Zero to One_ Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future ( PDFDrive )

DO ONE THING
On the inside, every individual should be sharply distinguished by her work.
When assigning responsibilities to employees in a startup, you could start by
treating it as a simple optimization problem to efficiently match talents with
tasks. But even if you could somehow get this perfectly right, any given solution
would quickly break down. Partly that’s because startups have to move fast, so
individual roles can’t remain static for long. But it’s also because job
assignments aren’t just about the relationships between workers and tasks;
they’re also about relationships between employees.
The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the
company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was
unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had
started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed
a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company
happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an
especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages.
Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of longterm
relationships that transcend mere professionalism. More than that, internal
peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often
imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every
company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to
outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical
cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain
view.