Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building

Edgar H. Schein and Peter Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership

“People work for people if they have a purpose.

“You know why playing a game is fun? Because it has rules, and you have a way to win. Picture a bunch of people showing up at an athletic field with random equipment and no rules. Someone is going to get hurt. You don’t know how to play, you don’t know how to score, and you don’t know how to win.” It’s critical for companies and teams to establish

By starting with yourself, you can create an environment in which everyone is self-aware—which, in turn, leads to mutual awareness among team members.

“I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do, and thus we focus on nothing in particular.”

“Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.”

existential risks > core product (including which countries to invest in further) > new products.

Then-CEO Eric Schmidt shared a simple but extremely effective framework to resolve these tensions: 70-20-10. Google would devote 70 percent of its resources to the core business, 20 percent to emerging products, and 10 percent to research and development for future products.

“To succeed, you actually want people thinking inside the box. The box you constructed!”