One of the biggest mistakes is fixating on metrics that don’t matter.

I think it’s totally false that we have to treat them differently. I can’t stand the term “millennials,” and the ones I know hate the name tag too. We should simply think of them as people early in their careers. Yes, we should teach them more, but we should teach them more about how business works.

When leaders not only are open to being wrong but also readily admit it—as Reed did that day, and regularly did—and when they do so publicly, they send a powerful message to their teams: Please speak up!

what people most want from work: to be able to come in and work with the right team of people— colleagues they trust and admire—and to focus like crazy on doing a great job together.

That respect for one another’s intelligence and genuine desire to discover the bases of colleagues’ views drove intense mutual questioning and kept it mostly productive and civil, if often quite colorful. The team also modeled this vigorous questioning for employees in many forums, openly debating one another.

We wanted all of our people to challenge us, and one another, vigorously. We wanted them to speak up about ideas and problems; to freely push back, in front of one another and in front of us.

A company’s job isn’t to empower people; it’s to remind people that they walk in the door with power and to create the conditions for them to exercise it. Do that, and you will be astonished by the great work they will do for you.

“I was too kind,” he told me, “and that means you’re a bad manager in a lot of ways. You end up sugarcoating things, and that’s doing them a disservice.”

data informed rather than data driven.