from Hacker News

Being a Force Multiplier

by jandrewrogers on 6/12/25, 11:38 PM with 13 comments

• by roenxi on 6/16/25, 6:03 AM

  This article could do with a good edit to cut out the middle section, which appears to be a list of mostly meaningless platitudes. Although I can't argue with great managers "organise ... a free team lunch" - managers of the world take note; deficiencies on the free lunch front could be what is holding you back from greatness.

  The basic idea of greatness being small optimisations in a large number of areas is worth repeating a few times though. The majority of greatness comes from avoiding making any well known basic mistakes and a strategy of working through all the details and checking for small problems can do a lot to enable that. Big dramatic gestures generally do not.

• by hansmayer on 6/16/25, 6:26 AM

  Ugh. Please lets stop adopting military concepts into the field of business leadership. Given that most humans and engineers in particular perform best when in position of having high autonomy, which is exactly the opposite of military environment, why do we keep borrowing from there? Is it because all the expired military "experts" who are trained to fit in and not think for themselves, lost all the wars in the past two decades and need a new job? Why do we allow people who are severely under-educated even compared to a junior-LLM-assisted rookie to tell us what we need to do? No, please don't be a "force multiplier", just look around and do what makes sense in your specific environment. You are way smarter than that.

• by asplake on 6/16/25, 10:45 AM

  > You don’t obsess over one thing. You move lots of little things forward. No grand initiatives. No reorg. Just constant, low-key, under-the-radar nudging in the right direction.

  It's not terrible advice, but it scales less well than the writer thinks. To really scale, you:

  1. Engage with the right challenges (large or small)

  2. Invite others into the process, celebrate their successes etc

  3. Coach others to start from #1

  Perhaps its organisational scope isn't much bigger than the team, but to my mind, the article doesn't go far enough beyond #2.

  Do it, and you're the best kind of leader, one that makes other leaders. That's what scales.

• by drcongo on 6/16/25, 8:21 AM

  Author could have used Substack itself as an example - it's a force multiplier for right wing conspiracy theories and propaganda.