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“When you don’t prepare for breakpoints—don’t warn the team, don’t thoughtfully restructure the org around roles first and individuals second, don’t add new managers, don’t reassess your meetings and communication tools, don’t give people access to training or coaches, don’t actively work to preserve your culture—then the consequences are clear: In their quest to keep people happy, I’ve seen leaders build their org around existing employees instead of first figuring out what the optimal structure should be and fitting their team into those roles. Then roles and responsibilities overlap, there’s a ton of redundancy in the upper levels, they have to invent weird new titles for people, and nobody knows what they should be working on. Work slows to a crawl. Employees complain that the culture is dead. People start to quit. Panic sets in and it can feel like a full-blown crisis.”
― Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making – An NYT Bestselling Entrepreneurship and Product Design Manual
― Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making – An NYT Bestselling Entrepreneurship and Product Design Manual
“this is the crucial point—Zenith, unlike Motorola, did not display an organizational propensity for setting bold, audacious goals after the death of its founder in 1958. By the early 1970s, “innate cautiousness” pervaded Zenith, as described by its controller in 1974: It’s hard to explain why a decision is made not to do something. There are a number of reasons behind it—including innate cautiousness. For one thing, we’ve always had our hands full with [our current markets] and we’ve always tended to stick with what appeared to be the biggest payoff and what we knew how to do best. . . . We didn’t feel we could compete . . . in those [new] markets unless we were willing to sacrifice some of our margin, and we were unwilling to do that. We are basically a U.S. company and likely to stay that way.64”
― Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
― Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
Nicholas’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Nicholas’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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