The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

To prevent this from happening, group tasks into functions and assign each function to one—and only one—person. These are your areas of responsibility. Apple pioneered AORs in Silicon Valley, but now most successful tech companies use this method. Create a document that lists all of the company’s functions and, for each, the directly responsible in

Your team will also be watching closely to see how you treat ex-employees; a vindictive attitude will make everyone feel unsafe!

Frequent, transparent feedback is critical for building a strong culture and a thriving business. Feedback is instrumental for building trust. Without trust, communication breaks down. Building a culture of feedback and transparency starts and ends with the founders.

Projects: This list is for projects that have more than one next action that can only be done one after the other (serially). Write out all the next actions required to get to completion.

During this top goal time, do not respond to emails, texts, calls, and messages. Only work on your top priority (your top goal for the current quarter) during these two hours.

The earlier in the day you schedule this top goal time, the better,

A product manager is someone who both has the social skills to sit with customers and is (or can learn to be) technical enough to know what can and cannot be done technically.

One misconception CEOs sometimes have is thinking they get to choose the values. By the time you have thirty or so employees, your company has a set of values whether you like it or not. It’s now your job to codify what’s already there. While it is possible to change a value, it will take a lot of work.

In addition to the weekly (or biweekly, once your company is efficient) meetings, once a quarter, all the department heads (at least) should take a day or two to do quarterly planning.