Joel Spolsky recounts his move from a Microsoft to (eventually) Juno Online Services in New York.

Eventually, though, I started to discover that the management philosophy at Juno was old fashioned. The assumption there was that managers exist to tell people what to do. This is quite upside-down from the way management worked in typical west-coast high tech companies. What I was used to from the west coast was an attitude that management is just an annoying, mundane chore someone has to do so that the smart people can get their work done. Think of an academic department at a university, where being the chairperson of the department is actually something of a burden that nobody really wants to do; they’d much rather be doing research. That’s the Silicon Valley style of management. Managers exist to get furniture out of the way so the real talent can do brilliant work.

From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/04.html

Guess what. Microsoft is still around and you probably never heard of Juno.

Takeaways:

• Presumably, as CEO you are also a manager. How do you view your job? Is it to tell people what to do or to move the furniture out of the way so the smart people can get the work done?
• If you want it to be the latter but it keeps being the former, what part do you play in creating that situation?
• What if you’re one of the smart people?
• How do you hire people smarter than you?
• Does it make you uncomfortable to see yourself as a furniture mover? What would your company be like if it didn’t?

[tags]small business, manager, management, CEO, entrepreneur [/tags]