Sublime

Jobs had a genius for building group identity. He handed out distinctive T-shirts and offered such childish but effective incentives as buying pineapple pizza for everyone if they completed a particularly difficult task by a certain time. He shrouded their work in mystery, insisting that no outsider be told what they were up to. The Macintosh was t

This was similar in a way to the approach of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett, founders of Hewlett-Packard and charter members of Silicon Valley. They called it “management by walking around.” Both men were constantly circulating and talking with their employees in the labs, production areas, and research facilities, recognizing that personal communic

In big organizations there are advantages to consistency, but I strongly believe that smaller groups within the larger whole should be allowed to differentiate themselves and operate according to their own rules, so long as those rules work.

A second explanation often advanced is that The Mythical Man-Month is only incidentally about software but primarily about how people in teams make things. There is surely some truth in this;

Then one day, one of the developers came in with a Harvard Business Review paper from 1986, written by two Japanese business professors, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka. It was titled, “The New New Product Development Game.” Takeuchi and Nonaka had looked at teams from some of the world’s most productive and innovative companies: Honda, Fuji-X

Structuring an organization for change is much harder than designing a system for change.

the very first principle of Systems-design is a negative one: DO IT WITHOUT A NEW SYSTEM IF YOU CAN The scholar will recognize this as Occam’s Razor in modern form: AVOID UNNECESSARY SYSTEMS (SYSTEMS SHOULD NOT BE MULTIPLIED UNNECESSARILY) Two immediate Corollaries, with significant implications for Management, are as follows: (I) DO IT WITH AN EXI

As with the newly improved sequencing pipeline, they wanted to transition from a system in which new tasks could be pushed onto their plate haphazardly to one in which they would pull in new work only when they were ready for it. To accomplish this goal, they sketched a diagram on some unused wall space that included a box for each step of their de

Experimentation was highly valued, but the urgency of a for-profit enterprise was definitely in the air. In other words, we felt like we were solving problems for a reason.