How to Run a Company

Most companies aren’t run any particular way. Contrast the default management style at most Fortune 500 companies or an average tech startup with the radical intentionality of the choices embodied in Ray Dalio’s Principles or the Valve employee handbook. Great leaders stare in the face of the extraordinary achievement they seek and ask what way of operating—from the biggest why to each critical everyday element of how—will best, over the long arc, produce this result.