I like thinking about how to scale a company without making it feel like a big company. The standard way to scale a company is to use hierarchy and process to manage the larger scale – big decisions get passed up the chain to an appropriate decision maker, and little decisions are handled by a […]
Category: management
Encouraging useful failure
One particular issue I’ve been thinking about with startup vs. big company culture (and that is referred to in a comment on my last post as well as comments over on Facebook) is how to encourage useful failure – failure where you learn something and then apply what you learned to improve next time. This […]
Startup vs. big company culture
Since Larry Page became Google’s CEO again in April, his focus has been on “making a company of more than 24,000 employees act like a startup“. And because of my interest in mapping out organizational space and understanding the different ways in which people can organize themselves, I’ve been trying to figure out what, exactly, […]
Understanders vs. Fixers
I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about what we thrived on in a job, and it was interesting to see how our perspectives differed. She talked about the thrill of fixing a problem, of figuring out what was happening, and designing a process or system to solve the problem forever. […]
The value of finance teams
When I was considering whether to take a job in Google’s finance department, a successful entrepreneur friend of mine told me I was making a mistake. He felt that designers and engineers added value to the world by creating new products, but the only thing finance people did was to say no. Given the pride […]
Action despite uncertainty
Scott Berkun just posted about situations in life where good data is impossible, which reminded me of a quote I’ve been meaning to share. I once went to a talk by Bob Sutton where he cited a quote by Andy Grove, CEO of Intel: “I think it is very important for you to do two […]
Call your shot
Babe Ruth pointing to the stands, and then hitting a home run. Joe Namath guaranteeing a Super Bowl victory despite being an 18-point underdog, and then going out and winning it. There’s something magical about calling your shot – telling people you’re going to do something impressive and then doing it. Even in the workplace, […]
Who is your audience?
One of the broader points that I don’t know if I made clearly in my last post is that effective communication depends not only on the message you are delivering, but also on the audience which the message is targeting. In the case of writing a resume, you have to remember that you are targeting […]
How to write a resume
I’ve written the same email five times in the last several months giving friends advice on how to write their resume, so I figured it was time for me to package it into a blog post that I could then just link to when needed. Assume this is my response to somebody with a few […]
Management Innovation Exchange
The Management Innovation Exchange (aka MIX) looks like an interesting project. It’s a collaboration between McKinsey, London Business School and a couple companies like Dell, with the idea being to open source ideas about management. It’s unclear yet whether it will attract a critical mass of community to discuss ideas (so far, the curation looks […]
