Companies are a technology for organizing people toward a common mission. Unlike software, they're rarely perfected because the incentive is only to be better than the competition, not to reach an absolute ideal of operational excellence.
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Addressing the human side of strategy is not just about culture. It requires focusing on the 'inside out' perspective by explicitly designing the company's operating model—its core tasks, processes, and collaboration methods—to support and execute strategic choices effectively and consistently.
Leaders in large companies often lack visibility into the day-to-day workflows that drive results. They see inputs like salaries and outputs like KPIs, but the actual process of how work gets done—the institutional know-how—is a black box that walks out the door every day.
Most startups focus on product or technology innovation, but Gamma's CEO argues that innovating on organizational design is an equally powerful lever. This means rethinking hiring, management, and team composition to create a competitive advantage.
Large corporations can avoid stagnation by intentionally preserving the "scrappy" entrepreneurial spirit of their early days. This means empowering local teams and market leaders to operate with an owner's mindset, which fosters accountability and keeps the entire organization agile and innovative.
Business is a unique domain where you can pursue selfish goals (building a large, profitable company) and selfless ones at the same time. By building a successful company with ethical, people-first practices, you force competitors to adopt similar positive behaviors to compete, thereby improving the entire industry for everyone.
In school or corporate jobs, the 'rules for success' are provided. Founders enter a world with no such rubric and often fail because they don't consciously develop their own theory of how the world works, instead defaulting to shallow, unexamined beliefs about what founders 'should' do.
Traditional corporate structures are too rigid for today's environment. The octopus serves as a better model, with distributed intelligence in its tentacles allowing for autonomous yet coordinated action, sensory awareness of customers, and rapid adaptation.
A project's success equals its technical quality multiplied by team acceptance. Technologists often fail by engineering perfect solutions that nobody buys into or owns. An 80%-correct solution fiercely defended by the team will always outperform a "perfect" one that is ignored.
To avoid bureaucratic bloat, organize the company into small, self-sufficient "pods" of no more than 10 people. Each pod owns a specific problem and includes all necessary roles. Performance is judged solely on the pod's impact, mimicking an early-stage startup's focus.
Top talent isn't attracted to chaos; they are attracted to well-run systems where they can have a massive impact. Instead of trying to "hire rockstars" to fix a broken system, focus on building a systematic, efficient company. This is the kind of environment the best people want to join.
