On building of All Trades

Every. Single. One. of the startups that I've worked with have some

co-founder (or early team) dynamic that implicitly shapes their lasting culture.

These practices may be well-known and honored, or they may be hard-coded yet unspoken (like the pie in my story above). Either way, they are a part of the company’s DNA — its nature.

As an Ops Leader,... See more

Amanda Schwartz Ramirez • Find the sacred pie

the people who can start things will be the major beneficiaries in the coming years, because the barrier is no longer knowledge or skills, it’s courage.

Superhuman

Responsive organizations are fueled by individual and collective learning. Retrospectives are baked into the culture; feedback and learning drive strategy and growth.

Sharan Bal • Hiring Humans, Not Resources

For the past decade, our idolatry of startups and innovation has meant the focus has been: What can we disrupt? How fast can we grow? How big can we get? How much can we raise?

Founders are taught to possess enough faith that they can build something very big very fast. This creates a pressure cooker of responsibility that distorts reality to the... See more

Sari Azout • Can I Ramble for a Sec?

Founders need a new way of thinking, of building, of support that allows them to drive systematic, methodical and meaningful change.

By casting a wide net, I learned that I have very little ability to predict how useful a call will be in advance. There is relevance, when work is closely related to something you’re working on, and usefulness, when work advances something you’re working on. Relevance is easier to predict, but it’s not a very good proxy for usefulness, which is a... See more

Cate Hall • How to Be More Agentic

in my role as a more traditional COO (which I also thoroughly enjoyed) I was touching on a large number of parts within Buffer. It also created a certain level of pressure, one that Joel described very well in this post. I felt the urge to try and “keep everything together” and within an arm’s reach so everything would go according to plan.

With... See more

How We're Working Without Managers at Buffer

The COO role shifts when you’re building a networked instead of a structured organization

Maximum leverage is the result of commitment, of daily persistence, of gradual and insane and apparently useless effort over time.

The moment of maximum leverage

The internet and software is only accelerating this trend: as coordination costs get lower, it becomes easier and easier for companies to use outside services instead of building capabilities internally, concentrating knowledge in fewer and fewer organizations.

Ise Jingu and the Pyramid of Enabling Technologies

How do you preserve a source of truth when your team looks like teams of the future, connected with individuals who care but may be working in different systems and organizations to help you achieve your business goals? How can you assign an arbiter of truth?

With the innovation of the org chart McCallum eased the tradeoff between scale and efficiency that many organizations face as they grow. This new ‘operating system’ for firms operates even more effectively in modern times by leveraging the internet, but the tradeoff between scale and efficiency has not gone away. Structures and processes that work... See more