Leadership
You Lit Your Own Hair on Fire
Startups love to run around with their hair on fire. They love urgent urgent urgent emergencies and, of course, hustle. The problem is that this is not a healthy or productive way to work. You may get a lot of stuff done, but you'll never have time to
The Fred User Manual
> Inspired by this confusingly-titled LinkedIn post [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-you-revolutionize-way-your-team-works-together-all-david-politis] , I wrote the personal User Manual below for our team. The User Manual is meant to instruct people on "how to work with me." Read the original post for more context. > The User Manual
A Place to Do Epic Work
A Hacker Noon post on high performance employees [https://hackernoon.com/know-the-soul-of-the-high-performance-employee-then-we-can-build-the-10-000-things-ad753ffd9b7f#.9oyofuh00] got me thinking about what we do at Tortuga [http://www.tortugabackpacks.com] to create a place to do great work. The author, William Belk, defines high performance employees (HPEs) as: > Rather than being tasked with
Between Autocracy and Holacracy
How much freedom is too much? The problem with giving your team freedom isn't that they'll abuse it or slack off. A good hiring process will prevent that. The problem is when freedom is really an excuse for a lack of vision, leadership, and guidance. Without
I Fucked Up (and You Can Too!)
> Below is the text of an email I sent to the Tortuga team recently. I've omitted a few numbers from the original email because they are for Tortuganaut eyes only. The most important one is still included. Hi Tortuganauts, I'm writing to share the story
9 Teammates, 0 Employees
Words matter. Notice how Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber, uses "I" and "we" in this interview [http://www.businessinsider.com/travis-kalanick-interview-on-self-driving-cars-future-driver-jobs-2016-8] (emphasis mine). > Isn't that the thing? [Laughs] I could give you self-driving nirvana if it's in the desert, there'