Walter Frick

To make a good decision, you need to have a sense of two things: how different choices change the likelihood of different outcomes and how desirable each of those outcomes is.

What Really Motivates Us

What really motivates us? Humans have pondered this question for decades. Is it money, power, and fame? Or rather fear and punishment? Psychologists’ answers have varied, along with a broad transformation in prevailing views. Developed by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci nearly four decades ago, self-determination theory (SDT) has become one of the most widely accepted theories of human motivation in contemporary behavioral science.

Mike Brown

One of the first things I like to do in a meeting is get clarity on what decision is being made and who has the decision rights. If the answer to either is vague or unclear, you should cancel the meeting and reconvene when you have clarity on these two points. If there’s ambiguity as to who has decision making rights for a particular topic, … [ Read more ]

10 Hiring Hacks For Nailing Culture Fit From New York’s Top Tech Recruiters

Each month General Catalyst brings together leading technologists from New York’s top startups for a brainstorming session on an industry challenge or theme. Through an exchange of best practices, our goal is to move the collective tech ecosystem forward. This month, we focus on company culture. We hosted Chief People Officers and recruiting leads from New York’s pioneering startups and here are some of the … [ Read more ]

Nick Leeson

When profit is the motivation, there is always an inclination to believe good results have been generated the right way, especially by top performers.

How Your Hiring Process Could Predict Unethical Behavior

Carnegie Mellon professor Taya Cohen explains the connection between moral character and workplace performance

John Sculley

There is one thing that every large organization has in common no matter what industry they’re in and that’s middle managers empowered with the authority to say no. And middle managers are typically measured on keeping everything going, not saying yes to change. This is true at old companies that have been around for 100 years. It is true at large tech companies like Apple … [ Read more ]

Jay Desai

The role of the CEO or founder means wearing many hats, and it may be hard for the mentor hat to be one of them — especially if you’re hiring people more senior or experienced than you. If you try, it will be inauthentic. A CEO can be many things to their manager to be supportive, and mentor may not be one of them. It’s hard … [ Read more ]

Jay Desai

I’d rather get sophisticated questions than simple answers from new hires. People often don’t think that asking questions is indicative of quick learning. They think it’s the opposite.

Jay Desai

There are at least two types of people when it comes to communication response time: real-time vs. gradual processors. If a real-time processor is negotiating with a gradual processor, it can be frustrating unless expectations are set up front.

Kim Scott

Don’t let decisions get pushed up. A lot of times you see decisions get kicked up to the more senior level, and so they get made by people who happen to be sitting around a certain table, not the people who know the facts. Don’t let this happen.

Kim Scott

Somehow people’s egos get invested in making decisions. If they get left out, they feel almost a loss of personhood. So you get ego-based decisions instead of fact-based decisions. The more you push yourself and your managers out of the process, the better your decisions will be.

Jeffrey Overall

A common misconception is that all unethical behaviors are self-serving. Examples of this include deceiving customers to make a sale and lying on expense reports. But although some unethical behavior is clearly self-serving, most unethical acts in the workplace are actually the result of managers encountering a moral dilemma.

Something Weird Happens to Companies When They Hit 150 People

The dynamics of companies change fundamentally when they exceed roughly 150 people, in ways that startup founders can struggle to address.

Hypergrowth and The Law of Startup Physics

Khalid Halim notices patterns in startups that how companies scale and break matches military groupings. In this exclusive interview, he pulls at the strings of this scaling-and-breaking phenomenon to articulate what he calls the law of startup physics. He explains how companies and people grow at different rates — and what this tension means for how both will break while scaling. Halim shares how he’s … [ Read more ]

Carly Guthrie

People do better work when they have lives of their own. That’s not always a popular opinion, but I’ve seen how true it is over and over again. It’s not just people with kids or spouses. Everybody has a community outside of the office. So few employers respect that — if you make it a point to, that will bind your employees closer to you. … [ Read more ]

Juan Luis Suárez

According to Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, authors of Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, culture is “information that affects individuals’ behaviors and that they learn from other members of their species through imitation, learning, and other social practices.” […] And if we accept that culture is information that affects individuals’ behavior, then understanding it requires us to figure out what … [ Read more ]

How to Banish Bad Habits from Your Company

Freek Vermeulen explains why unhelpful practices go unnoticed and suggests how rooting them out can help innovation.

Thomas Watson

[Andrew Fastow] thinks all management decisions should face one simple question. “If this company were privately owned, and I were leaving this company to my grandchildren, would I make this decision?”

5 Common Complaints About Meetings and What to Do About Them

We all complain about meetings. We have too many. They’re a waste of time. Nothing gets done. These complaints often have merit, but they are so broad that they’re difficult to argue with and harder to address.

There are specific complaints that can be tackled, however. When I ask people in the workshops I lead what they most want help with, five issues consistently come up. … [ Read more ]