You don’t need venture capital to steal good ideas. Here are battle-tested practices from exceptional companies that you can implement tomorrow, regardless of your team size or industry.
From Amazon: The Narrative Memo
What They Do:
Amazon banned PowerPoint in 2004. Every meeting for important decisions starts with 20 minutes of silence, reading a six-page memo written in full sentences.
What to Steal:
You don’t need six pages. Start with one page. The format:
Title: [What you're proposing]
Context: [Why now? What changed?]
Proposal: [What specifically are you suggesting?]
Alternatives Considered: [What else did you think about?]
Risks: [What could go wrong?]
Success Metrics: [How will we know this worked?]
Why It Works:
Writing forces clarity. You can’t hide fuzzy thinking behind bullet points and animations. If you can’t write it clearly, you don’t understand it.
How to Implement (Week 1):
- Pick one recurring meeting
- For the next instance, require a one-page memo 24 hours before
- Start the meeting with 5 minutes of silent reading
- Discussion is now about the content, not explaining the slides
From Basecamp: The Circuit Breaker
What They Do:
No project at Basecamp runs longer than 6 weeks. If it’s not done by then, it doesn’t roll over—it gets killed or radically descoped.
What to Steal:
The hard deadline. Not for crunch time—for forcing scope decisions.
Why It Works:
Without a circuit breaker, mediocre projects never die. They lumber on, consuming resources, because “we’ve already invested so much.”
The deadline forces the question: “If we can’t finish this in 6 weeks, is it worth doing at all?”
How to Implement (This Sprint):
- For your next project, declare the deadline upfront
- At the halfway point, do a “kill or commit” review
- If you’re not at least 50% done, cut scope immediately
- No extensions. Ever. (The first extension destroys the pattern)
From Pixar: The Braintrust
What They Do:
Every few months, directors must screen their in-progress film to the Braintrust—a group of peers who will ruthlessly critique it. The twist? The Braintrust has no authority. They can’t force changes.
What to Steal:
The “critique without authority” model. Create a group that:
- Sees work-in-progress (not polished presentations)
- Gives candid feedback (not politeness)
- Has no decision-making power (the creator still owns it)
Why It Works:
When reviewers can’t force their will, they stop trying to control. They start trying to help. The feedback becomes about “have you considered…” instead of “you must…”
And because the creator maintains ownership, they actually listen. Defensive walls come down.
How to Implement (Next Month):
- Identify 3-4 people whose judgment you trust
- For your next significant project, show it to them at 50% complete
- Ask: “What concerns you? What am I missing?”
- Listen, thank them, then decide what to do
- Rotate who presents, so everyone gets better at giving and receiving feedback
From Google (Old): The 20% Time
What They Did (Before It Faded):
Engineers could spend 20% of their time on projects outside their main job. Gmail, Google News, and AdSense came from 20% time.
What Actually Matters:
It’s not about the 20%. It’s about the permission to scratch your own itch.
What to Steal:
The explicit permission. Not necessarily dedicated time, but the green light to work on things that matter to you.
Why It Works:
Your best people are creative problem-solvers. If you only let them solve the problems you assign, you’re wasting half their value.
How to Implement (Next Quarter):
- Announce: “If you see a problem worth solving, spend a few hours on it”
- Create a monthly demo day for these projects
- Protect it fiercely—if someone gets criticized for “wasting time” on their project, the program dies
From Tesla: The Anti-Expertise Principle
What They Do:
Elon Musk actively discourages “we’ve always done it this way” thinking by moving people between radically different projects.
What to Steal:
The intentional rotation of people into areas where they’re not experts.
Example:
At Tesla, a software engineer who worked on Autopilot might move to battery management. They’ll ask “dumb” questions that experts have stopped asking:
- “Why do we do it this way?”
- “What if we tried…”
- “Is this step necessary?”
Why It Works:
Experts optimize for the current solution. Non-experts question whether we’re solving the right problem.
How to Implement (Next Hiring Cycle):
- When filling a position, interview one “outsider”—someone from a different industry
- On project kickoffs, include one person who knows nothing about this area
- Give them explicit permission to ask “stupid” questions
From Stripe: The Written Incident Review
What They Do:
After every significant outage, Stripe writes a detailed postmortem that includes:
- Timeline of events
- What went wrong (technically and organizationally)
- What they’re changing
No blame. Just learning.
The Template:
What to Steal:
The blameless postmortem format. Even if you don’t have “outages,” you have failures.
Why It Works:
When failure isn’t punished, people share what really happened. When you share honestly, you learn. When you learn, you don’t repeat mistakes.
How to Implement (After Next Failure):
- Within 48 hours, write the timeline
- Identify contributing factors (not a single cause)
- For each factor, ask: “What process would have caught this?”
- Create specific action items with owners
- Share it broadly (your team at minimum, company ideally)
From GitLab: The Default to Async
What They Do:
GitLab has 2,000+ employees across 65+ countries. Default is async communication. Meetings are rare and recorded.
What to Steal:
The “async-first” communication hierarchy:
1. Can this be a document? → Write it
2. Can this be a chat message? → Send it
3. Can this be a recorded video? → Record it
4. Does this need real-time discussion? → Schedule a meeting
Why It Works:
Synchronous communication (meetings, video calls) requires everyone to be available at the same time. It excludes parents who need flexible hours, remote workers in different time zones, and deep thinkers who need time to process.
Async is inclusive.
How to Implement (Starting Monday):
- For the next scheduled meeting, ask: “Could this be an email?”
- If the answer is yes, cancel it and send the email
- For the next week, before scheduling any new meeting, document the decision first
- Only meet if the document raises questions that need discussion
From Spotify: The Failed Squad Model (Lessons from Failure)
What They Did:
Spotify’s squad model became famous. Then it stopped working for them. They’ve since admitted it was oversimplified and caused problems.
What to Steal:
The lesson, not the model: Structure follows strategy, not the other way around.
When Spotify was scaling rapidly, autonomy was the bottleneck. Squads solved that.
When they needed more coordination for platform initiatives, squads made it harder. They evolved.
Why This Matters:
The worst management mistake is copying another company’s org chart. Their structure solved their problems. You have different problems.
How to Implement (Ongoing):
- Every 6 months, ask: “What’s our biggest bottleneck?”
- If it’s speed → Give more autonomy
- If it’s consistency → Add more structure
- If it’s communication → Create more forums
- Adjust your structure to solve your current problem, not last year’s problem
The Meta-Lesson
Notice what these practices have in common:
- Lightweight: You can start tomorrow
- Reversible: If it doesn’t work, you can stop
- Specific: Clear implementation, not vague principles
- Battle-tested: Real companies with real results
You don’t need to transform your entire organization. Pick one. Try it for a month. If it works, keep it. If not, try another.
The companies that built these practices didn’t implement them all at once. They evolved them over years, often by accident.
You can be more deliberate. Steal the best ideas, adapt them to your context, and iterate.
That’s not copying. That’s learning.