RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts.

What are some of the advantages of organizing much of a company in a mission-oriented form? There is only one. It is that the individual units can stay in touch with the needs of their business or product areas and initiate changes rapidly when those needs change. That is it. All other considerations favor the functional type of organization.

— High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove

Source: Amazon Kindle

Related Stories and Excerpts:

  1. Innovation is mysterious. Inspiration is largely unpredictable. But it’s obvious from all the success we see in the marketplace that we can rise to the occasion. Once the habit is ingrained and you become the starter, the center of the circle, you will find more and more things to notice, to instigate, and to initiate. Momentum builds and you get better at generating it. If you go to bed at night knowing that people are expecting you to initiate things all day the next day, you’ll wake up with a list. And as you create a culture of people […]
  2. Teams win when their individual members trust each other enough to prioritize team success over individual glory; paradoxically, winning as a team is the best way for the team members to achieve individual success. The members of a winning team are highly sought after by other teams, both for the skills they demonstrate and for their ability to help a new team develop a winning culture. — The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, et al. Source: Amazon Kindle […]
  3. On building learning organizations Personal mastery: Continually clarifying and refining our personal visions, and seeing reality objectively. Building shared vision: The capacity to translate individual visions into collective visions that galvanize a group of people based on what they’ll really like to create together. Mental models: Learning to unearth our own personal pictures of the world, to bring them to the surface so that we see how they impact our actions. Team learning: Spending time together to suspend assumptions and come up with new ideas. Systems thinking: What causes patterns of behavior? It is a framework for seeing the whole picture instead of […]
  4. Alignment means that managers should explicitly seek and highlight the commonality between the company’s purpose and values and the employee’s career purpose and values. Some obvious commonality emerges naturally: both sides thrive on progress. Companies want to launch new products, grow their market share, and expand into new markets; employees want to take on new responsibilities, increase their capabilities, and yes, make more money. In other words, both company and employee want to be on a winning team. But zoom in a bit more, and differences appear. Perhaps the employee has a side interest in early childhood education, but […]
  5. Habits are behavioral autopilot, and that’s why they’re such a critical tool for leaders. Leaders who can instill habits that reinforce their teams’ goals are essentially making progress for free. They’ve changed behavior in a way that doesn’t draw down the Rider’s reserves of self-control. Habits will form inevitably, whether they’re formed intentionally or not. You’ve probably created lots of team habits unwittingly. If your staff meetings always start out with genial small talk, then you’ve created a habit. You’ve designed your meeting autopilot to yield a few minutes of warm-up small talk. The hard question for a leader […]

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