Management

Management is about coping with complexity. Without good management, organizations become chaotic in ways that threaten their survival. Good management brings order and consistency through the unending practice of:

• Setting tough goals
• Establishing processes to reach them
• Executing those processes
• Learning from the results

Running a Team

As a manager of a team, it's your responsibility to create a high performance team. High performance teams are fast. They value speed not just for its own sake, but also because fast teams are necessarily decentralized — low in friction, and high in trust.

• Equip teams with a vision, goals, distinct roles, membership stability for 18+ months, clear (yet porous) boundaries
• Create a reward and accountability system, for both individuals and the team as a whole
• Give teams autonomy to manage team processes
• Keep great teams together
• Encourage initiative at all levels; execute-and-communicate over ask-and-wait

Running an Organization

When you're running a larger organization, your success has more to do with clarity of a shared vision, common principles, and strength of belief in them, than to assets, expertise, operating ability or management competence, important as they may be.

• Design a structure to implement your strategy
• Then adjust the structure to accommodate for people
• The best org structures make the right decision the easiest one
• Put the best people on the hardest problems
• Empower people to make decisions; execute-and-communicate over ask-and-wait
• Hold people accountable to their results
• Put teams that work together, especially poorly, as close together as possible
• Keep innovation and maintenance together
• Re-org infrequently, well, and involve stakeholders; in a firm of any size the knowledge of how things really work is highly dispersed
• Keep your org flat