Company Culture

If you look closely, all these problems fundamentally come from:

1. Decreased skin in the game, which reduces team alignment


2. N^2 communication, which creates need for managers and specialization, which reduces individual agency and breadth of learning


3. Reduced risk tolerance, which slows everything down

#1 and #2 are inevitable results of having more... See more

Kevin Scott, now CTO of Microsoft, would ask in candidate interviews: “What do you want your next job to be after this company?” Most of your team members realistically won’t stick with the same company forever. This is even more true as you scale to 20, then 50, then 100 team members and so on. But the best way to empower them to do good work is... See more

2) Clear Roles & Decision Rights

Without clear swim lanes and decision rights, individuals on teams feel disempowered and projects tend to stall out. This often happens when leaders are hesitant to explicitly give up their own power or when they want to maintain the appearance that the team is a democracy. High-performing teams have clear roles for... See more