Craiglist Founder: Why Large Companies are Dysfunctional

>> Well, the challenges that I had to face were just keeping and staying out of the way as need be. When you have good people doing stuff, you have to avoid helping them. For example, whenever I talk about learning coding again, it makes the tech team nervous. Sounds like a joke, isn't. So getting out of the way is really important. Listening to good legal advice is important. In '98 knowing when to lead or to get out of the way, a balance is important. You know, so right now the idea is sometimes just to be patient, to listen to people who have expertise, also with media advice because the deal is that every one of us is now more responsible for own media, our own reputation online. We're responsible for our social media strategy because, you know, if you don't have a social media strategy, you're like a tree falling in the forest and, you know, even if you have consultants, you still have to take some responsibility. I am trying to learn how to better use social media but for the causes I support, not so much me.

>> Why are you doing customer service?

>> It needs to be done. It means that I'm gonna stay seriously engaged with the community, and it feels right. But that way also can conduct my government's responsibility a lot better if I know what's going on. We're a small organization, but I'm really fearful that we might some day suffer from one of the big falls of large organizations. The deal is in a hierarchy what you do to get ahead is you tell your boss what the boss wants to hear, and then the boss tells his or her boss what they want to hear. So you quickly get poor information going up to the top. That's why large companies are dysfunctional, not all, but that's the tendency. And that's why if you're say a president, you need to have a Blackberry so people can tell you what's really going on. People who are not in your immediate circle of advisors.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====