There’s a surprisingly big category of problems that are ‘orphaned.’ By ‘orphaned’ I mean: you can’t point to a specific person or organization who thinks it’s their responsibility to deliver the outcome in its entirety.
The fact that this excellent essay has just 14 likes and no other comments at the time of my writing hints at another problem upstream of those described in the essay: How can we even get the right people to focus on big problems, and the lack of General Managers to solve them, without essays like this being in the New York Times? How can we get important thinking like this to the audience it needs?
Optimistic media is one way! More and more enterprising journalistic types are being drawn towards building solutions oriented outlets, myself included
A great example of this kind of thinking is what Tom Farley did while NYC health commissioner under Bloomberg. Farley transformed the city's health department to focus on the leading causes of death among New Yorkers (tobacco and unhealthy foods), in effect becoming the "GM of saving lives" in New York. Highly recommend his book Saving Gotham
Thank you for this piece, Nan, and for the quality of the discussion it’s sparked here. I find the “orphaned problems” framing clarifying.
One thing I’m sitting with, reading both the essay and the comments, is a distinction between a theory of historical causation (who or what “caused” success) and a theory of responsibility design (where accountability for an outcome actually lived). I read the GM concept less as a “great person” claim and more as an argument about the importance of having a durable locus where the buck stops, especially under uncertainty, fragmentation, and changing conditions.
In civic and place-based systems, many problems feel orphaned not because no one cares or is working on them, but because responsibility is structurally illegible: authority is split, time horizons are short, risk is punished, and accountability can’t be held by any one person or institution for long enough. That makes me wonder whether the next step in this conversation is not just “more GMs,” but how we design institutions (or vehicles) that can actually host GM-level responsibility without relying on heroics.
At Amazon we call these people STLs - single threaded leaders. Bezos famously said: who is the most senior leader who is singularly focused on solving this problem? One director said: me. Bezos asked him, so what else are you solving for? The director gave him a list of other things his organization was working on. Bezos then said: well, this is not single threaded then, is it. And the next week it was: that director cancelled other things and focused his org in solving just that problem. This is similar to the concept of GM you are describing. This person should have enough resource, or ability to get this resource and seniority, to move the mountain.
Side note: STL term drifted since Bezos' days and now Amazon has "STL"s who are junior ICs which kind of defeats the meaning of it.
I think I'm pretty sympathetic to this idea, especially for "smaller" problems, but have two places of skepticism:
- I think that GMs working as funders makes some level of sense (because they can see the entire ecosystem, etc.), but there are lots of circumstances where programmatic organizations aren't the right place to house GMs, especially for very large problems, in part because it just seems hard to make large organizations that continue to be effective (and don't get bogged down in bureaucracy, etc). I think there are narrow problems where a single programmatic organization tackling it makes sense, but lots of times you might want to test multiple, potentially contradictory theories of change to address an issue. A funder can do this a lot more easily than a single programmatic group.
- But, funders are also maybe not the ideal GMs at times? They often have worse access to information than programmatic groups in many important ways (because they mainly get info from people who want funding from them), and if they are in a good place to be a GM (because they are a monolithic funder), and their strategy is bad, then the space is at a lot more risk if they take this approach.
That being said, I think many small issues or sub-causes can really benefit from this model. And maybe big causes, but the GM really has to be the right person (which feels very stakesy to get right). Thanks for writing this!
As much as this provides an interesting take, I am skeptical of the the central claim here. I don't believe that the principal impediments to successfully addressing the greatest problems of our era is the lack of highly determined 'general managers'; there are other cultural, political, technological and geopolitical factors that have greater explanatory power over the absence of such pivotal figures.
Furthermore, the examples cited there of Henderson's work on smallpox or Wolfson's role in marriage equality are unconvincing.
In the case of small pox, the original idea of eradication was in fact promoted by Victor Zhadnov (over the prevailing consensus of 'control') inspired in part by the Soviet achievement of mass production of freeze-dried vaccines. The idea of vaccinating only the "ring" around the infected person was in fact an accidental discovery by Bill Foege. The eradication effort was boosted by one of the rare collaborations between the superpowers with the US providing the funding and Soviet Union producing and the vaccines. And of course, the actual groundwork of vaccination involved several important "managers" who coordinated village to village and door to door programs to accomplish it.
The same is true if you did some research about marriage equality too. It was a classic example of mass-movement evolution that brought about the cultural shift and boosted no doubt by the role of important figures (not just Wolfson).
It would be highly reductionist to assume that all marriage equality in the US or eradication of smallpox just would not have happened without their respective "general managers".
A GM coordinates effort. They can't accomplish a task single-handedly. If you go back and re-read the respective paragraphs, other forces you mention that are equally required to succeed are described, and the GM's role was to help direct and "manage" them to reach the tipping point of 100% eradication and national equality respectively.
Not sure if I understand your point very well here but I am not disputing the generic "role" of GMs to "direct and 'manage'"coordination for various social movements.
I am against the idea that the something of the scale of smallpox eradication was achieved principally due to the unwavering commitment and undeterred vision of *one exceptional* GM (as opposed to multiple factors including contributions from several individuals and organization that together outstrips the importance of one person). The evidence presented here is limited, misleading and even on first reading, highly unconvincing.
This is nothing but the "great man" theory of history adapted to social movements and repackaged with a startup entrepreneur as the central savior for all the major problems facing the world.
I see better where you're coming from. Not a fan of Great Man theory either. Perhaps I interpreted the piece more generously because I've seen management portrayed as unromantic and even unnecessary work. Since a manager is an employee being paid to achieve outcomes which, in many cases, are not tied directly to shareholder value, I saw the reference to entrepreneurship as a suggestion to put people with the iconoclasm to be founders in roles often filled (if they are filled at all) by the dispositionally bureaucratic. So, less of a startups saving the world narrative, and more of a suggestion to bring some startup-derived wisdom to social movements. I agree that attributing the success of an entire movement to one person is bullshit, and I didn't interpret the piece as making that claim.
Thanks for that message - you're right that there can be two possible interpretations here:
1. Replacing the prototypical manager with someone with the mindset, ambition and approach of a startup founder for critical decision-making positions would lead to better outcomes (along the lines of what you are saying).
Maybe this is correct but this post offers no evidence in support of it.
2. The primary reason for the (perceived) inadequacy or downright failure in our ability to crack the biggest challenges confronting humanity - and lives of sentient beings - is the lack of certain "phenotype"of individuals (maybe GM, startup founder whatever) taking charge and leading the cause.
This second interpretation is utterly devoid of even a shred of evidence in support (and every available piece of evidence leads to the exact opposite conclusion).
Hmm.... What about the idea that it's helpful to employ people to accomplish a specific desired outcome if nobody has that outcome as their explicit job description yet?
I have a similar post in my drafts. I do think the question goes further upstream--where are the hyper-persistent and spendy philanthropists? People in these roles in ordinary nonprofits also run into some issues where certain parts of the problem are housed in parts of society that their nonprofit, as an entity for the public good, isn't allowed to touch. Also there are tax/legal issues with paying people at nonprofits tonnes of money, although perhaps hospitals have found a way around this. I imagine a new sort of vehicle (not an ordinary nonprofit) might make it easier to get more of these off the ground.
AI alignment is by far the biggest problem we as a species are faced with. I’ve taken it upon myself to become the “GM” of this problem. With that in mind I’ve developed a “course” which I think is the best way in which to tackle the alignment problem. I’ve developed a film which describes my course and I’m currently working on a more professional version of the film. Stay tuned…
Loved this essay. I'm not sure whether GMs is quite the right framing of the solution, but I also think you point to a critical question about how to seriously address market failures instead of waving our hands at them.
Where I struggle: how do we know we're funding the right GM(s)? If we heavily centralize decisions about how to solve a highly complex, global problem, but we also suspect that an extended time horizon is required to make progress on these types of problems, how do we know we have the right person leading the right-sized chunk of the problem?
An example that's close to my own life: I think Sal Khan aims to fill the role of education's GM—with a mission to provide a free, world-class education to everyone, anywhere. To work towards this, he's founded not only Khan Academy, but also several other experimental organizations like Khan Lab School and Schoolhouse (a peer-to-peer tutoring platform I co-founded with him). He recently joined TED as a board member and vision steward. He's mobilized hundreds of millions of dollars towards making education accessible.
Based on my time working with Sal, I think he's a one-in-a-billion visionary, and a brilliant person. At the same time, education is an absurdly complex problem to solve. His positioning as education's ambitious GM has helped his ideas get disproportionate levels of funding compared to other potential innovators and nonprofits in this space. This presents a tradeoff: maybe through centralization we make strides in solving the coordination problem, but we could create a new problem where one person's intuitions (however good) become a single point of failure.
A potential way to address this: build a coordinated network of GMs, without much central authority, who work as peers on adjacent chunks of large problems and who are well-positioned to challenge each other's intuitions.
The beauty of general managers is they own outcomes, not processes. Most climate initiatives fail because nobody has the authority to say "our carbon accounting is bullshit, we're measuring the wrong things entirely" and actually change course. What if we made GM-equivalents fireable by the communities they serve, with quarterly votes based on measurable progress toward specific targets rather than five-year strategic plans?
What’s very interesting is the ‘market failure’ you have identified might need at least two do-able interventions to solve it. First some kind of longer term funding stream, perhaps in 5 year tranches, to give GM founders the ability to do the long range work needed to make these solutions happen, and second, some kind of filtering/signalling process to find those people and get them skilled enough to do this work. Each of the case studies you identify (including yourself) is a rare person. Even 5x ing the supply of these types of people would be transformative, because each of them is choosing to solve a giant problem in the world for comparative peanuts when they have most of the exact skill set one might associate with founders of for profit companies. So their individual opportunity costs might get in the way unless you find ways to ‘build’ the moral architecture of such people such that they focus on the longer term goal somehow. That seems like a very interesting problem to solve. It has been done many times in the past but afaik mostly by the religious.
Love this framing, and agree with the need for GM talent development and increased ambition among non-profits so those GMs have a platform (our Big if True Science Accelerator (BiTS), inspired by ARPA program design and management, works on the talent part). It would be great if the organizations looking at the world's problems from a GM perspective could share lessons and tools and coordinate. Also, for some problems, the GM-led effort might be most needed at an early stage or other critical time, to work on core parts of the problem that 1) won't be addressed by traditional mechanisms (e.g., markets, government grants), and 2) if solved, would unlock progress and allow these usual mechanisms to kick in. The entering wedge, or what we would call the "DARPA-hard" part of the problem. Solve that part, and the rest of it is much easier to work out. That lends itself to a time-bound, thesis-driven, focused push.
They offer an alternative path for our best and brightest students to refocus their careers on these issues Nan is illustrating, rather than getting sucked up by PE or Big Four.
The fact that this excellent essay has just 14 likes and no other comments at the time of my writing hints at another problem upstream of those described in the essay: How can we even get the right people to focus on big problems, and the lack of General Managers to solve them, without essays like this being in the New York Times? How can we get important thinking like this to the audience it needs?
Optimistic media is one way! More and more enterprising journalistic types are being drawn towards building solutions oriented outlets, myself included
A great example of this kind of thinking is what Tom Farley did while NYC health commissioner under Bloomberg. Farley transformed the city's health department to focus on the leading causes of death among New Yorkers (tobacco and unhealthy foods), in effect becoming the "GM of saving lives" in New York. Highly recommend his book Saving Gotham
Thank you for this piece, Nan, and for the quality of the discussion it’s sparked here. I find the “orphaned problems” framing clarifying.
One thing I’m sitting with, reading both the essay and the comments, is a distinction between a theory of historical causation (who or what “caused” success) and a theory of responsibility design (where accountability for an outcome actually lived). I read the GM concept less as a “great person” claim and more as an argument about the importance of having a durable locus where the buck stops, especially under uncertainty, fragmentation, and changing conditions.
In civic and place-based systems, many problems feel orphaned not because no one cares or is working on them, but because responsibility is structurally illegible: authority is split, time horizons are short, risk is punished, and accountability can’t be held by any one person or institution for long enough. That makes me wonder whether the next step in this conversation is not just “more GMs,” but how we design institutions (or vehicles) that can actually host GM-level responsibility without relying on heroics.
Great piece.
At Amazon we call these people STLs - single threaded leaders. Bezos famously said: who is the most senior leader who is singularly focused on solving this problem? One director said: me. Bezos asked him, so what else are you solving for? The director gave him a list of other things his organization was working on. Bezos then said: well, this is not single threaded then, is it. And the next week it was: that director cancelled other things and focused his org in solving just that problem. This is similar to the concept of GM you are describing. This person should have enough resource, or ability to get this resource and seniority, to move the mountain.
Side note: STL term drifted since Bezos' days and now Amazon has "STL"s who are junior ICs which kind of defeats the meaning of it.
I think I'm pretty sympathetic to this idea, especially for "smaller" problems, but have two places of skepticism:
- I think that GMs working as funders makes some level of sense (because they can see the entire ecosystem, etc.), but there are lots of circumstances where programmatic organizations aren't the right place to house GMs, especially for very large problems, in part because it just seems hard to make large organizations that continue to be effective (and don't get bogged down in bureaucracy, etc). I think there are narrow problems where a single programmatic organization tackling it makes sense, but lots of times you might want to test multiple, potentially contradictory theories of change to address an issue. A funder can do this a lot more easily than a single programmatic group.
- But, funders are also maybe not the ideal GMs at times? They often have worse access to information than programmatic groups in many important ways (because they mainly get info from people who want funding from them), and if they are in a good place to be a GM (because they are a monolithic funder), and their strategy is bad, then the space is at a lot more risk if they take this approach.
That being said, I think many small issues or sub-causes can really benefit from this model. And maybe big causes, but the GM really has to be the right person (which feels very stakesy to get right). Thanks for writing this!
As much as this provides an interesting take, I am skeptical of the the central claim here. I don't believe that the principal impediments to successfully addressing the greatest problems of our era is the lack of highly determined 'general managers'; there are other cultural, political, technological and geopolitical factors that have greater explanatory power over the absence of such pivotal figures.
Furthermore, the examples cited there of Henderson's work on smallpox or Wolfson's role in marriage equality are unconvincing.
In the case of small pox, the original idea of eradication was in fact promoted by Victor Zhadnov (over the prevailing consensus of 'control') inspired in part by the Soviet achievement of mass production of freeze-dried vaccines. The idea of vaccinating only the "ring" around the infected person was in fact an accidental discovery by Bill Foege. The eradication effort was boosted by one of the rare collaborations between the superpowers with the US providing the funding and Soviet Union producing and the vaccines. And of course, the actual groundwork of vaccination involved several important "managers" who coordinated village to village and door to door programs to accomplish it.
The same is true if you did some research about marriage equality too. It was a classic example of mass-movement evolution that brought about the cultural shift and boosted no doubt by the role of important figures (not just Wolfson).
It would be highly reductionist to assume that all marriage equality in the US or eradication of smallpox just would not have happened without their respective "general managers".
A GM coordinates effort. They can't accomplish a task single-handedly. If you go back and re-read the respective paragraphs, other forces you mention that are equally required to succeed are described, and the GM's role was to help direct and "manage" them to reach the tipping point of 100% eradication and national equality respectively.
Not sure if I understand your point very well here but I am not disputing the generic "role" of GMs to "direct and 'manage'"coordination for various social movements.
I am against the idea that the something of the scale of smallpox eradication was achieved principally due to the unwavering commitment and undeterred vision of *one exceptional* GM (as opposed to multiple factors including contributions from several individuals and organization that together outstrips the importance of one person). The evidence presented here is limited, misleading and even on first reading, highly unconvincing.
This is nothing but the "great man" theory of history adapted to social movements and repackaged with a startup entrepreneur as the central savior for all the major problems facing the world.
I see better where you're coming from. Not a fan of Great Man theory either. Perhaps I interpreted the piece more generously because I've seen management portrayed as unromantic and even unnecessary work. Since a manager is an employee being paid to achieve outcomes which, in many cases, are not tied directly to shareholder value, I saw the reference to entrepreneurship as a suggestion to put people with the iconoclasm to be founders in roles often filled (if they are filled at all) by the dispositionally bureaucratic. So, less of a startups saving the world narrative, and more of a suggestion to bring some startup-derived wisdom to social movements. I agree that attributing the success of an entire movement to one person is bullshit, and I didn't interpret the piece as making that claim.
Thanks for that message - you're right that there can be two possible interpretations here:
1. Replacing the prototypical manager with someone with the mindset, ambition and approach of a startup founder for critical decision-making positions would lead to better outcomes (along the lines of what you are saying).
Maybe this is correct but this post offers no evidence in support of it.
2. The primary reason for the (perceived) inadequacy or downright failure in our ability to crack the biggest challenges confronting humanity - and lives of sentient beings - is the lack of certain "phenotype"of individuals (maybe GM, startup founder whatever) taking charge and leading the cause.
This second interpretation is utterly devoid of even a shred of evidence in support (and every available piece of evidence leads to the exact opposite conclusion).
Hmm.... What about the idea that it's helpful to employ people to accomplish a specific desired outcome if nobody has that outcome as their explicit job description yet?
You should try to do some of the things on that list
Thank you for the essay!
I have a similar post in my drafts. I do think the question goes further upstream--where are the hyper-persistent and spendy philanthropists? People in these roles in ordinary nonprofits also run into some issues where certain parts of the problem are housed in parts of society that their nonprofit, as an entity for the public good, isn't allowed to touch. Also there are tax/legal issues with paying people at nonprofits tonnes of money, although perhaps hospitals have found a way around this. I imagine a new sort of vehicle (not an ordinary nonprofit) might make it easier to get more of these off the ground.
AI alignment is by far the biggest problem we as a species are faced with. I’ve taken it upon myself to become the “GM” of this problem. With that in mind I’ve developed a “course” which I think is the best way in which to tackle the alignment problem. I’ve developed a film which describes my course and I’m currently working on a more professional version of the film. Stay tuned…
Loved this essay. I'm not sure whether GMs is quite the right framing of the solution, but I also think you point to a critical question about how to seriously address market failures instead of waving our hands at them.
Where I struggle: how do we know we're funding the right GM(s)? If we heavily centralize decisions about how to solve a highly complex, global problem, but we also suspect that an extended time horizon is required to make progress on these types of problems, how do we know we have the right person leading the right-sized chunk of the problem?
An example that's close to my own life: I think Sal Khan aims to fill the role of education's GM—with a mission to provide a free, world-class education to everyone, anywhere. To work towards this, he's founded not only Khan Academy, but also several other experimental organizations like Khan Lab School and Schoolhouse (a peer-to-peer tutoring platform I co-founded with him). He recently joined TED as a board member and vision steward. He's mobilized hundreds of millions of dollars towards making education accessible.
Based on my time working with Sal, I think he's a one-in-a-billion visionary, and a brilliant person. At the same time, education is an absurdly complex problem to solve. His positioning as education's ambitious GM has helped his ideas get disproportionate levels of funding compared to other potential innovators and nonprofits in this space. This presents a tradeoff: maybe through centralization we make strides in solving the coordination problem, but we could create a new problem where one person's intuitions (however good) become a single point of failure.
A potential way to address this: build a coordinated network of GMs, without much central authority, who work as peers on adjacent chunks of large problems and who are well-positioned to challenge each other's intuitions.
The beauty of general managers is they own outcomes, not processes. Most climate initiatives fail because nobody has the authority to say "our carbon accounting is bullshit, we're measuring the wrong things entirely" and actually change course. What if we made GM-equivalents fireable by the communities they serve, with quarterly votes based on measurable progress toward specific targets rather than five-year strategic plans?
D. A. Henderson is a great example; I mentioned him in this old essay, along with Harry Weaver of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (polio): https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/leadership-and-progress
What’s very interesting is the ‘market failure’ you have identified might need at least two do-able interventions to solve it. First some kind of longer term funding stream, perhaps in 5 year tranches, to give GM founders the ability to do the long range work needed to make these solutions happen, and second, some kind of filtering/signalling process to find those people and get them skilled enough to do this work. Each of the case studies you identify (including yourself) is a rare person. Even 5x ing the supply of these types of people would be transformative, because each of them is choosing to solve a giant problem in the world for comparative peanuts when they have most of the exact skill set one might associate with founders of for profit companies. So their individual opportunity costs might get in the way unless you find ways to ‘build’ the moral architecture of such people such that they focus on the longer term goal somehow. That seems like a very interesting problem to solve. It has been done many times in the past but afaik mostly by the religious.
this post stirred me in ways i haven’t been able to articulate yet - all i know is i’m very excited by this
thank you for writing this nan!
you will hear from me :)
Love this framing, and agree with the need for GM talent development and increased ambition among non-profits so those GMs have a platform (our Big if True Science Accelerator (BiTS), inspired by ARPA program design and management, works on the talent part). It would be great if the organizations looking at the world's problems from a GM perspective could share lessons and tools and coordinate. Also, for some problems, the GM-led effort might be most needed at an early stage or other critical time, to work on core parts of the problem that 1) won't be addressed by traditional mechanisms (e.g., markets, government grants), and 2) if solved, would unlock progress and allow these usual mechanisms to kick in. The entering wedge, or what we would call the "DARPA-hard" part of the problem. Solve that part, and the rest of it is much easier to work out. That lends itself to a time-bound, thesis-driven, focused push.
This essay reminds me of Rutger Bregman's School for Moral Ambition. https://www.moralambition.org/
They offer an alternative path for our best and brightest students to refocus their careers on these issues Nan is illustrating, rather than getting sucked up by PE or Big Four.