It was the weirdest thing my CEO ever told me: “Stop it. You’re doing things too well.” I was making a classic marketing leader mistake, I just couldn’t see it. I was so focused on getting everything right: - The copy on the homepage - The traffic growth of our blog - The product shots in our demo video My team and I were working hard. But the growth chart was stubbornly flat. It was totally my fault: I got stuck doing the wrong things right. In binary math, you use bits — 0 or 1 — to express numbers. You do this by flipping bits from 0 → 1 in a certain order. For example, here’s how 8 is expressed: 1-0-0-0 = 8 And here’s what 7 looks like: 0-1-1-1 = 7 Notice that 7 has three bits flipped. While 8 — the larger number — has only one! Back to my CEO: “As a leader, your job is to flip the highest order bit.” “When you pick the right priority, it doesn’t matter if you do it well or not.” “Doing the correct thing poorly is worth more than executing the wrong things perfectly.” This rewired my brain almost instantly. I dropped half the things I was working on, and a few months later, charts were going up and to the right again. Let's end with a few examples. Low-order bits that leaders commonly get stuck on: - Arguing over design and typos - Over-coaching poor performers - Constantly watching your competitors Examples of high-order bits: - Picking the right go-to-market - Aligning the team around priorities - Recruiting great people for leadership If your team is working hard, but it feels like you're going on circles, ask yourself whether you're prioritizing the highest-order bit. Do the right things wrong > Do the wrong things right
Great article. It's something I've been trying to teach developers as well. Deep analytical thinking can overbake a solution, when you just need something that just does the job, apply strategic thinking instead. There's often a cost in software development with choosing the right level of future proofing and flexibility but when you overbake the solution who miss the strategic opportunity and create more entropy as more actors and actions are at play, some of which aren't needed as the scenario isn't a know state in the current system. A-B testing and having feature based solutions that can be easily flipped off and deprecated can help solve a solution for now and elegantly ensure that you don't create a lot of technical debt, compared to creating a generic, fully feature proofed solution and creates lots of technical debt that is hard to dispose off when the market and strategy has moved on. my 2c worth, bake real world learning as part of process with the ability to fail fast elegantly.
This is complete junk. “Doing the correct thing poorly is worth more than executing the wrong things perfectly.” + Picking the right go-to-market ==> picking the wrong go-to-market; + Recruiting great people for leadership ==> recruiting poor, or mediocre, people for leadership. Yes, obviously, some things are more important than others, but doing the important things poorly isn't going to get you anywhere. In fact, since the important things are often more expensive to implement doing them wrong is going to cost you more than doing less important things poorly
Wow 😮 You stopped my scroll with this post 🧠 Doing the correct thing poorly is worth more than executing the wrong thing perfectly. 🎤 I should print that and frame it on my wall. It’s such a good word for engineering leaders. It’s so hard to get everything done, that you end up getting nothing done. Pick the right thing. 🔥
As a CEO, you may also want to consider: 1111 = 15 and 1*0*0*0 = 0
Love the metaphor, though its a bit more nuanced imo. Buildings would not be stable without a proper foundation. Leading Software development is all about balancing what has to be done technically and what provides the most value right away. Typically the most valuable path is the one that balances between short, medium and long term goals. What I often see is marketeers and business people just living in the now, aiming for short gains, only to fall for death ends. That's the whole point of having a vision. Sometimes a short term goal does not make sense without a vision, but it will under a vision. (Like migrating to a new framework, preventing mid-term that you need to build everything from scratch)
On some level, I like the metaphor to binary and the underlying lesson, but even this analogy is still too focused on the details. It requires a lesson in binary to understand. To me, there are just certain details you can figure out in the moment they arise. We like solving those details now because they’re more fun and give us immediate feedback. But taking the long view shows us the importance of execution above all else.
In computing, it's called "most significant bit" for a reason :D Good point, although in most cases you'll only find out if the things were wrong or right after they've been done. That's why real-world experience is more important than any degree. Also, many factors come into play: Interdependencies, internal politics, long-term sustainability, etc. It's also easy to assign a higher priority to certain actions that have a higher perceived impact, neglecting others that are required to keep the business running. IMO, a good leader doesn't get lost in the details, but is definitely aware of them.
“Doing the correct thing poorly is worth more than executing the wrong things perfectly.” based on "Better an average strategy and a great execution, than a great strategy and an average execution ", picked that one up somewhere, inspired by J Dimon 2002 apparently .... "Not everything (bit)you can count counts, and vice versa" is one of my mantra's. Even in B2B, it remains a people's business. Customers buy from people they trust, like and know they will be there to support them in case stuff hits the fan" it's one my goals in my job , that sales tell me: "STOP YOUR MARKETING, we cannot follow with the great leads you deliver" ...not there yet
Reminds me of a story about Andrew Carnegie and getting $10,000 worth of business advice. A man named Frederick Taylor was a young upstart and attended this fancy gentleman's meeting with the titans of industry, including Carnegie. Carnegie was poking fun at Taylor as a young guy who was "consulting" on management. After all, what could he tell them they didn't already know? So Carnegie challenged Taylor, "If you can give me some good advice about management I'll write you a check for $10k." That's $280k in today's money. Taylor said, "Mr. Carnegie. Make a list of the top 10 most important things you could be doing. Then do the first one." A list? How laughable. Did Carnegie do it? The story goes Taylor received a check for $10,000 a week later. Why? Because of this reason! Leaders are often so distracted on the day-to-day they miss the forest for the trees. By actually sitting down, making time, and constructing a list, it forced Carnegie to think about *why* each item was on the list in that order. Strategy is not just the next task to achieve our goals, it's about thinking deeper about why we do what we're doing. Shout out to Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy for that story.
Game Development Generalist
1yCringe doesn't get much worse than equating a perceptual property of binary math to a multidimensional problem involving people and calling it management wisdom.