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when under attack
- retreat and focus of making the core value proposition stronger
- do not attempt to widen the surface area of the battles – causes dilution of forces
- improving your product from 98% to 99.99% brings more overall value to your customers
On hiring and firing
- Talent density
- high enough talent density reduces the need for dummy proofing
- Reduce need for dummy proofing reduces amounts of required processes
- Team moves faster
- performance plan is a waste of time both of the manager and the employee
- Give a generous severence package
- give easy exit for managers
- give runway for ex-employees
- we are not a family but a team of professionals
- all founders fail at firing early – understanding that it is important to do so to protect the company and it is nothing selfish
- when dealing with people and emotions
- use less data
- rely more on intuition and personal judgement
Leadership
- context not control
- Context of problem
- constrains and limitations
- difficulties
- highly aligned loosely coupled
- Never let friendship get in the way of a professional judgement
- Manage all stakeholders with compassion
- time spent towards self improvement as a leader will overall benefit the organization
- do not try to do everything yourself
- at different stages of an organization leading means very different things
- as an executive it is less about dealing with the nitty gritty details and more about unblocking your team members from getting stuff done
- Every CEO will inevitably make mistakes along the way
Culture and values
- Culture = Context of behavior
- communicate it very explicitly
- hire base on culture and values
- helps ensure decisions are made the same way without you needing to be involved by being in the same room
- In companies with weak culture, culture is diffused and people act differently
Timing
- It is hard to predict when something might happen
- most of the time predictions are if they are even going to happen is in itself bogus
- In 1995, predicted streaming would become mainstream in 2002 and then again in 2007. The trend only started emerging slightly before 2012.
Maintaining adaptability
- management is by nature forced to be short term – how to improve things by X percent next quarter
- need to ensure against becoming a monoculture like company through over optimization with processes
- need to be able to respond to market changes
- important to keep some slack and redundancy
Further readings
- Beyond Entrepreneurship, Jim Collins
- Conscious business, Fred Kofman
