Marc Andreessen says more founders need to read 'the Elon playbook'

""I believe there are a lot of people who should be learning a lot more from him who cannot bring themselves to do it and to their own detriment," Andreessen said during a recent episode of Stripe cofounder John Collison's "A Cheeky Pint" podcast. The A16z cofounder said that by observing Musk, he's distilled the Tesla CEO's actions into an unofficial playbook that looks far different from traditional corporate management texts, like the legendary General Motors CEO Alfred P. Sloan, after whom MIT named its school of management."

""Basically, number one, it's only engineers," Andreessen said. "Your company, people who matter in your company are the engineers, the people who understand the technical content of what you're doing for technology companies. And then you only ever talk to the engineers. You never ever ever talk to mid-level management." Not everyone can do this method, Andreessen said, mentioning that Ben Horowitz, A16z's other cofounder, views it as assuming "you have somebody like Elon who can hold the entirety of every engineering topic in their head all at the same time.""

A management playbook prioritizes engineers as the only people who matter in technology companies and directs leaders to communicate primarily with them. The approach advises avoiding mid-level management and funneling decision-making to those with technical expertise. The method assumes leaders capable of holding complete technical topics in their heads, which limits transferability but does not make it unique to one individual. There is a belief that more such technically omniscient leaders exist than commonly assumed. Additional transferable elements include cultivating a strong personal brand or cult of personality to unify and mobilize teams around ambitious technical goals.

Read at Business Insider