To prevent single points of failure, implement a "pilot/co-pilot" system. Regularly rotate employees, promoting the co-pilot to pilot and bringing in a new co-pilot. This develops well-rounded talent, breaks down knowledge silos, and makes the company anti-fragile, despite initial employee resistance to change.

Companies mistakenly bundle management with authority, forcing top performers onto a management track to gain influence. Separate them. Define management's role as coordination and context-sharing, allowing senior individual contributors to drive decisions without managing people.

Supercell avoids emotional decision-making by being radically transparent with data. A daily email with key metrics for every game is sent to the entire company. This ensures everyone understands the performance criteria and accepts the rigorous, data-driven decisions to kill projects that don't meet specific thresholds.

Challenge the 'hire slow' mantra. Hiring is an intuitive guess, so act quickly. Once a person is in the organization, their performance is a known fact, not a guess. This clarity allows for faster decisions—both in removing underperformers and, crucially, in accelerating the promotion of superstars ahead of standard review cycles.

Rather than relying on formal knowledge sharing, Alphabet's X embeds central teams (like legal, finance, prototyping) that float between projects. These individuals become natural vectors, carrying insights, best practices, and innovative ideas from one project to another, fostering organic knowledge transfer.

Contrary to the popular bottoms-up startup ethos, a top-down approach is crucial for speed in a large organization. It prevents fragmentation that arises from hundreds of teams pursuing separate initiatives, aligning everyone towards unified missions for faster, more coherent progress.

Siphoning off cutting-edge work to a separate 'labs' group demotivates core teams and disconnects innovation from those who own the customer. Instead, foster 'innovating teams' by making innovation the responsibility of the core product teams themselves.

Many founders become too attached to what they've built. The ability to unemotionally kill products that aren't working—even core parts of the business—is a superpower. This prevents wasting resources and allows for the rapid pivots necessary to find true product-market fit.

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.