Category Archives: The Rules

Collection of stories featuring other peoples ‘Rules’ for successful endeavours. In general you should think of Rules more as guidelines, they won’t be consistent and in fact some will probably cancel each other out. Figure out what works for you!

Scaling up culture – how to spread it without losing it


I came across this book via a post about “Scaling Excellence” on Matthew E. May’s blog. It’s a subject close to my heart having experienced massive growth with Rightmove.co.uk and trying to hang on to all the good small company stuff whilst getting externally very big.

The bumf says the book (and the nobel prize for best co-author name must surely go to Huggy Rao) is built on nearly a decade of academic research and case studies into companies as they have grown. Of the 7 rules for scaling set out by Rao and Sutton, the one that leapt out at me and appears in first place was the idea that you should be aiming to “spread mindset, not just footprint“. Continue reading →

Paul Graham’s Rules for Love – Part 3

Paul Graham, serial entrepreneur and big cheese behind Y-Combinator (funded over 450 startups, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Reddit) has a fantastic collection of essays containing all sorts of wisdom garnered over his years working.

Here’s my final highlight from a great one on “How to Do What You Love”

3. Prestige is opinion of the world, fossilised inspiration.
If you do anything well, you’ll make it prestigious

I’ve come across this sentiment in other places and for me it’s got great roots in one of the key modern leadership attributes; humility. The lesson I take from this is when trying to build something that people will love and get engaged with, do it for reasons that aren’t primarily about how you will be seen or rewarded for doing it.

Don’t embark on a project to make money. Don’t be in it for the awards you might get from backslapping industry pundits, be in it for the difference it will make to everyone involved.

Paul Graham’s Rules for Love – Part 2

Paul Graham, serial entrepreneur and big cheese behind Y-Combinator (funded over 450 startups, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Reddit) has a fantastic collection of essays containing all sorts of wisdom garnered over his years working.

Here’s some more highlights from a great one on “How to Do What You Love”

2. Always Produce.
a. Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.

Put any high performing, engaged team in a room and explore what motivates them and chances are you’ll get back a bunch of words like ‘achievement’, ‘competence’ and ‘contribution’. These values all have roots in the drive to build something, deliver a service, produce a feeling. What I really like about Paul’s ‘always produce’ rule is it’s ability to be both chicken and egg: you can bring up energy and engagement by just doing and you can also reinforce energy and engagement by seeing the results of the doing.

If you’re stuck in a rut, turning in circles, just start taking steps, make things different – produce!

Paul Graham’s Rules for Love – Part 1

Paul Graham, serial entrepreneur and big cheese behind Y-Combinator (funded over 450 startups, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Reddit) has a fantastic collection of essays containing all sorts of wisdom garnered over his years working.

Here’s some highlights from a great one on “How to Do What You Love”

1. Do what you love.
a. But doesn’t mean do what you most love this second i.e. you have to work at it.

b. Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it’s rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you’ll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you’re in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you’re practically there.

‘Love’ and ‘Passion’ are often thrown around when it comes to aspects of corporate culture necessary to produce engagement and shiny happy workers, but there’s a reason. Think of how much emotion is bound up in the nature of those words. Emotions are personal because they’re your feelings. If you want to get engagement with an enterprise, then people have to feel about it and that meands finding something they can match a passion for or develop love for.

As Paul says, most struggle but it’s a worthy struggle. Aim for love and even if you only hit ‘really like’, you’ll still be better off than the cubefarm.