Management principles

People, ideas, machines - in that order!
— Colonel John Boyd

Here I share some thoughts on what I think good management and good organisational culture looks like. This is both a taster of what you’ll get if you work with me, and a commitment to hold me to when we work together. It’s a living document - I’ll keep it updated as my beliefs change.

Last reviewed 2026-03-03.

Be a philosopher-king

Ideas matter. A lot. Take them seriously. Go deep on everything. Follow Andy Grove’s Didactic Method: when you think you’ve gone far enough, ask another question! Read books and articles and share them with your colleagues. Ideas without action are pointless, but action without ideas is useless. You need to prioritise in the framework of a wider vision if you want to grow the pie rather than just slice it different ways. Front-loading your thinking makes a big difference to success. Think slow, act fast.

It’s not what you know, it’s how you think

Domain knowledge isn’t that important. Smart people pick it up quickly. What matters is a willingness to learn and to push yourself into new and unknown areas. Information may be princely - but curiosity is king.

The whole business is your business (and mine)

Think that marketing isn’t your problem as an engineer? Wrong! If your product isn’t marketed effectively, all your hard work is wasted. There’s no job to small, and no domain too far removed from your expertise in a business that it doesn’t matter to you.

Radical candour, everywhere

Feedback given in earnest and with good intentions is a gift. It’s in no one’s best interests to withhold feedback. The person who wants to give the feedback ends up holding onto their feelings. The person who needs to receive the feedback ends up making the same mistakes - or doesn’t realise they’re doing the right thing!

Build safety and trust

Ideas and feedback need an environment of safety and trust to survive. When things go wrong, blame the processes not the people. Never punish people for giving legitimate feedback; never make people bad about being wrong. Humour, friendliness and respect are essential lubricants for building trust, but aren’t enough. You must learn to have difficult conversations well to build true trust and safety.

Skip, skip, skip

Talk to everyone, everywhere. You don’t need permission to talk to your manager’s manager, or your manager’s manager’s manager, or your… well, you get the idea. Water cooler chats and skip-level meetings are an essential safety values for releasing pressure in an organisation. Use them!

Zero-based time management

Time is a resource to be managed. It’s the most important resource we have. Speed matters, but it doesn’t come about from just doing stuff. Build a habit of justifying how you use your time and over time, your use of this resource will become more focussed and effective. Build a culture where this whole mindset is normalised, and everything becomes exponentially more focussed and effective.

The critical path is the golden path

Be clear about the critical path. Keep asking yourself what thing has to happen next to unblock everything else. What’s the thing that will delay your schedule? What’s the limiting step? Yes, long-term planning is useful. Yes, you need a vision. But the number one failure mode of projects is losing sight of the critical path and getting bogged down in inessential stuff. Follow the critical path - it’s the golden path forward.

Bad operations cannot be tolerated

Use the Toyota method. When something goes wrong operationally, everyone from the janitor up is empowered to push The Big Red Button. Whether it’s server downtime, communications breakdowns, or meetings that go nowhere, no operational problem is too small to go unfixed. You ship your org chart. Our organisation is the single biggest product we build.

Output matters

It shouldn’t need saying, but it does. Too often, organisations reward polish, communication skills, clubability, or specific management styles. The result? The engineers who quietly get shit done get ignored. Charisma is useful for sales. It can get a lot done and open doors. But it doesn’t ship features or create customer value. It’s your (ie my) responsibility as a manager to make output the North Star for performance.

Join the 1% club

If you can do one thing every day that improves your performance or the performance of your team by just 1%, the results compound. Compound growth is where true competitive advantage emerges.

Grab the big lever

Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.

Thus wrote Archemeides. Focus on high-leverage activities as a team. If you can find that one big lever to pull, you’ll achieve so much more than pulling lots of little ones. Find ways to work on things that together add up to more than the sum of their parts.