Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration

Years later, after Grove had learned to appreciate this, he read Peter Drucker’s The Practice of Management, which described the ideal chief executive as an outside person, an inside person, and a person of action. Grove realized that instead of being embodied in one person, such traits could exist in a leadership team. That was the case at Intel,

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If you’re trying to replicate DARPA’s success, most of the structural bits are a distraction. They’re certainly useful, but if you don’t get the agentic program leader piece right, nothing else matters.

The importance of agentic program managers to the success of the ARPA model isn’t surprising or new. The “aha” was that the only way to cut through the paradox of inconsistent process leading to consistent success was that the agentic program leader may be the only thing that’s important to get right; everything else may be cargo-culting.

DYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM Love your artists and soldiers equally Maintaining balance so that neither phase overwhelms the other requires something that sounds soft and fuzzy but is very real and often overlooked. Artists working on loonshots and soldiers working on franchises have to feel equally loved. After creating what eventually became Bell Labs, Va

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