Leave big books for big companies—What to focus on as a young CEO
Sometime in 2017, I began to obsess about how we badly needed to have documentation on our brand, team JDs, departments… the list goes on. I wanted properly detailed definitions of everything, spelled out “like serious companies do”.
It was a frustrating task that was never completed.
But then I realized that over time, some of these things naturally came to place as we grew as a business, each one as the need appears.
If you think “business is supposed to be run on big corporate documents”. You may want to think again.
“Structure”, in the sense of detailed written stipulations, is usually a solution to the problem of complexity that comes with size. Big businesses need them to be able to avoid or reduce chaos. Imagine companies like Google and Facebook, each with over 50,000 employees. You can imagine guidelines, portals, booklets advising on some issues and instructing on others. As much as a company like Google tries to be less bureaucratic than companies of that size, they simply cannot run without many things clearly spelled out. When you are dealing with hundreds or thousands of people, leaving so much to discretion or joint review comes with huge risks.
On the other side, the advantage is that a small group of people can get the right work in the right direction via daily direct iteration, conversation, stand-ups, short calls, deliberations, and more. Also, they can afford to make mistakes, fail, get back up, learn from them and continue. Small businesses hardly make errors that land them in big legal battles or other major crisis situations. Hence it helps for small businesses to rather maximize that flexibility and let things take shape over time as they experiment and learn every day. That’s absolutely fine.
As a small business founder, you can directly, daily influence “order” (or whatever it is you want) and transfer your work culture ideology to your people. Perhaps one of the most important things to obsess with is the motivation of your team members to put their heart to the best work possible. If they understand what needs to be done and why, and you care about them enough for them to choose to do it, for more reasons than their pay, you are probably half-way there already.
In summary, leave the big books for the big companies who can’t survive without them. And in all that you do, read Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.
