It’s not sufficient to schedule strategic thinking time once every quarter or year. It’s all about iterations: making a few decisions, testing them, and coming back to the table the following week for discussion. It’s these ongoing weekly meetings that will keep your strategy relevant and fresh. Jim Collins refers to this team as “the council.”

When his company reached 50 employees, Michael Dell recognized the need to hire someone to manage the People side of his growing business and serve as a shock absorber between him and the rest of the organization. He recruited Barbara Kreisman from Motorola University. She helped him scale the company to 40,000 people before leaving Dell. (She is

WARNING: Whatever is the strength of a leader often becomes the weakness of the organization (e.g., if the founder is strong in marketing, the business may eventually find it’s weak in this functional area). Why? Because leaders have a tendency to hold on too tight, strangling the efforts of those around them. Or the leaders figure they can “watch

One of the biggest mistakes a CEO can make, in the spirit of transparency and openness, is to share important changes and information with all the employees before briefing the middle managers and supervisors.

Author of Change to Strange: Create a Great Organization by Building a Strange Workforce (a book that we strongly suggest you read), Cable notes, “If your competitive advantage depends on your people creating something valuable and distinctive, then your workforce can’t be normal.” Therefore, if you want to have a differentiated strategy, you can’t

Growth sucks cash. This is the first law of entrepreneurial gravity.

Leaders don’t have to be years ahead, just minutes ahead of the market, the competition, and those they lead. The key is frequent interaction with customers, competitors, and employees.

It needs to hurt to break a promise; otherwise, it’s too easy to let the moment pass.

The two main arguments we hear for not meeting regularly, especially for the daily huddle: 1. We don’t have the time. 2. We see each other all day anyway.