1/ As a young engineer coming to silicon valley 18 years ago I misunderstood the leverage of organization building.
2/ It was obvious to me that engineering provided a tremendous amount of leverage. You could write code once and it could get used millions/billions of times to help people. How could anything else achieve such leverage?
3/ Part of what Google taught me was the leverage of systematized focus on "building a machine" that can attract, retain, and help coordinate the work of hundreds or thousands of people to build things together.
4/ That machine begins with a brand/philosophy. What does it stand for? How do people select-for/qualify-for participation? What are the opportunities to contribute/grow?
5/ I remember hearing Johnathan Rosenberg (VP at Google at the time) saying that "hiring great people is more important than your actual job". This always rubbed me the wrong way, because, in a sense it sounded like a multi-level-marketing scam.
6/ But I think the reality is that, while doing great work is hard, there is another very challenging and critical skill at play: attracting, filtering, and convincing great people to come together to work on a shared mission.
7/ If those people come together with a shared mission they will figure out great ways to contribute. In fact, if you filter properly, great people don't need a lot of "management" and "structure".
8/ Having a way to help people learn about and get connected to the problems of the day is very important and very high leverage. This was on my mind as I Tweeted earlier:
