Binder

Strategy

Picking the long road. Structure, time horizons, the trap of metrics, what kills companies.

McChrystal had it right: structure, not the plan, is the strategy. Distributed structure beats centralized plans every time, and the long game - patient compounding across decades - beats the quarterly grind by a wide margin. The hard part is that most software companies are run by the wrong temperament for their mode: investors when they need operators, operators when they need investors.

The metrics trap is the most reliable killer - metrics become the product, users become an externality, and the cure is principles. Underneath all of it, every exec at a software company has the same job: product. Forget that and the org carves into lanes, each locally optimized and collectively mediocre. Most companies aren’t growing anyway - maturity is the actual stage, and pretending otherwise is the cargo cult that kills companies.