Cutline Speaks

Are you a maker or a manager?

posted by Michael on July 29, 2009

Thanks to a post yesterday on the NYT Freakonomics blog, I just came across a fascinating essay from Y Combinator partner and programmer Paul Graham.

Graham argues that there are two kinds of people i­n Silicon Valley when it comes to schedules -- managers and makers -- and the kinds of schedules those two groups usually maintain has a significant impact on the value they get out of things like meetings. Here's an excerpt from Graham's essay:

One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.

There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one-hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.

Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

Looking at this as a PR professional in Silicon Valley, I'd argue that successful public relations in the Valley frequently requires that you combine the two types -- you may spend part of your day in strategy meetings with a client or your team (manager), another part developing a plan or a pitch (maker), another part dealing with the media (manager), and yet another part developing a messaging doc or writing an op-ed (maker). One of the real challenges with this kind of schedule is being able to move rapidly from manager mode to maker mode or vice versa -- being able, for example, to spend your morning meeting with clients and working with the media, and then shift your focus entirely so you can spend your afternoon drafting the next great press release.

At Cutline, we pride ourselves on our ability to act quickly, and we live by the motto "get things done" -- regardless of what we're doing. And although it's often a challenge to keep up with the pace, there's nothing more exciting than knowing that every day is different. We'd be curious to hear from other PR professionals out there on this debate. 

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