Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu on the trade-offs of employee autonomy

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu used his X account to discuss a common dilemma about whether employees should await instructions or take the initiative themselves. He described metric-heavy firms as producing a “wait for instructions” mindset that delivers predictability but can leave the organization adrift without flawless leadership. By contrast, a culture that rewards initiative tends to feel chaotic, with frequent internal debates and a lingering sense of “not good enough.”

Vembu illustrated this with programmers who habitually critique each other’s code, saying every smart coder thinks another’s work “sucks, I can do better.” He concluded that companies must accept either the comfort of certainty at the cost of innovation, or the discomfort of a dynamic, self-driving workforce, noting that trying to combine both often yields the worst of both worlds.