From placid planners to passionate pioneers: In pursuit of the next thing

When you're a scrappy startup, being nimble, agile, and flexible comes with the territory. But how do you maintain agility when you're a much, much larger company? Hope is not lost. Roy Rapoport shares critical leadership practicesfocusing on encouraging failure, growing heretics, and empowering dissentthat will help you maintain a technical and organizational edge.

Large organizations have some distinct size advantages: They typically experience fewer existential threats, and they have significantly more resources and access to low-interest technical debt. Perversely, your organization’s pinnacle of success harbors within it its own seeds of destruction. As you grow larger, you typically grow slower. If you’ve been successful at having your technology adopted, your technology is now critical to your customers, and you spend more of your time on stability, commoditization, and incremental improvement. Your organization too risks becoming more homogenous, agreeable, and risk-averse. How do we save ourselves from the Dead Sea effect caused by organizational scale? Roy Rapoport shares critical leadership practices that will help you maintain a technical and organizational edge and explores implementations of these practices, stories of real-world success (and failure), and the impact of these practices on the organizational culture of a large 20-year-old tech company. In the process, Roy also covers shipbuilding and naval combat, of course. Topics include: