2020-10-23 at

Industrial Organisation: C-Level

"My first mistake in my first company, was deregulating the investors. My second mistake was assembling incompetent founders (hands-on). So now that I am in the process of restructuring, after five years, I am spending a bit of time to design the next team."

I'm trying to map out a clear delineation of roles across C-level/functions for the next hospitality team I build.

Model, iteration one:

- finance and IR need to be paired under the same person; finding, managing, and firing investors comes under this person; also both top and bottom line responsibility; this role is both political and quant, but facing strategic counterparties.

- operations; talent management, SLAs, and execution of routines including self-improving routines fall under this person; ditto political and quant but facing tactical counterparties, i.e. staff, suppliers, customers.

- legal and technology fall under the same person; because the legal constraints and innovation / fundamental problem solving concerns involve the same sort of thinking, popularly referred to as engineering talent.

Thought in progress.

Iteration two:

You may ask where product and marketing in general fall in this rubric. Well, I do think that this being the economic essence of the business it actually needs to be shared across the three functions above. Engineering needs to work on the strategic level, ops needs to work on the tactical level, and finance needs to provide political air-cover. You can't separate finance from politics. Politics supervenes on economics. It's political economy all the way down every value-chain.

Iteration three:

You may ask about branding and the soul of the company, or its heart. Well if you don't understand how branding is an engineering problem, then you simply don't have a rigorous model of how human thought works.

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