I’ve written about Apple and Amazon’s organizational designs on various occasions, including Apple’s Organizational Crossroads and The Amazon Tax. What is fascinating is that the two companies are polar opposites of each other: Apple is extremely centralized and focused, befitting its obsession with being the best, while Amazon is extremely decentralized and independent, befitting its obsession with experimentation. It’s why Apple is known for multiple groundbreaking products, while Amazon is known for multiple groundbreaking businesses. I think, though, the fact they are so drastically different speaks to why Bezos and Jobs rank so highly as CEOs: the only way you end up on the extreme end of the organizational structure axis is via clear intent and purpose from the leader.
In an all-remote setting, where team members are empowered to live and work where they're most fulfilled, mastering asynchronous workflows is vital to avoiding dysfunction and enjoying outsized efficiencies. Increasingly, operating asynchronously is necessary even in colocated companies which have team members on various floors or offices, especially when multiple time zones are involved.
One of my favorite quotes is in the final book, when Harry asks Dumbledore, “Is this real or is all of this happening in my head?” And Dumbledore responds, __“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”__ For me, that quote is equally true of entrepreneurs who aren’t afraid to believe in the things that are happening in their head, and make them real.
When we try to change a person’s mind, our first impulse is to preach about why we’re right and prosecute them for being wrong. Yet experiments show that preaching and prosecuting typically backfire — and what doesn’t sway people may strengthen their beliefs. Much as a vaccine inoculates the physical immune system against a virus, the act of resistance fortifies the psychological immune system. Refuting a point of view produces antibodies against future attempts at influence, making people more certain of their own opinions and more ready to rebut alternatives.
The true promise of digital health is the delivery of high-quality care at a fraction of the cost, and at dramatically higher scale than incumbents—by using modern tech and AI to do what historically has been done through human labor or poorly functioning IT products. A risk to this promise is that every digital health company ends up allocating all of its cost savings to rebuilding the same components of their operating systems over and over again from scratch, across their separate walled gardens.
This is a very annoying way to live. I want ideas to carry over from one day to the next, and when they contradict each other, I want to get to the bottom of it and figure out the truth. I want to feel like my beliefs about the world are well-grounded, and unknotted—I want my beliefs to be more like a chef’s mis en place than a hairball at the bottom of a drain.
Ending the filibuster isn’t about enacting an extreme agenda, it’s about empowering the more moderate half of the Democratic caucus to set the agenda. They ought to step up and do it.
However, almost all of them have no idea that they want Slack. How could they? They’ve never heard of it. And only a vanishingly small number will have imagined it on their own. They think they want something different (if they think they want anything at all). They definitely are not looking for Slack. (But then no-one was looking for Post-it notes or GUIs either.)
Male leaders stay at unicorns twice as long as female leaders: The study found that the average tenure for female founders is just 1.78 years, while the average tenure for male leaders is 2.66 years.