May 2015
Intermediate to advanced
322 pages
7h 26m
English
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Chapter 33. How to Make Your Company Half as Effective
When Charles, Brian, and I cofounded Ontela, we were all sick of big companies. There were a lot of things we wanted to do differently, but one of the main ones was to build a company that wasn’t a faceless bureaucracy. (In hindsight: good goal.)
A company where everyone was impactful. (Absolutely!)
A company where nobody felt disempowered. (Everyone should be empowered to do their job, for sure!)
A company where everyone was a part of the decision-making process. (Wait... should everyone be a part of every decision-making process?)
A company where nobody was left out! (Now something has gone dreadfully awry.)
We made one of the classic startup blunders. We confused individual empowerment, which we all wanted, with its precise inverse: decision by committee.
It started out great: I (the CEO) went over the database schema with Charles (the CTO). Brian (the VP of Business Development) reviewed his pitch decks with Charles and me, who had lots of feedback. Charles and Brian would suggest dozens of changes to my fundraising pitch, most of them quite helpful. We were a well-functioning team.
Except that we weren’t getting work done very fast. We were putting in long hours, but it always seemed like there was more activity than there was progress. We didn’t realize it at the time, but we had run afoul of one of the most important rules of startup productivity: if two people work on a task, it takes at least twice as long.
As we ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.