Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building

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

“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

“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.”

“What I think you’ve taught me most is how important it is to state the obvious.” Yes, it felt like a backhanded compliment. But what I think she meant is that I strive to make implicit structures and beliefs explicit. Making those elements clear to everyone allows a group of people to become a true team and a company to scale.

Done right, the company and the culture will evolve, but the center will always hold.

“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.”

The hardest parts of company building and management are done in private: designing your planning process, deciding who gets promoted, planning a reorganization, reducing the scope of a person’s role.

The company’s mission and founders attracted me, but most of all, it offered the chance to build again, and to scale the type of product that I thought could positively impact millions of businesses—and, in doing so, potentially create millions of jobs. This has been a motivation of mine since I first worked in politics, where I saw how economic op

Leadership is ultimately about driving change, while management is about creating stability.