This is great: "If you’re a manager and care seriously about speed, you’ll need to tell your people you’re wiling to accept the tradeoffs. Reid did this with me. We agreed I was going to make judgment calls on a range of issues on his behalf without checking with him. He told me, “In order to move fast, I expect you’ll make some foot faults. I’m okay with an error rate of 10-20% — times when I would have made a different decision in a given situation – if it means you can move fast.” I felt empowered to make decisions with this ratio in mind—and it was incredibly liberating.""
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> 2. The best way to get a powerful person’s attention: offer to help them.
This is entirely consistent with what Sheryl Sandberg said at HBS's commencement in 2012. [1]
"When I was first at Facebook, a woman named Lori Goler, a 1997 graduate of HBS, was working in marketing at eBay and I knew her kind of socially. And she called me and said, I want to talk with you about coming to work with you at Facebook. So I thought about calling you, she said, and telling you all the things I’m good at and all the things I like to do. But I figured that everyone is doing that. So instead I want to know what’s your biggest problem and how can I solve it. My jaw hit the floor. I’d hired thousands of people up to that point in my career, but no one had ever said anything like that. I had never said anything like that. Job searches are always about the job searcher, but not in Laurie’s case. I said, you’re hired. My biggest problem is recruiting and you can solve it."
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> "At PayPal, one cultural trait was: “Let the best idea win.” No answer or idea at PayPal would be taken at face value. Instead, the idea’s proprietor had to argue vigorously and withstand critiques from colleagues. The upside: analytical rigor tends to produce better ideas than “this is the way it’s always been done” or “the CEO said so.” The downside: a confrontational interpersonal culture can stress relationships at work and undermine possible collaboration. Moreover, this cultural undercurrent was effectively “anti-experience”: it was a harder place for experienced people to operate because they had to re-prove themselves.""
This reminds me of Julie Zhuo's writing about design being intentional and purposeful. [2]
>> [PayPal] was a harder place for experienced people to operate because they had to re-prove themselves
Can confirm (PayPal employee here). That being said, the "senior" people that can't re-prove (or prove, for that matter) themselves aren't let go; they just end up working on projects similar to what the recent college grads take up.
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> 2. The best way to get a powerful person’s attention: offer to help them.
This is entirely consistent with what Sheryl Sandberg said at HBS's commencement in 2012. [1]
"When I was first at Facebook, a woman named Lori Goler, a 1997 graduate of HBS, was working in marketing at eBay and I knew her kind of socially. And she called me and said, I want to talk with you about coming to work with you at Facebook. So I thought about calling you, she said, and telling you all the things I’m good at and all the things I like to do. But I figured that everyone is doing that. So instead I want to know what’s your biggest problem and how can I solve it. My jaw hit the floor. I’d hired thousands of people up to that point in my career, but no one had ever said anything like that. I had never said anything like that. Job searches are always about the job searcher, but not in Laurie’s case. I said, you’re hired. My biggest problem is recruiting and you can solve it."
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> "At PayPal, one cultural trait was: “Let the best idea win.” No answer or idea at PayPal would be taken at face value. Instead, the idea’s proprietor had to argue vigorously and withstand critiques from colleagues. The upside: analytical rigor tends to produce better ideas than “this is the way it’s always been done” or “the CEO said so.” The downside: a confrontational interpersonal culture can stress relationships at work and undermine possible collaboration. Moreover, this cultural undercurrent was effectively “anti-experience”: it was a harder place for experienced people to operate because they had to re-prove themselves.""
This reminds me of Julie Zhuo's writing about design being intentional and purposeful. [2]
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/sheryl-sandbergs-full-hbs-spe...
[2] https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/build-a-tru...