Company-Culture

You’re in a meeting at Apple. The agenda has 12 items. Next to each item is a name. iOS notification improvements: Sarah Chen Battery optimization: Marcus Rodriguez App Store review process: Jennifer Wu That name isn’t the person who does all the work. It’s the person who is directly responsible for that outcome. One person. Completely accountable. Not a committee. Not a team. One person. If it succeeds, they get credit. If it fails, it’s on them. ...

You’ve been doing Scrum for years. Two-week sprints. Daily standups. Story points. Sprint planning. Retrospectives. And it’s exhausting. The sprints feel arbitrary. The planning meetings drag on. The backlog is a graveyard of ideas no one will ever build. You’re shipping, but it feels like running on a treadmill. What if there’s a better way? In 2019, Basecamp published “Shape Up”—their alternative to Scrum. The core idea: Work in 6-week cycles (not 2-week sprints) Fixed time, variable scope (not fixed scope, variable time) No backlog (ideas don’t pile up forever) Betting, not planning (leadership commits to ideas worth doing) Shaping, not speccing (rough outlines, not detailed specs) It’s radically different from Scrum. ...

Toy Story 2 was a disaster. Four months before release, Pixar screened an early cut for the leadership team. It was bad. The story didn’t work. Characters felt flat. Jokes landed with thuds. John Lasseter, Pixar’s creative chief, said: “This isn’t working.” Most studios would have panicked, blamed the director, or shipped it anyway. Pixar did something different. They convened the Braintrust. A group of Pixar’s best storytellers sat in a room with the director. For hours, they picked apart every scene. Brutally honest. No sugarcoating. ...

In 1950, Toyota was a struggling Japanese car company. American manufacturers like Ford and GM were giants. They had scale, capital, technology. Toyota had none of that. But they had something else: Kaizen. 改善 (kai = change, zen = good) Continuous improvement. Not big, dramatic changes. Not revolutionary breakthroughs. Just small improvements. Every day. By everyone. Over decades, those small improvements compounded into dominance. By 2008, Toyota became the world’s largest automaker. ...

No vacation policy. No expense policy. No approval process. Just one rule: Act in Netflix’s best interest. In 2009, Netflix published a culture deck that became legendary. Sheryl Sandberg called it “the most important document ever to come out of Silicon Valley.” It laid out a radical philosophy: Give people freedom. Expect extraordinary results. Fire quickly if they don’t deliver. It’s provocative. Some love it. Some hate it. But everyone talks about it. ...

In 2012, Spotify released a video about their engineering culture. It showed autonomous “squads,” aligned into “tribes,” supported by “chapters” and “guilds.” It looked amazing. Teams working independently. No bureaucracy. Innovation everywhere. The video went viral. Suddenly, every company wanted squads and tribes. Management consultants sold “Spotify Model transformations.” Books were written. Certifications created. There was just one problem: Spotify doesn’t use the Spotify Model anymore. The model that everyone copied was a snapshot of one moment in Spotify’s history. A work in progress. An experiment. ...

It’s 9 AM. You walk into a conference room at Amazon for a major product decision. No one is talking. Everyone is reading. For 20 minutes, the room is completely silent. Executives, directors, engineers—all reading the same six-page document. No PowerPoint deck. No bullet points. No presenter standing at the front of the room. Just reading. Then, after everyone finishes, the discussion begins. Welcome to Amazon’s most powerful cultural practice: the 6-pager. ...