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Decent article here about “leaders” who spend every all-hands meeting talking about financial metrics that most of the organization doesn’t understand or cannot connect back to their work — so, about 90% of leaders — with some good quotes and approaches, but like every other article ever written about work, it utterly misses the point that consistent discussion of financials, growth, and wealth-building is the closest thing many executives have to “fun” in their lives, so no, they’re not about to stop doing it anytime soon. Shipping product, grinding, being in 17th gear and beating rivals constitute the purpose of those guys. You take their ability to talk about CAGR and Q3 beating expectations away, you basically just killed them. In their minds, they just became a 1950s housewife. And fuck if they know how to roast a ham.
That’s the problem with most orgs and most work suggestions: they ignore psychology. An executive does not care about words like “engagement.” He views engagement as what just happened to his daughter, Brooke — and honestly he only cares about that because he has to pay for the wedding (goddamn Kevin, his family is loaded. Can’t they help out?). An executive cares about money, and engagement to him (or her) is about making money, growing, beating rivals, and showing you “won.” Bezos is the grand puba of these guys in some ways; go look up his speech in Berlin in 2018 where he…
