• People more important than ideas - mediocre team will kill a good idea, a great team will fix or circumvent a mediocre idea
• Hire for potential, not for current skill level
• People must always feel free to suggest ideas; if there is more truth in hallways than meetings, there is a problem.
• Finding and fixing problems is everybody’s job. Anybody should be able to stop the production line.
• Candor is necessary in addressing why things are not the best they could be.
• Efforts like braintrust meetings, daily feedback, postmortems, and company-wide Notes Day provide structured encouragement to promote ideas.
• Notes Day
• Braintrust meetings focus on giving advice from experienced people to newer directors
• Focus on the problem rather than the person; the director ultimately chooses what advice to accept.
• The first conclusions we draw from success and failure are typically wrong (eg fundamental attribution bias).
• Important to critically evaluate the process, not just celebrate/commiserate the outcome.
• The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them, and no prevention program is perfect.
• Failure is a necessary consequence of trying new things.
• The desire for everything to run smoothly is a false goal which leads to measuring people by the mistakes they make, rather than by their ability to solve problems. Do not accidentally make stability a goal.
• Don’t confuse the process with the goal. Working on our processes to make them better, easier and more efficient is vital but not the goal. Making a great product is the goal.
• It is important to build capability to recover from unexpected events, while also trying to uncover unseen factors.
• Crises are not always bad - the process of responding to crisis often brings people together.
• Show early and show often, instead of waiting for perfection.
• Protect new ideas that represent the future, rather than protecting the past.
• A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organisational structure.