the actual trade-offs. Right? Somebody sitting there with the code and being like, "Rounded corners or straight corners, skeuomorphism or not?" When person clicks this button, do we double check? Do we understand what they meant or do we just erase their hard drive? Thousands upon thousands of these tiny little decisions get made. Only the invisible leader is present. So if you don't cultivate that sense of common purpose, you have no control over what's going to happen. Again, your promises are worthless. So if you want a little homework, read Mary Parker Follett. She will enlighten you.