Seven CEO Practices That Make Incentives and Decisions More Explicit

Shaan Puri frames these practices as management moves that can sound excessive, impolite, or nearly impermissible—yet may create clear incentives, remove delay, enforce focus, or transfer judgment quickly. The useful question is not whether they constitute a general doctrine. It is what each practice makes more likely, and whether a company and its leader want to bear the trade-offs.

For Puri, the stories are “frame breaking”: they challenge constraints leaders may treat as fixed when they are really conventions. Rewards do not necessarily have to wait for annual review cycles. A CEO does not necessarily need a calendar full of recurring meetings. Focus can be more than a value written on a wall.

Sam Parr supplies the counterweight. He repeatedly resists the lifestyle implied by some of the examples, especially the expectation of working until midnight. Puri agrees that highly successful people can use opposite approaches. These are not instructions to make every company harsher; they are examples of unusually direct ways to shape behavior.

Martin Basiri, whom Puri identifies as the founder behind ApplyBoard and a newer company called Passage, described a practice he calls an “option drop.” When someone solves a major customer problem, has a strong idea, unlocks growth, or otherwise does something notable, Basiri may announce an equity-option grant immediately. At times, he said, he gives options to everyone still working in the office late at night.

The grant is not cash handed out on the spot. Shaan Puri says the options have a strike price and an exercise window, and that Basiri messages an assistant with the recipients and amount before the grant is formalized. But the signal is immediate, concrete, and public. Employees can see the behavior being rewarded at the moment it occurs.

Puri’s point is basic behavioral reinforcement applied with unusual speed. Rather than relying on company values stated years earlier, the CEO allocates a stake in the company when somebody acts in a way he wants repeated. Basiri told Puri that the practice changed what people did: solve an important problem, help a customer, create growth, or show up when the work is difficult.

Puri’s own connection to Basiri began with an investment he failed to make. In his mid-twenties, after being introduced by a 13-year-old scout, Puri agreed to put $25,000 into ApplyBoard, which he describes as a service helping international students apply to universities and earning fees from schools when students were admitted. He then got cold feet and did not follow through. He now calls ApplyBoard a multibillion-dollar company, while saying he does not know its exact current figures.

Parr rates the option-drop idea as effective but not especially extreme. He does not use options; his company recognizes notable work by striking a gong in the office. Puri calls that “auditory reinforcement.” Both practices make achievement visible, but the option grant adds ownership and a financial claim to the recognition.

Shaan Puri says OpenAI uses an inbox—friction@openai.com—for employees to report whatever is keeping them from getting their work done: a policy, procedure, missing resource, or other obstacle. A person at the company triages what comes in and, when the complaint appears to identify legitimate friction, works to remove it.

The premise is not that the CEO personally resolves every problem. It is that employees have a standing way to identify drag, and someone is assigned to determine whether it should be cleared. Puri describes it as a “janitorial crew for bureaucracy”: an explicit effort to fight the bloat, policies, and potholes that accumulate as a company gets large and grows quickly.

Sam Parr gives the practice two thumbs up, one of his highest ratings, because it is “less heroic and more systematic.” A forceful leader can personally cut through a bottleneck; a friction-removal channel attempts to make the discovery and removal of bottlenecks part of the organization’s operating routine.

Siemens CEO Roland Busch is shown describing a habit of answering messages quickly and with few words, often simply “Ok” or “No.” Shaan Puri interprets the practice as a management system: employees can email a question or request, receive permission or rejection quickly, and come talk to Busch immediately if the matter requires more detail. There are no recurring meetings merely to catch up.

Puri attributes a blunt formulation to Busch’s approach to meetings with direct reports:

Puri’s criticism is that many status meetings become “progress theater.” Employees perform their productivity, managers perform oversight, and neither necessarily advances the work. Busch’s approach reduces ritualized alignment, but requires people to escalate directly when a decision actually needs discussion.

Jeff Bezos’s famous question-mark emails represent a more abrasive version of the same compression. Puri says Bezos would read customer messages sent to him, forward a complaint to the relevant team, and add only a question mark. Teams understood that shorthand to mean: Is this true? Why is it happening? What are we going to do about it?

The question mark was not necessarily an order to satisfy one particular customer. In Puri’s account, it was a prompt to investigate whether an anecdote revealed a fault in the larger machine. A team might respond that its data showed a 98% success rate. Bezos’s view, as Puri recounts it, was that the customer’s experience and the metric could both be true—the metric might simply omit something material.

Sam Parr agrees that individual customer stories can reveal what ordinary data misses. But he also identifies a constraint on copying the technique: a one-character message works only when its organizational meaning is understood. From most executives, Parr says, a question mark could read as disrespect rather than as a request to investigate.

At PayPal, Peter Thiel’s rule was that each employee should have one major problem. Shaan Puri gives examples: combating fraud, increasing adoption of the PayPal button on eBay, or reducing processing fees. The premise was not merely that people should try to focus; it was that their relationship with the CEO would be organized around one assigned challenge.

Puri recounts that if someone tried to discuss another topic with Thiel, Thiel would walk out of the room. He says Keith Rabois confirmed that Thiel literally did this. The nonverbal consequence was direct: the way to earn the CEO’s attention was to stay on the assigned problem.

Thiel described this logic as “focus is convex.” Puri interprets that to mean that the last increments of concentration have disproportionately large effects. Moving from 80% to 90% focus may matter far more than the numbers imply because high-performance outcomes become sharply differentiated near the top. He compares it to swimming: being merely very good yields little recognition, while the final distance to the extreme tail creates an entirely different outcome.

The practice is meant to prevent smart people from distributing attention across several plausible priorities. It also leaves little room for wide-ranging conversations, opportunistic problem-solving, or relationship maintenance that many organizations consider normal.

Jack Welch’s practices at GE were presented as continuous selection. Shaan Puri says Welch required each business division to be number one or number two in its market. If a division fell short, it had one year to improve, be sold, or be shut down. Welch also fired the bottom 10% of performers in the company each year.

The first rule tests whether a business deserves continued investment; the second prevents low performance from persisting until a crisis forces action. Puri calls both Darwinian forcing functions. The difficult part, he argues, is not seeing their logic but applying them continuously rather than tolerating weak performance indefinitely.

Sam Parr complicates the Welch example. He has heard both that Welch was admired as a leader and that GE became an unwieldy collection of businesses, and says he does not know how to reconcile those judgments. He also contrasts Welch with Jensen Huang’s approach as Parr understands it: rather than firing people, Huang raises intensity until employees become great or leave.

Puri sees those as different routes to weeding out low performance. One uses explicit dismissal; the other makes the environment difficult enough that people either meet its standard or depart. Neither is offered as the universally correct model.

Alan Mulally’s Ford story addresses a separate problem: making bad news reportable. Puri says Ford had lost $17 billion in the prior year, yet every project in its color-coded business review was marked green. Mulally concluded that people were afraid to show failure. When, at the next review, one project finally appeared red, Mulally stood and applauded.

Puri finds the story too much like a Disney movie to be compelling. But its logic is distinct from Welch’s: public applause for a red project attempts to reward candour rather than punish poor outcomes. The aim is to make an accurate signal available early enough for a company to respond, instead of creating a system where every dashboard looks healthy until the failure can no longer be concealed.

Jimmy, known as MrBeast, used what Shaan Puri calls a “cloning” strategy for key hires in the early days of his business. A new employee would shadow MrBeast from the time he woke up until he went to sleep, for roughly six months. Puri recalls that one hire also acted as MrBeast’s alarm clock.

The purpose was not conventional onboarding. Constant proximity was meant to expose the employee to the founder’s decisions often enough that the person could make similar judgments without a written manual or a meeting for every question.

Puri remembers a room of CEOs reacting to the arrangement as both impressive and far beyond ordinary expectations. He does not know whether MrBeast still uses the practice. MrBeast has matured, Puri says; Beast Industries has a CEO and more people, and is likely less rough-and-tumble than it was in its earlier period. But Puri’s broader point is that practices which remain useful tend to survive while ineffective ones are pruned away.

The cloning model offers a maximal answer to a familiar founder problem: how to create someone who can act with the founder’s judgment rather than merely execute instructions. It also demands an extraordinary degree of access, time, and intensity from both people involved.

The practices above are all ways of increasing intensity. Sam Parr’s objection is straightforward: he does not want the same outcomes badly enough to accept the same costs. He does not want to be at the office until midnight, and does not put himself in the same category as the leaders being discussed.

Shaan Puri offers Kevin Kelly’s framing as a counterweight. In an exchange quoted by David Perell, Kelly defined greatness as being remembered by people outside one’s family a generation or two later. Kelly said that, by this definition, he had chosen not to be great. He preferred an eclectic life of writing, exploration, and smaller projects over the extremity and singular obsession he believed greatness required.

Parr says he has wrestled with a similar definition, though over a longer horizon. Wealth alone, he reflects, is unlikely to make a person memorable for centuries. The people who endure in public memory are more likely to be political or civic figures, humanitarians, inventors, or artists—and the odds of reaching that category are very low.

For Puri, legacy was never especially motivating. The more useful distinction is between achieving greatness and being great. Achieving a historically significant outcome may require costs he does not want to pay and a degree of obsession that does not fit how he is wired. Being great is available in the present: as a friend, parent, colleague, or mentor; in a difficult moment requiring courage; or in the choice to give someone patience rather than withdrawing into distraction.

Parr says parenthood can make that choice immediate. There may be a period when children are old enough to be engaging companions and still actively want their parents’ time, making ambitions that once seemed unquestionable feel less urgent. He believes ambition can return later. But an ambition may be declined not because it is impossible, but because its price is no longer acceptable.