Insightful org chart design and founder mode points by Brian Chesky (Airbnb CEO)

I found this podcast interview with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky (the transcript is available here) fascinating on how he considers organizational design at the enterprise level.  He makes the point that if an organization wants a single, fast-moving flywheel (a cohesive set of priorities), they should have a lean, functional organization (which is his approach to Airbnb) instead of separate business units. Here's a relevant excerpt:

That being said, once you get rowing… think about a bunch of us in a boat, and we’re rowing together. If there are 10 people in 10 boats, they can get going faster and they can go in different directions, but the 10-person boat is going to row faster than 10 one-person boats. So once you get going with the functional organization, what I basically tell people is it’s harder to get something on the roadmap, but if it gets on the roadmap, we put the weight of the company behind it.

I like that constraint. I like the constraint of anyone can’t just do anything because now we’re focused, now we’re prioritized, now we only do things that are differentiated. And the governor is that we only do as many things as I can focus on. That’s what I do. That’s what Steve Jobs did at Apple, and that’s what Walt Disney did at Disney, and that’s what Elon Musk does at Tesla. You only do as many things as the CEO can focus on and manage.

His discussion of founder mode was also fascinating to hear, both of what he sees as the focus, but also as how it is misrepresented/misunderstood -- here's an excerpt:

If I could summarize founder mode in a couple sentences, it’s about being in the details. It’s that great leadership is presence, not absence. It’s about a leader being in the details. And if you as a leader aren’t in the details, guess what? Your leaders aren’t in the details, and their leaders aren’t in the details. And one day you’re going to wake up, and you have 50-year-olds managing 40-year-olds, managing 30-year-olds, managing people two years out of college doing all the work with no oversight, and you have these four unnecessary layers. You have no experts in the company.

So, the antidote to this is to try to be as functional as possible. We are a functional organization. Functional just means expertise-based, not general management-based. I’m the only non-functional person in the company; all functions roll up to me. I generally think the CEO should be the chief product officer of the company. The most important thing a company does is make a product. If the CEO is not the expert in the product, then why are they the CEO? Said differently, I should not be the CEO of SpaceX. I couldn’t be the chief product officer because I do not understand rocketry. So maybe I’m a good CEO, but I can’t be the chief product officer. There may be some exceptions, but I generally think that’s the case.