Every once in a while I come across something so true, and well written that I just makes sense to copy and paste it without comment, confident that you will get it without me making things worse... Here's an example, from my favorite newsletter from CBinsights.com.
Scale challenge #1 - A culture of helpful
As we've grown to 130 folks on the team, there are a few things that have become increasingly important and that we've been thinking of a lot.
A common question we now get from the team is what is our biggest risk. We covered it at our recent offsite (slides here) but the big thing boils down to having people who are 4s and 5s on the helpfulness hierarchy.
I learned about this framework in a great essay by Daniel Debow which is linked below.
Scale challenge #2 - A culture of speed
The other thing we're really focused on is speed. As an insurgent company, speed is a killer weapon. A great essay on this topic comes from The First Round Review by Dave Girouard, founder and CEO of Upstart and former President of Google Apps Enterprise.
He writes:
Scale challenge #3 - A culture of intellect & critical thinking
While there is a lot of talk about hiring people with high EQ (definitely important), we also increasingly hire for smarts.
Isht as we scale remains uncertain and smart folks with high intellectual capacity can think critically of how to solve these challenges and know where to focus.
An oldie but goodie from HBR is linked below on this topic.
Scale challenge #4 - Stay humble. Outwork everyone.
And finally, we have to outwork everyone else. Grit, as it's come to be known.
One of my favorite essays on this is by Ray Allen, former NBA star. In his essay entitled "Letter to My Younger Self", Allen writes:
