Management & Leadership

A manager's output = The output of his organization + The output of the neighboring organizations under his influence.

What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.

Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves.

When a leader takes so much ownership that members of the team feel there is nothing left for which they can take ownership, team members will execute only at the boss's specific direction without any buy-in themselves.

Management is not a promotion. Management is a career change.

A healthy failure culture rewards intelligent failure.

Effective executives focus on outward contribution. They ask: 'What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?'

The president of the United States gets 100 days to prove himself; you get 90.

The only way to think like a leader is to first act: to plunge yourself into new projects and activities, interact with very different kinds of people, and experiment with unfamiliar ways of getting things done.

People leave managers, not companies. How long an employee stays and how productive he is while there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor.

Multipliers invoke each person's unique intelligence and create an atmosphere of genius - innovation, productive effort, and collective intelligence.

Det er ikke visionen, der får os ud af sengen om morgenen, det er vækkeuret.

Loonshot: A neglected project, widely dismissed, its champion written off as unhinged.

People don't care which company they work for. They care which team they're on.

If the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization wins.

Your advice is not as good as you think it is.

The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place. The Struggle is when people ask you why you don't quit and you don't know the answer.

Your job as a manager is not to dole out advice or 'save the day' - it's to empower your team to find the answers themselves.

Organizational debt is like technical debt, but worse. You can choose when and how to pay down technical debt, but organizational debt often comes due unexpectedly.

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.

Champions behave like champions before they're champions.

Your job is to make the organization better by solving bigger problems, not to be the best coder.

When there is doubt, there is no doubt.

Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.

The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive - the drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things because they matter.

It's not mean, it's clear.

Culture is not something you are - it's something you do.

If you give people freedom, they will amaze you.

The leader is truly and ultimately responsible for everything. That is Extreme Ownership.

Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great.

The key to being a successful skipper is to see the ship through the eyes of the crew.

The answer is simple: a good leader builds a great team that counterbalances their weaknesses.

With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.

The greatest team members are not just skilled but also deeply aligned to where the company needs to go.

OKRs aren't about hitting targets, but about learning what you are really capable of.

A sound operating system running on an efficient cadence is essential to execution and lays the groundwork for great management.

The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing.

If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.

A Tribal Leader focuses their efforts on building the tribe - or, more precisely, upgrading the tribal culture.

Your culture is how your company makes decisions when you're not there. It's how they behave when no one is looking.

Better people make better All Blacks.

If your business depends on you, you don't own a business - you have a job. And it's the worst job in the world because you're working for a lunatic.

The fundamental paradox of the tour of duty: acknowledging that the employee might leave is actually the best way to build trust, and thus develop the kind of relationship that convinces great people to stay.

Every day you don't have the conversation is a day you're lying to your employee about their future.

Adequate performance gets a generous severance package.

The leader who waits for perfect AI will be outmaneuvered by the leader who acts with good-enough AI today.

The great captains lowered themselves in relation to the group whenever possible in order to earn the moral authority to drive them forward in tough moments.

If you go into every interaction assuming that culture doesn't matter, your default mechanism will be to view others through your cultural lens and to judge or misjudge them accordingly.

Great CEOs don't try to do it all; they make sure it all gets done.

Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.

The most successful teams aren't the ones that collaborate most, get along best, or put in the longest hours.

we have to ideate, activate, and implement.

Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.

The best leaders are the best learners.

Your emotional wake is what people feel long after you've left the room - or the Zoom call. In the age of async work, that wake lasts longer and spreads wider than ever before.

The best minute I spend is the one I invest in people.

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

Leadership is about recognizing that there's a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.

Your job is not to be the best engineer on the team anymore. Your job is to help your team become the best version of themselves.

We fall into hero worship because it's convenient and comforting. We want someone to fix things. We want to believe individuals can shape history.

You have an Advice Monster. We all do. It's that voice in your head that compels you to add value, to have the answer, to fix things, to be seen as essential.

When we remove ego, we're left with what is real. What replaces ego is humility, yes - but rock-hard humility and confidence. Whereas ego is artificial, this type of confidence can hold weight. Ego is stolen. Confidence is earned.

The leader's mood is quite literally contagious, spreading quickly and inexorably throughout the business.

Pain + Reflection = Progress

Your job is not to be everyone's friend. Your job is not to make everyone happy. Your job is to move your team forward by identifying and removing obstacles.

Vision without traction is merely hallucination.

The true price of leadership is the willingness to place the needs of others above your own.

In the Infinite Game, the true value of an organization cannot be measured by the success it has achieved based on a set of arbitrary metrics over arbitrary time frames. The true value of an organization is measured by the desire others have to contribute to that organization's ability to keep succeeding.

People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe.

He who thinks he leads, but has no followers, is only taking a walk.

Innovate or die, and there's no innovation if you operate out of fear of the new or untested.

Your title makes you a manager. Your people make you a leader.

The servant-leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.