The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 20 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Kurgan: Exceptional managers still make the wrong decision 40% of the time
“As a manager, if you make 55% of good decisions, you're a really good manager. If you make 60%, you're exceptional. But that means 40% of your decisions will be wrong.”
Kurgan: Product teams in data-rich environments must trust data over intuition
“Trust the data, not your intuition. You know, King was always pretty data driven, but it, it's, it was an incredibly data rich environment. I mean, the beauty of free to play on Facebook and later on mobile is that it provides you know, faster and a higher qua…”
Kurgan: Leaders shouldn't assign tasks they were never willing to do
“Well, I think you shouldn't ask people to do what you haven't been willing to do at some point in your career. I mean, obviously, as things evolve, you know, the highest impact you might have with, for your shareholders and your company and your team might not…”
Stephane Kurgan: Digital companies must iterate features in days, not months
“And speed of iteration is, is very important, especially in, in digital businesses. And, you know, to your earlier point, I, I've seen companies where, you know, they take six weeks or eight weeks or 10 weeks basically to come up with you know, a minor iterati…”
Kurgan: Founders who cannot articulate a mission statement lack directional clarity
“And actually I think if you can't articulate a mission statement as a founder when you're at seed or series A stage, I have a question mark about whether you know, where you're going and what value you, you're gonna be delivering to your clients.”
Kurgan: Ethical product consistency is essential for maintaining employee engagement
“The, you know, many, many of our employees in, in the original, you know, Stockholm studio and many other studios care deeply about the player experience and really want to do something good, right? And provide a magical experience to the players and hence, yo…”
Kurgan evaluates executives on operations, maturity, corporate contribution, and personal development
“The way I, you know, evaluate, you know, the performance of the leadership team is I look across four dimensions. You know, the first one is the operating or the financial performance of their function. So, you know, have they beaten their numbers essentially?…”
Kurgan: Executives must multiply team time by doing pre-meeting work
“You are the service of your team. And that means that you, the that you should not be a consumer of their time, but you should be a multiplier of their time and their effort. That means that, you know, before you meet with them you know, if there is material, …”
Kurgan: Dissatisfaction with internal communication worsens as companies scale
“When you run a survey inside a company and you ask the company, You know, is, is communication good? And do you, are you happy with the level of communication? The answer is always no. And it gets worse as you scale, right? So there is never enough communicati…”
Stephane Kurgan: Teams must set their own goals to maximize engagement
“What's very important is for teams to set their own goals because that's how they're going to be engaged and that's how they will stretch themselves. But if you feel these goals are not stretching enough, then you should challenge them.”
Kurgan: Early-Stage Venture Investments Require Marriage-Like Founder Transparency
“When you invest in a company, it's a marriage, you know, it's gonna last, if it's early stage, it's gonna last for a very long time, And you need some level of transparency. If that transparency isn't there, you know, we're not going to be effective, and we we…”
Kurgan: Praise should be spontaneous yet sparse to retain high value
“You can be very spontaneous with praise. You want to be, you know, very systematic with it. When you see something that's great, you absolutely have to call it. But at the same time, you want to be sparse because otherwise it loses quite a bit of its value. An…”
Kurgan: A manager's job is making decisions, not being right
“So the job Is not to be right. The job is to make decisions. And of course you're going to get a bunch of decisions wrong. That's, and there is no negative feedback about that. If you keep making the same decision wrong multiple times, then that's a problem.”
Stephane Kurgan: Frequently reversing decisions drives organizational paralysis
“What is incredibly toxic in organizations, and I've seen that many times, is you make a decision, and then you come back on it the next week, and then the following week, and, you know, basically drives paralysis in your organization.”
Stephane Kurgan: Making the wrong hire is worse than missing a candidate
“There is no doubt, I think one of your guests said, I think that's Frank Slotman, I completely agree with him, there's much more downside making the wrong hire than not bringing in the right person, because, you know, that person, if you scale fast, will be re…”
Kurgan: Scaling companies must re-evaluate core values annually
“You have to evolve your values. For example, your values cannot stay static. So every year you have to revisit whether, you know, the values you had for the company are still the right values.”
Kurgan: Leadership hiring should be one-third external, two-thirds internal promotions
“So, you know, a good rule is one-third external, two-thirds internal, and then you develop your female employees, and you really over-invest to develop them into managers and to leaders, and you have a set of programs around that just to make sure that we're g…”
Stephane Kurgan: Scaling King required pairing 'mathematicians' with 'magicians'
“At King, there's a very nice saying, which is, you know, it's the mathematician meets the magician, right? And I think before I went to King, I could work with mathematicians, But since I've worked at King, I can also work with magicians.”
Kurgan: Late-stage tech companies must standardize compensation before going public
“A lot of that data is, is gonna be shared with your institutional investors, and they will actually pay attention. That's one of the things where you have to do a lot of work actually being, before going public. Is your compensation policies.”
Stephane Kurgan: Venture capital operates on an eight-to-ten-year feedback loop
“When you're an executive, especially in the digital business, you have a daily clock, right? The feedback loop is, is extremely fast. So, you know, every morning I would get a thousand data points, you know, with all the reporting, and then suddenly you go to …”