Operating Principles for Rapid Growth

There are many challenges facing decision-makers when trying to kick start an organization on the path of rapid growth. When trying to change the trajectory of an organization its paramount that all pull in the same direction. Rapid growth requires operating based on the creation of a set of principles for the way you’d like your teams to work. Once communicated then stand back and let the teams self-organize around those principles. These principles are presented below:

1. Customer value = business value -- this is the belief that if we make our customers successful, our business will be successful. Simple enough but this is a surprisingly rare belief in many companies. 
2. Value learning over delivery -- this principle drives home the point that discovery is as important as shipping features since shipping something nobody wants (or can use) holds no value 
3. Radical transparency -- a culture of openness, disclosure and sharing is one that encourages learning, collaboration and trust. 
4. Humility in all things -- ultimately, we can't predict the future of our products nor our business. We make our best guesses about what we believe to be true. This is fine as long as we're open to changing our minds in the face of strong evidence.  

 Lesson to be learned: tuning up an organization for rapid growth is less about scaling processes and more about operating within a simple set of principles.