Brie Wolfson

Instead of protecting your teams from failure, prepare them for it.

We first wrote these “10 things” when Google was just a few years old. From time to time we revisit this list to see if it still holds true. We hope it does—and you can hold us to that.

At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. 

 Among the senior leaders I’ve worked with, I’ve seen folks cause far more harm applying this advice too literally than by ignoring it. Leading effective and collaborative teams requires a nuanced approach to trust.

Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that... See more