1When a company grows beyond a hundred people, the informal habits that once worked begin to fail quietly.
2Founders who once knew every customer by name now discover serious problems only after they have become full blown crises.
3The great temptation is to add more layers of managers, but each new layer slows decisions and blurs responsibility.
4Strong leaders resist this temptation by pushing real authority downward, toward the people who actually face the customer every day.
5They define a small number of clear goals, repeat them endlessly, and measure progress in ways that everyone in the company understands.
6Culture matters more than strategy, because even the finest strategy fails the moment that people stop believing in each other.
7The best executives hire people who are smarter than themselves and then fight the daily urge to interfere with their work.
8They also protect quiet time for thinking, since a calendar full of meetings leaves no room for careful judgment.
9In the end, a company is just a group of people making thousands of small decisions every day.
10Management succeeds when all of those small daily decisions add up to something that the whole world finds genuinely valuable.