Working principles · 01—32
Mantras.
Hard-won mantras shaped through experience: building Newicon, working with teams and pursuing personal projects.
Some are original, some are borrowed or adapted from people and companies I admire. They are not commandments. They are prompts: useful ways to challenge an assumption, unlock a conversation or find a better next step.
01—08
Transparency and trust
09—16
Empowerment and growth
17—30
Innovation and engineering
- 17.The simple, not the complex
- 18.All requirements are wrong
- 19.Challenge constraints
- 20.Don’t #!@$ the customer
- 21.Pragmatic, not dogmatic
- 22.Use first-principles thinking
- 23.Aim to be less wrong over time
- 24.I don’t know is a superpower
- 25.Build rather than buy core skills
- 26.Ask why, why, why, why, why
- 27.Automate
Organise around the value stream
Close mantra ↑Raw materials arrive at one end of a factory and a finished car, spacecraft or aeroplane leaves the other. Anyone can see that a vehicle halfway along the line is half complete. Manufacturing made the flow of value visible.
Offices often do the opposite. Work is batched between departments grouped by function. Each transition adds movement, storage, communication and waste. Digital work can be worse, with a product passed from person to person and uncertainty about whether anyone has the latest version.
Organise around the value stream. Even without a physical factory, we can visualise the flow and create shared windows into the work being done.
- 29.Be bold and break things
- 30.Make it visual
31—32