What culture is, and who sets it
- great example of how they do it at Duolingo
- culture is the hardest thing to pinpoint and to preserve (Fadell)
- first hires are crucial for setting a company culture (Fadell)
Openness and trust
- in a sign of good culture - good news travel slow and bad news spread fast → what helps is to encourage - not punish - people to put problems in the open (Horowitz)
- lack of transparency due to the lack of bottom-up / top-down information flow can bring distrust - when there's a lack of data, distrust fills that void (Fadell)
- being a good company does not matter when things go well but matters big time when things don't go so well which happens at some point for sure (Horowitz)
What growth does to it
- silos start appearing when first management layer is introduced and people distribute into verticals & those might not share enough (Fadell)
- org breakpoints seem to catch (leadership) people off guard and it's annoying to plan for them because it's messy - sadly here the "if it's not broken, don't fix it" does not work (Fadell)
- coaching / mentoring is especially important at breakpoints - e.g. when around 30-40 ppl or 80-120 (Fadell)
The hard moments
- people won't remember everything working for your organization but they will remember the day of being laid off - that's why it's important that their direct managers lay them off and not HR or something similar as they don't have that strong relationships with those being laid off (Horowitz)
- in the process of change - don't worry what you're about to lose - think of what you want to become (Fadell)