"A Korolev, not a Rogozin" ©

Yesterday I was in an interview. A large company, turnover in the billions, the leader in its category. More than three hours of conversation, the longest interview of my life. That is not the point. The point is one thing the owner said. He said: “We are looking for a Korolev, not a Rogozin.” On the whole I agree: a business does not need “effective managers” with no expertise. Then he went on. They need someone who can replace any person on his team and do that person’s job ten times faster and ten times better. There I disagreed. I did not argue. I am writing this down instead. We both agree a manager should have expertise. We disagree about why.

First I wanted to know whether Korolev was that person. He could not build an engine better than Valentin Glushko. He could not build a rocket control system better than Nikolai Pilyugin. He could not build a launch complex better than Vladimir Barmin. He did not do the ballistics. Mstislav Keldysh’s institute did, and the press called Keldysh the Theoretician of Cosmonautics. Even the idea of the first satellite was not his. Mikhail Tikhonravov and his group brought in the concept of the simplest possible craft, and Korolev noticed it and pushed it upward. The whole program rested on the Council of Chief Designers, set up in 1946, and each of Korolev’s colleagues on that council was stronger than him in his own field. His deputy, Boris Chertok, in the memoir Rockets and People, describes Korolev’s strength in other words: will, speed of decision, a readiness to take responsibility, and a feel for what mattered. When the R-7 failed launch after launch in 1957, it was Korolev who answered to the state, not Glushko. And now the interesting part. There is an episode where Korolev tried to do without his strongest expert. He and Glushko fell out over the fuel for the N-1 moon rocket, and Korolev gave the engines to Kuznetsov’s aviation design bureau, which had never built anything on that scale. The result is known: four launches, four failures, though after Korolev’s own death. We lost the moon race. Korolev, it seems, also could not do his team’s work ten times faster and ten times better.

And the research? There is some. Amanda Goodall of Bayes Business School in London has spent twenty years on the link between a leader’s expertise and an organization’s results. In 2023 she collected the findings in the book Credible: the best hospitals are run by doctors, the best universities by strong scientists, and Formula 1 teams win more often under former drivers and mechanics. That is not Goodall’s key point. An expert leader is not there to do the subordinates’ work. An expert leader is there to understand the work deeply enough that nobody can feed him nonsense. In another of her studies, on data from 35,000 employees in the US and Britain, a boss’s competence in the subject was the strongest predictor of job satisfaction. Stronger than pay.

One conclusion, different reasons. What do you think? Should a leader be the best specialist, and the management will follow? Or a deep enough specialist not to be fooled, who then gets better at managing?

I am waiting for comments on Setka.