Process

Software engineers love design patterns. Factory, Observer, Strategy—we have names for recurring solutions to recurring problems. Management has patterns too. Not organizational structures or methodologies, but specific, repeatable practices that work across different contexts. Here are patterns I’ve seen work in startups, scale-ups, and enterprises. Pattern 1: The Written Decision Record Intent: Make decisions visible, reversible, and learnable. Context: Teams waste time relitigating old decisions, or worse, making decisions without knowing why previous choices were made. ...

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: ...

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. ...