Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
One clear purpose
Wartime at Instacart, the stretches when the company's survival was at stake, ran on a few operating principles. The first is clarity of purpose: a company can't do more than one thing, and everyone has to be aligned on what that thing is.
Inside that sits a line many people hate: you let fires burn. A business always has little fires popping up, and people are wired to put them out and go to sleep feeling good that the risk is gone. But any energy taken from the single task lowers the probability of achieving the thing that could take the house down, so it takes something close to tunnel vision.
Speed and filtering
The second is velocity. Work that usually takes weeks takes hours or days, and that part is energizing. The exhaustion comes from the constant filtering, like a windshield wiper clearing away everything that isn't the road.
Who owns what
The third is clear ownership. Some organizations have everyone wanting their name on a project, and others have people content to play for the front of the jersey with one leader on each stream. The second kind does better in wartime.
Why are people wired to fix small problems?
Psychologists Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer analyzed nearly 12,000 diary entries from 238 employees for their 2011 book The Progress Principle. They found that completing even small tasks lifted people's mood and motivation that day. Closing a loop brings a sense of progress, which is why a quick fix can feel better than work on a distant goal. The diaries came from employees at seven companies.
Where does the idea of wartime management come from?
Investor and author Ben Horowitz popularized the split between peacetime and wartime CEOs in a 2011 blog post. He expanded it in his 2014 book The Hard Thing About Hard Things. In his framing, a peacetime leader expands the market, and a wartime leader defends against a threat to the company's survival. The post drew on his experience running Loudcloud, later renamed Opsware, which Hewlett-Packard bought in 2007 for $1.6 billion.
How do emergency rooms decide what to ignore?
Emergency departments use triage, a system that sorts patients by urgency so the most critical cases get care first. The practice traces to Dominique Jean Larrey, a surgeon in Napoleon's army, who treated the wounded by severity instead of by rank. Minor injuries wait while life-threatening ones are handled, because treating everyone in arrival order would cost lives. The word comes from the French trier, to sort.
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