Sublime

This is one of the innovator’s dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.

Separate your artists and soldiers People responsible for developing high-risk, early-stage ideas (call them “artists”) need to be sheltered from the “soldiers” responsible for the already-successful, steady-growth part of an organization.

And as I learned in that 2003 S-Team meeting, if you started caveating or waffling about why you were not hitting objectives, Jeff wouldn’t hesitate to tear that kimono off for you.

In the technology business, you rarely know everything up front. The difference between being mediocre and magical is often the difference between letting people take creative risk and holding them too tightly accountable. Accountability is important, but it’s not the only thing that’s important.

Remove the coxswain’s guidance from a crew, and inexperienced rowers may descend into misalignment and poor pacing. Similarly, without senior leadership calling the shots, a company’s silos may end up misaligning their efforts if the company is operating in a complicated environment. And if the organization is dealing with complexity, traditionally

We talked about results not only for the operation’s sake but to tell the story of how a given action had enhanced or harmed relationships across the organization, or deepened credibility with key stakeholders. We were asked hard questions by our leadership not so they could demonstrate power but so they could give us room to be honest and vulnerab

Disney, John Andrew Rice, and Steve Jobs not only headed Great Groups, they found their own greatness in them. As Howard Gardner points out, Oppenheimer showed no great administrative ability before or after the Manhattan Project. And yet when the world needed him, he was able to rally inner resources that probably surprised even himself. Inevitabl