These two essays have been doing the rounds of late, and for good reason:

Paul Graham’s com­par­i­son between the sched­ules of Man­agers and the sched­ules of Mak­ers (cre­atives). The gist? A manager’s day is divided into hour-long blocks of time, mak­ers work in much longer, rel­a­tively uncon­strained and non-discrete units of time. The prob­lem is in mak­ing these two work together.

When you use [the manager’s sched­ule], it’s merely a prac­ti­cal prob­lem to meet with some­one. Find an open slot in your sched­ule, book them, and you’re done. […]

When you’re oper­at­ing on the maker’s sched­ule, meet­ings are a dis­as­ter. A sin­gle meet­ing can blow a whole after­noon, by break­ing it into two pieces each too small to do any­thing hard in. Plus you have to remem­ber to go to the meet­ing. That’s no prob­lem for some­one on the manager’s sched­ule. There’s always some­thing com­ing on the next hour; the only ques­tion is what. But when some­one on the maker’s sched­ule has a meet­ing, they have to think about it.

With the phi­los­o­phy that a man­ager is more ser­vant than dic­ta­tor, Aaron Swartz offers tips for non-hierarchical man­age­ment (via Kot­tke). This is specif­i­cally for star­tups, he sug­gests, where the tra­di­tion ‘org chart’ is flipped upside down, but these tips seem sound no mat­ter what the organisation:

  • Man­age­ment is a (seri­ous) job
    • Stay organ­ised
  • Know your team
    • Hire peo­ple smarter than you
    • Be care­ful when hir­ing friends
    • Set bound­aries
  • Go over the goals together
    • Build a community
  • Assign respon­si­bil­ity
    • Vary respon­si­bil­i­ties
    • Del­e­gate responsibly
  • Clear obsta­cles
    • Pri­or­i­tize
    • Fight pro­cras­ti­na­tion
  • Give feed­back
    • Don’t micro­man­age
  • Don’t make deci­sions (unless you really have to)
  • Fire inef­fec­tive people
  • Give away the credit
  • Few peo­ple are cut out for this