Domain 05 · 24 cases
Leadership & Org Design
Culture, incentives, decision rituals and succession, from Amazon's six-page memo and Netflix's culture deck to Bridgewater, Nvidia and Ford's turnaround.
- Engineer feedback so the truth reaches the people who need it
- See what your incentives actually reward versus what you say
- Decide how much control to keep as headcount grows
Airbnb: Brian Chesky and Founder Mode
COVID-19 nearly killed Airbnb. Travel stopped, revenue cratered, and the company cut roughly a quarter of its staff in 2020. When Brian Chesky rebuilt, he…
Amazon: Two-Pizza Teams and the Six-Page Memo
Amazon banned PowerPoint in its leadership meetings. In its place, every serious proposal becomes a six-page written memo that the room reads in dead silence…
Apple: Jobs Returns and the Power of Focus
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was weeks from bankruptcy and drowning in product, printers, handhelds, and a confusing grid of barely…
Berkshire Hathaway: Radical Decentralization
Berkshire Hathaway employs hundreds of thousands of people across dozens of companies, yet its Omaha headquarters runs on a staff of fewer than thirty. While…
Bridgewater: Radical Transparency and Its Limits
Ray Dalio built the world's largest hedge fund around a set of principles he called radical transparency: meetings recorded, colleagues critiqued to their…
Costco: Jim Sinegal and Paying People Well
Jim Sinegal co-founded Costco in 1983 and ran it until 2011, paying frontline workers well above retail averages and offering health and retirement benefits…
Disney: Succession Done Wrong, Then Right
Michael Eisner joined Disney in 1984 and engineered one of the great corporate turnarounds of the era. Then his co-leader Frank Wells died in 1994, and…
Ford: Mulally's One Ford and Psychological Safety
Alan Mulally took over Ford in 2006 with the company burning cash and mortgaging assets to survive. He installed a weekly Business Plan Review where every…
GE: Jack Welch and the Cult of the CEO
Jack Welch became the most celebrated CEO in America during his two decades running General Electric, exiting any business where GE was not first or second,…
GM: Mary Barra Leading Through Crisis
Mary Barra became GM's CEO in January 2014. Within weeks she inherited an ignition-switch defect the company had known about for years, linked to deaths, and…
GM: The Ignition Switch and Organizational Silence
Engineers at General Motors documented a faulty ignition switch in the mid-2000s. It could cut engine power and disable airbags in a crash, and they proposed…
Google: Project Aristotle and Psychological Safety
Google studied roughly 180 of its own teams to answer a simple question: what makes some great and others mediocre? The researchers expected the answer to be…
Haier: The Company as Thousands of Micro-Enterprises
Zhang Ruimin took over a failing refrigerator factory in Qingdao in 1984 and built it into one of the world's largest appliance makers. At the scale where…
Microsoft: Nadella and the Growth Mindset
In 2014, Microsoft was big, profitable, and stuck, its stock flat for over a decade and its dominant products tied to markets shrinking in relevance. When…
Netflix: The Culture Deck
In 2009 Netflix posted an internal slide deck to the open internet, and it became one of the most-read documents in Silicon Valley history. Built by HR chief…
Nissan: Carlos Ghosn, from Turnaround Hero to Fugitive
In 1999 Nissan was near bankruptcy, drowning in debt and losing markets, when Renault took a stake and sent in Carlos Ghosn. He cut costs hard, closed…
Nvidia: Jensen Huang's Flat Organization
Conventional management wisdom says a CEO should have somewhere between five and ten direct reports, narrow enough for real oversight and coaching. Jensen…
Patagonia: Values-Driven Leadership and the Ownership Handoff
Yvon Chouinard spent five decades turning a blacksmith's climbing-hardware business into one of the most recognizable outdoor brands in the world, run on…
PepsiCo: Indra Nooyi and Performance with Purpose
Indra Nooyi took over PepsiCo in 2006 and spent about twelve years growing a snack-and-soda giant while quietly betting that a company built on sugar and…
Pixar: The Braintrust
Pixar shipped a run of blockbuster animated films, and Ed Catmull — the co-founder who later wrote "Creativity, Inc." — credited an unusual meeting for…
Southwest: Herb Kelleher and Employees First
In the 1990s, most airlines were squeezing labor costs to compete on price. Southwest was paying its people well and letting flight attendants crack jokes…
Uber: Toxic Culture and Its Cost
Uber grew faster than almost any company in history, and then a single engineer's blog post helped topple its CEO. In February 2017, Susan Fowler published…
WeWork: Adam Neumann and Founder Hubris
WeWork raised billions on the premise that it wasn't a real estate company but a consciousness-elevating global movement. Then the IPO prospectus landed in…
Zappos: Culture as Moat and the Holacracy Bet
Tony Hsieh built Zappos on the conviction that culture was the real product, with no-script customer service, 365-day returns, and a now-famous offer paying…
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