Organization

“Having the most advanced AI and the access to the best models in the world won't determine whether your organization succeeds.”

“In a world where, you know, someone who develops the product can use technologies that helps them sell more effectively, that helps them track That helps them track outreach, that helps them write with a better pitch on the first go, and these are real tools t…”

“And the reason I did that then is a belief that if the role was going to get automated, Or that AI was not being adopted fast enough in those departments. It's time to let those people go and rebuild the organization as if we were building it knowing what tech…”

“And so I think that, that that's gonna have huge implications for how organizations are run and your ability to manage teams of humans and AIs is gonna go through the roof. I do think organizations will likely be flatter in the future.”

“If I have an AI model go generate a contract, and I generate a contract 20 times, and, you know, all 20 times, it's just three percent different. And, like, that, I, that, that kind of slop introduces all new kinds of risk for my organization that the code ver…”

“First of all you need to execute change as a combined leader group, because if you don't have, if you don't, if you aren't a combined leader group, and you try to do something on your own, you'll trigger the immune system of the organization. You know, the org…”

“I believe a lot that organizations run on all the small signals that you send, not kind of like the high level values. And then the values are important. Values and principles are very important, but it is almost like the implicit signals that the environment …”

“I think actually there's a lot of big tech examples where they're kind of pushing really hard for their teams to use more code. They're being evaluated on how much code they're using. And they're just kind of getting more and more slop that nobody understands.…”

“At around 10 people, you are now an organization, right? You can't just have 10 people in every meeting, in every discussion, on every Slack channel. You need to start differentiating it. So you're organizing your team and organization maybe sounds like someth…”

“They'll definitely be smaller. They'll be flatter because of that.”

“I'm much more hopeful about organizations, because organizations think more slowly, and they have procedures for thinking, and so you can control the procedures. Individual judgment is really hard to fix. Not impossible.”

“That most people don't even recognize this as a need, that when we talk about change, particularly in organizational contexts, we teach people how to think about change, but we don't teach them how to speak to it. We don't even teach them that that is importan…”

“If every single one of those people is operating from their own, like protagonist viewpoint of this is how I actually see the world. This is what I think we're here to do. And I need to convince everyone around me at all times. Like it becomes extremely ineffi…”

“So there's that phase of like POC or figuring things out. It feels like it's passed us by now. Like most organizations know the opportunity. They know what they want to do, and they really just need help to go execute on it.”

“When an organization achieves advantage, it develops a tendency to continue operating with the same strategy that produced the advantage. It is the leader's main role to keep alive the quest. For advantage.”

“I think like every organization should be thinking hard about whether or not they ought to cap headcount and just, you know, keep headcount at or below where it is and increase kind of headcount, so to speak through AI.”

“Colonial Pipeline's inability to isolate and recover quickly showed us that many organizations lack the right tools and processes to really handle these sophisticated cyber threats.”

“And so one of the expressions I've heard is like, you've got to make sure in an organization, everything's kind of in sync and something can be ahead of another thing, but it can't be so far ahead. That the whole thing starts to fall apart.”

“True simplicity that is applied consistently throughout your entire organization is extremely rare.”

“As I always say, all the easy problems get taken care of before they get to me. All the easy decisions are done. So really or not, when you know, when you're leading an organization, you end up with the hardest decisions and they matter.”

“The worst thing a leader can do is make an organization too dependent on them. If you care about building a sustainable long-term organization and a legacy, then it behooves you not to make the organization very dependent on you.”

“You don't want to You don't want to Kind of trigger the immunity system of an organization, right? So if you try to do too much thing, the whole organization is just trying to expel you. It's just want to get rid of you. You're a nuisance, right? It's as if yo…”

“And I do think the capabilities that are possible are gonna outstrip most organizations' capacities to absorb them, for most of their employees to absorb them without a lot of effort.”

“The nervous system of an organization is a reflection of the nervous system of the CEO.”

“The problem of strategy inside an organization Is diversity of interest and fear of action. Because action, when you do something in an organization of any size, it involves people changing what they do. It involves changing power relationships among humans in…”

“Great organizations set a vision and head in a direction, and everybody aligns to make that happen.”

“You can't do more than four or five things at the same time and get the organization to do it. You've got to really narrow it and say, okay, here's the 80%, I call it the 80% solution. Here's the four or five things we need to do to get 80% of the way there. A…”

“Great people want to work with other great people, and organizations can really die when you have someone who's a star, and they see other people around them underperforming, and that not being rectified.”

“If you want your organization to be trustworthy, the promises it makes, if you want to win the public's trust by making promises they can believe, you have to embody those promises in the structure of the organization itself, so that even if you weren't there,…”

“There should never be, throughout an organization, any doubt as to where authority for making decisions resides, or any doubt that they will be promptly made.”

“One of the patterns I see is that organizations don't know that they can actually learn at a much lower cost. They believe they need to build this elaborate MVP, which is not minimal in any way. And then launch it, and then they will discover it. Basically, it…”

“It's like fragmenting responsibility and you, you're incentivizing people to not know. You're giving people incentive to stay in their lane and stay focused only on their task and the computer or the system or the organization is supposed to take care of every…”

“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.”

“I still think no matter who you are as a CEO, the goal is to build a healthy organization that could function without you, and I think that's always the goal, and then it becomes a matter of where do you spend your incremental time.”

“Essentially, we lose our way because we believe in a false choice. So most people believe that the pattern of organizational evolution is from chaos to bureaucracy.”

“Because it's the reality is that human beings have values and can hold values, but organizations don't really, they have ways of operating and beliefs about how the world and reality works.”

“Every additional human you have in your organization. Causes extra overhead and geometrically so because now that you have to keep all those people informed, give them all context, make them all feel heard”

“To improve performance, what you want to reduce is errors, and that's what most organizations do. They try to cut down on errors, but they're missing the up arrow of improving, increasing insights. And so most organizations only focus on reducing errors.”

“What blocks insight is that organizations say they want insights, and they want innovation, And they really don't, but they're being serious. They think they want insights, but insights are disorganizing. As you point out, insights make you change the way you …”

“If you have an idea that's a bad idea and you make a mistake, that's the down arrow. Everybody can see it, right? It's public. So there's a lot of cost for making a mistake. If you fail to make an insight, nobody will know. So the reward structure is always fa…”

“You know, one of the counterintuitive things is organizations typically tend to become more conservative when they get larger, which is ironic because they have more resources than when they were a smaller company.”

“And so I would argue on the one hand, there is the ability to assess the risk with greater accuracy and more timeliness, but we have problems in our society and our organizations now where it's very hard to overcome inertia, either The inaction or the momentum…”

“But in a lot of organizations, that guy would have been the villain. You know, like, look, pal, put a lid on it. You're costing us a fortune trying to serve these customers. And he would have felt not great about the company. It just would have been a disconne…”

“If I had to put this under one big banner, the big banner I would probably select is they fail to consider alternatives.”

“I find it entrepreneurs are actually Generally speaking, they're probably one or two standard deviations a little bit better about this because they care more about the outcomes and less about who gets the credit, but inside organizations, how you get promoted…”

“Well, I think that often we're going for speed when we should be going for velocity. So the difference is velocity has a direction and a vector attached to it and speed doesn't. So you can drive really fast in circles around a track, or you can drive from LA t…”

“And so a lot of change organizationally and in families and in relationships don't occur, not because they're not the right answers. We don't know what to do, but because People benefit from both in terms of power, resources, right? They benefit from those pro…”

“We, you know, encounter this all the time, where in organizations, they have these big plans for AI but they're just, They're unsure about actually deploying them and turning them on, and things get held up for months and months and months because of that.”

“Obviously, you have that number or that 150 limit, which is really, really very palpable because it essentially means when you are in an organization where you can't know everyone enough to trust them implicitly, and this is where vision and culture become so …”

“So in general, you know, more educated people make better judgments, I think, on average, but people decide I'm going to make better judgments. I don't think that's very hopeful. I'm much more hopeful about organizations, because organizations think more slowl…”

“There is so much dry powder out there. I mean, it's the macro environment feels very much like those days when anyone could raise money. So organizations should be Trying to stuff their coffers if they can get a good valuation and close on reasonable terms rea…”

“And when we first started working with leaders years ago, we did a little bit of measurement around this, and we saw that most people in organizations keep somewhere between 40 and 60% of their agreements.”

“Usually the way this works in most, most organizations is a human walks up to another human and says, hey, I'm going to be taking this rack down. What can we actually do about this? Well, we can turn this into software.”

“Actually, organizations are disposed to be Conservative, right? Once you have something to protect the organism, the organization goes into protection mode, which is not a creative mode. If you want an organization that's disposed to be creative, you have to f…”

“And it's probably the reason that organizations, companies tend to die instead of evolve. Like most companies die and they die relatively early in their potential lifespan. And I think we do that because change is demanding and unsettling and destabilizing and…”

“I think the quality of an organization is not how much it, how, how good it is at preventing bad things from happening. Although that's, it's a useful skill, but I don't think that's necessarily the quality of organization. The quality of organization is how q…”

“It feels to me that actually the reasons that organizations don't take, don't tend to make more of these or make more good ones is It's more kind of sociological, more institutional, and less that it's fundamentally too costly, because in most cases, the downs…”

“I think my experience is there's always more intelligence and talent in organizations than manages to get out and to surface and to be deployed, and I've always wondered why, and where does it go, and why does that happen, and where does it get stuck and trapp…”

“If you think about the DNA of any organization, it's very difficult to stop an organization from following the money.”

“There are measures of Machiavellianism, and you, if you're a Machiavellian, you know, and you lie and manipulate and don't mind really harming people to rise in power, you'll do well in one-shot negotiations, but for the most part, you don't do too well in ris…”