Corporations that excel at creating autonomy for their best employees often empower them to become something like companies of one: these employees work faster and more ingeniously, and they use fewer resources. For example, Google gives its engineers “20 percent time”: they can work on whatever project they want for 20 percent of their time. More than half of the products and projects Google releases were created during this 20 percent time.
This book is about how less can be more. The author advocates for the idea that great companies don’t always have to be big companies, especially in today’s where lots of value can be driven by technology. Sometimes, scaling businesses or organisations only up new kinds of problems, and might impede the company from doing great work.
Ultimately, the author is proposing an alternative perspective to what we’ve seen from the media about how each startup “has a dream to be the No. 1 xxx”. I’ll be sharing some excerpts that I found interesting when reading this book.
