Keith Rabois explains how "barrels" (rare leaders who drive initiatives independently) and "ammunition" (reliable executors) determine how many projects an organization can handle. PayPal had only four to eight barrels, while many companies operate with just one, limiting them to a single major initiative at a time.
Chapters
One of the key ingredients in scaling a company is to be consciously aware of the ratio between what I refer to as barrels and ammunition. Most people and most companies are ammunition, meaning they will do what they're told and they will try to do it to the best of their abilities, but they won't actually drive from inception and conception and take an entire organization with them. Turns out that any organization can only really do as many projects as it has barrels. Those are the people that can come up with original ideas, can rally the team around them, can fix things that don't look like they're as, they aren't working as promisingly as you had hoped. My friend and colleague, Lee Hower, framed it slightly differently, which is basically the number of people that you can fire and forget. So basically you give somebody a project, an idea, a concept, a goal, and that's the last thing you have to do. They will take the initiative, they will fill in the gaps, they'll report back, and they will, one way or the other, find a way to succeed. It's surprisingly rare to find a barrel. For example, in my PayPal days, we probably had somewhere between four and eight barrels in the entire organization. That's actually a fairly significant amount. The number of parallel projects a CEO or executive or founder can embrace is predicated or dictated by or limited by the number of barrels in the organization. In many companies, only one thing that's really important can get done at once because there's only one barrel. If you have two barrels, barrels, you can embrace two different projects and two distinct initiatives. And if you have three, even better. So I tend to focus on the ratio between the two. If you have one barrel and 500 people, that's not going to really, it's going to frustrate actually most of the ammunition. So you're always looking for, do I have the right ratio of barrels to ammunition? And anytime you can add a barrel, I would pull the trigger.
