Food for Thought #6: Scaling Startups, Unicorpses, Culture Hacking

Food for thought for September 13th, 2015 on management lessons from scaling startups, dead unicorns and corporate culture hacking:

Steven Sinofsky (via Medium): A Leader’s Guide To Deciding: What, When, and How To Decide

Making decisions is something that at first comes naturally, even easily, and then as a company grows the complexity creeps up on CEOs and execs.

Molly Graham (via First Round Capital): ‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups

If you personally want to grow as fast as your company, you have to give away your job every couple months.

Brad Feld: Unicorpse

The current usage of the word unicorn makes me tired. I could rant about it for a while, but that would make me tired of myself ranting about it. Instead, I’d like to focus on a word that appeared a month ago by Aileen Lee in Welcome To The Unicorn Club, 2015: Learning From Billion-Dollar Companies. That word is unicorpse.

Steve Blank: Hacking a Corporate Culture: Stories, Heroes and Rituals in Startups and Companies

I’ve spent this year working with corporations and government agencies that are adopting and adapting Lean Methodologies. I’ve summarized my learnings in this blog post, and here, here and here and here and put it together in the presentation here. One of the interesting innovation challenges I’ve encountered centers on a company’s culture. While startups have the luxury of building values and…

Boris Wertz (via Version One): Nine common things that start-up founders tend to underestimate or overestimate

When you’re in the midst of building a company, it’s hard to fully assess the significance of various activities and decisions- particularly for first-time entrepreneurs who don’t yet have the wisd…

Max Chafkin (via Fast Company): What Makes Uber Run

The transportation service has become a global brand, an economic force, and a cultural lightning rod.

Karen Wickre (via Medium): I’ve Spent A Lifetime Building a Mighty Network. Here Are My Secrets

I’ve long been told that I “know everyone.” In other words, I have a great network, one that’s an object of envy. Rule One: Take pleasure in it. It’s not just a safety net, it’s YOUR net.

Stephanie Yee (via r2d3.us): A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning

What is machine learning? See how it works with our animated data visualization.

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