Management as an Invested Skill

The claim that nobody actually funds management

The pattern begins with an observation about a gap between stated and revealed preference. George Bonaci, who runs growth at Eric Glyman's Ramp, argues that companies almost universally say they value learning and development and even believe it, but rarely do the work, because, in his words, it "takes time, resources, intentionality, and it has to be top-down."¹ Management, in this framing, is not an assumed competence that arrives with a title. It is a skill that either gets deliberately invested in or does not develop at all.

The Samsara model: structure plus accountability

Bonaci's worked example is Samsara, where a program called Leadership Principles institutionalized what had started as the founder-CEO's own habit of reading. The mechanics are concrete. Every leader received a box of roughly fifteen business books shipped to their home, with the expectation of reading one per month. Each book fed a peer discussion organized around a specific principle the company wanted its leaders to embody, and included a requirement to demonstrate putting that principle into practice.¹

Bonaci's emphasis is that the books are not the point. The mechanism is the structure and the accountability around them, which convert "we value learning" from a slogan into applied practice rather than passive consumption. The design keeps management development from decaying into what he calls reading theater, where the input happens but the "demonstrate in practice" loop is never enforced.

Onboarding engineered to the minute

The same intentionality appears in how new people are brought in. Bonaci describes his own first thirty days at Samsara as written out in what he called excruciating detail, with the first two weeks scheduled to the minute: who to meet, what to do with the time. A manager giving a new hire their best possible start, in this view, owns a detailed 30/60/90-day plan rather than defaulting to "go shadow me" or "sit in support." The expectations escalate on a clock: understand the job and how the company makes money within a few days, learn the business and team and domain by thirty days, and show step-change impact and original perspective by ninety.¹

A side effect Bonaci highlights is that identical structured onboarding makes new hires comparable. When everyone runs the same first thirty days, a manager can assess on facts, such as whether someone shipped in their first week, rather than on vibes. The structure doubles as an assessment backbone.

Old books, transferable principles

Bonaci addresses a common objection: that leadership books written decades ago cannot speak to a post-pandemic, fast-changing market. His reconciliation is that tactics change, meaning channels and tools, but business fundamentals and good management do not change much. His illustration is Eliyahu Goldratt's The Goal and the theory of constraints, a decades-old idea that still describes where any team's bottleneck sits. The operative discipline is vetting: choose books carefully, be intentional about which principle to extract, and something is learnable from almost any book regardless of age.¹

Why the pattern is a capital-allocation decision

What ties the pieces together is the reframe of management development from an HR nicety into something closer to a founder-level allocation of time, money, and accountability. Under this view, the investment either happens deliberately or it does not happen, because the diffuse, easily deferred nature of the work means it loses every unforced competition for attention. Bonaci presents the program as the system that makes the rest of a people philosophy pay off. The design replaces informal good intentions with an enforced mechanism.

The pattern carries its own acknowledged tension. A mandate to read fifteen books a year is itself a real time cost, and the claim that business "has not changed much" sits uneasily beside the view that channels and tactics decay quickly. Bonaci's answer is that the line runs between tactics and principles, though where exactly that line falls is precisely what remains contested.