A company is made up of people. These people do things to help the company make progress towards its goals. The way people within a company do things—how they communicate, how they create, how they decide—is that company's operating system.
A company's operating system is the foundation for which all work at that company gets done. Companies with excellent operating systems will be more innovative and productive. Employees at these companies will be happier and more fulfilled.
There are two core processes that take place within any company: making decisions and doing work. An excellent operating system will be opinionated about both.
Companies will naturally build operating systems whether or not decisions are proactively made to build them. Decisions need to be made and work needs to get done, and if proactive decisions are not made as to how these things get done, habits will form, then calcify, then get transmitted to new people.
Changing norms of human behavior is far harder than establishing them. As such, we choose to form those norms proactively.
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core principles of decision-making
- delay decisions for as long as possible but no longer
- decisiveness is more important than correctness
- a decision, once made, can be relied upon
- disagree and commit
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first step for making any decision: decide how you are going to decide
- what people need to be involved?
- what information is required?
- how, and to whom, should it be communicated?
- how should it be implemented?
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We have root access to and the source code of our own operating system: we can extend it, refactor it, and even trash huge sections of it if we choose. As we evolve as a company, we will doubtless need to update it in many ways.
Because our operating system underlies everything that we do, it's important that we are mindful of the dependencies involved in making updates. Since the hardware for this operating system is the human brain, changes to it could require neural re-wiring and significant communication. These can be costly in terms of time and energy.
The difficulty of change does not mean that we should not undertake this effort, however. Rather, it means we should do so carefully.