ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT Your principles should be clear and explicit enough that the people who consult them will make the same decisions a founder of your company would. They should also be deifned in a way that acknowledges potential tensions. When two principles seem to conlfict, the context should tell you which principle should take precedence. For example, “think rigorously” is paramount for high impact and irreversible decisions, but “move with urgency” is critical for decisions that are lower impact and potentially tunable. In this way, your core tenets serve more as a guide to action than a toothless list of nice-to-haves. This also makes them a useful rubric for hiring new people and assessing performance. Do candidates have aptitudes or experiences that align with your operating principles? Do existing employees execute their responsibilities in a way that upholds them? You should bake your operating principles into both your hiring and performance review processes to make them useful and keep them top of mind. When you run post-mortems on projects, evaluate process and results through the lens of your operating principles. “During growth, people can get very outcome-oriented and cut corners on the underlying thought process,” says Johnson. “Having principles written down allows you to say, ‘Hey, we agreed as a company that we would proceed according to these tenets. How could we have adhered to them better in this situation?’ Or, alternatively, ‘Do we need to change how we operate to achieve better results in the future?’” You know you’ve done right by your operating principles when people start using their language verbatim in decision meetings. “That’s the next best thing to having leadership in the room.” It starts with onboarding. To underscore the importance of Stripe’s Operating Principles, they show new hires the company’s very ifrst set of principles, written down the year it was founded. It’s striking how similar they are to today’s list — which emphasizes exactly how foundational these ideas are to Stripe’s success. “It shows what’s ALWAYS been important to the company — which really sticks with people,” says Johnson. “It also gives us an opportunity talk about when those very few changes have been made and why.” The operating principles play an even bigger role in training for new managers joining the company. “If you’re not careful, managers bring whatever rules and behaviors they had in their prior roles — and they have tremendous inlfuence on their teams,” she says. “That’s 67