management

Match leadership support to skill and temperament

Keep it clean, keep it working, throw out the jerks — operate a business with the simple discipline of a well-kept home.

Companies run at room temperature by default. Founders are exothermic — they inject heat into the system. The job is to protect that heat from being politicked away.

Load all change at once. Once a sponge is saturated, it cannot absorb more water — all subsequent change is free.

Every CEO directive has an implicit asterisk: do it, as long as it still makes sense to you.

Pre-asked birthday cake delivered to every employee's store, every year.

Retention edge when you can't outbid competitors on wages.

Never do anything to disrespect the longest-tenured front-line worker.

Eliminate incentive gaps to unlock founder-quality output from everyone you hire or work for

A three-question self-reflection that forces leaders to see the whole self, not the touch-up version.

When you rise into power, you stop seeing how it feels to be the one with less of it.

Two questions that tell you whether your manager can advance your career — or is a dead end.

Care personally and challenge directly at the same time

The best feedback combines caring personally about someone with the courage to challenge them directly

Build resilient humans by praising what they do, not who they are

Drive lasting performance through self-direction, growth, and meaning

Replace carrots and sticks with autonomy, mastery, and purpose to drive real performance

Care personally AND challenge directly—most managers only do one

Praise the effort and strategy, never the innate talent

Intrinsic motivation beats carrots and sticks for creative work

Assess competence and commitment

Simple, yet effective

Correct mistakes, build confidence

Manage in minutes

Leading through hypergrowth

Navigate hypergrowth

Take control of debt

Analyze business portfolios

A generalized approach to developing a competitive strategy

A framework for articulating a firm's competitive strategy

Resources, Processes, and Values determine what an organization can and cannot do

Remove yourself as the bottleneck by building a management layer with long-term incentives that aligns their interests with the company's growth.

A structured ten-task system for accelerating leadership transitions and reaching the break-even point faster

Follow nine rules that violate traditional management wisdom to achieve hypergrowth.

Navigate five phase changes from garage startup to global giant as each stage demands a fundamentally different approach.

How well-intentioned leaders unknowingly shut down the intelligence around them

Five leadership disciplines that extract and multiply the intelligence in organizations

Two types of leaders and their dramatically different impact on team intelligence and capability

Seven coaching questions that help you say less, ask more, and lead better

A manager's output equals the output of his organization plus the neighboring organizations under his influence

Upgrade your motivational operating system from carrots-and-sticks to intrinsic drive

Keep them in suspense

Go see the actual situation yourself before making any decision

Log good and bad leadership examples to build your own style

Managers make widgets; leaders make change

Focus on strengths to cut active disengagement from 40% to 1%

Care personally and challenge directly to be a kick-ass boss

Give spontaneous feedback through Information, Impact, Invitation, and Implications

Lead by example

100-day plan