ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT At an organization, you can see bad habits like people acting like assholes and getting away with it, and you have to decide how to respond. Netlfix’s famous culture deck declares that they won’t accept brilliant assholes. Sounds reasonable, but Graham would assert that there are many companies who do. “So the question is, what do you want your company to be like? When you see a trend over time that you don’t like, you need to aggressively manage it. Otherwise you can end up with some really bad habits as a company.” You have to pounce on any bad habits that could become part of your company’s DNA. Whatever your company looks like at this stage is how it will be, lfoor to ceiling, when you’re older and bigger. Over 750 Employees Typically around this point, individual people’s identities shitf away from the company and toward their team. They become Facebook engineers, for instance, not just Facebookers. CEOs may start to hear questions like, “What does the marketing team even do?” This is also where politics start to emerge, gradually at ifrst and then with greater momentum. Graham deifnes politics as the moment when people start to act in their own self interest rather than the best interest of the company. It’s otfen shocking when it ifrst shows up. It can be a sign that you hired too quickly or aren’t communicating proactively enough about what behaviors will be rewarded, and about what you’re doing in the world. Strong, constant communication with the leaders of teams is the only way to keep things healthy. Everyone has to feel that they and their work are clearly tied to the broader goals of the organization. Everyone has to own calling out bad behavior when they see it. This is also when team leaders should look back at advice for CEOs to survive initial company scale. They can use most of the same tactics to keep their teams humming along without people feeling disillusioned or falling prey to the wrong priorities. You can also ifnd great advice on team scaling from other experts here, here and here. 62