Principles
Durable claims that survive beyond the speaker's biography — each with explicit limits, transferability judgment, and evidence.
Principle
Aggressive ≠ jerk — direct + forthright with empathy in the relationship, not in the message
Direct-but-empathic feedback compresses delivery time and preserves the relationship; fluff-dressed feedback extends pain and dilutes the signal.
For your next tough-feedback conversation: write it down the night before. Say only what''s on the page. Then sit in silence. Empathy goes in the relationship, not in the message.
“I'm super impatient. ... I'm just direct and blunt with people. I'm not a jerk. ... a lot of times, especially engineering leaders ... they think when you tell them you have to manage poor performers out, they think you have to be a jerk when you do that. You don't have to be a jerk about it. You just have to be about direct.”Dick Costolo
“Bill Campbell actually gave me this advice early on — is, like, write down what you want to say, and then say that and don't say anything else.”Dick Costolo
Principle
Bezos rule: only take long on decisions that are existential
Decisions split into one-way doors (existential, hard to reverse) and two-way doors (reversible) — applying existential-grade deliberation to two-way doors wastes velocity that compounds.
Classify your 5 active major decisions: one-way or two-way? Apply existential deliberation only to one-way doors.
“This is the old Jeff Bezos thing. Only take a long time to make decisions that are existential. ... There are fewer and fewer of those decisions that can be like, if we screw it up, we can go back and do the other one. Do those right away.”Dick Costolo
Principle
Forestry management beats forest-fire fighting at scale
Reactive firefighting scales sublinearly (one leader can only fight so many fires); strategic forestry management scales because it changes the conditions under which fires happen.
Track how much of your week is fire-fighting vs forestry. If <30% is forestry, you''re still in tactics.
“Your job as a director, as you grow in this company is you can't just say, Well, I put out this forest fire. ... your job is to map the territory and start to do forestry management. ... You need to be focused more on thinking about this whole pie and what has to be true 24 months from now so this whole territory is in better shape.”Dick Costolo
Principle
Make sure everybody understands what you understand — priorities + context + personal stakes
Context-rich priority communication produces compound motivation (the bricklayer building a cathedral); priority-only communication produces compliance but not initiative.
For your top 3 priorities, ask each direct report: do they know what success means for them personally if we hit it? If not, you''ve communicated the what but not the why-for-them.
“Ben had in his outline ... make sure everybody understands what you understand. So I would always tell my managers that. Like, your job is to make sure everybody understands what the priorities are and what it means for them and their team, how they fit into those priorities, and more importantly, for your team, what it means for them personally and professionally if we achieve what we have to achieve.”Dick Costolo
“It's like the analogy of somebody asking a bricklayer what he's doing, and the bricklayer says, "Oh, I'm laying bricks." And the other bricklayer says, "I'm building a beautiful cathedral."”Brian Halligan
Principle
Push decisions down the stack — kill committees, ban "so-and-so said"
Group-decision-by-committee makes decision speed scale O(n) with group size; pushing decisions down the stack with banned authority-citation makes it O(1) at the level where the work happens.
Audit how many decisions came up the stack this week that should have stayed down. Each one is a vote that you''ve created a committee-by-proxy.
“We're not going to make decisions as a group, we're going to push decisions down the stack. ... don't come to me and ask me what you should do about this unless you have no idea. ... don't tell your team what to do. Tell them to figure it out and push as many decisions down the stack as you can.”Dick Costolo
“God, I hate hearing "Dick said" in the company as a reason for things. ... part of the speed was no, we're not going to have so-and-so said. Push the decisions down the stack.”Dick Costolo
Principle
Solve problems with DRIs, not processes
Adding process steps to prevent specific failures accumulates monotonically — each failure adds a step, no failure removes one, so processes grow unboundedly while outcomes stagnate. DRI ownership inverts the math.
For every process step in your org, ask: is there a DRI who owns this outcome and could replace this step? If yes, replace it.
“Don't solve problems with processes. ... at Google famously, the launch checklist got to be, like, 17 pages long. ... pretty soon you're not managing to outcomes, you're managing to the processes.”Dick Costolo
“You should probably only really have a couple organizational processes, and everything else should be span of control and decision-making. ... It's not the job of leadership to prevent mistakes from happening. It's the job of leadership to correct mistakes quickly when they happen.”Dick Costolo
Principle
There are many ways to climb the mountain — don''t copy the archetype
Archetype-imitation fails twice: (1) the source biography is incomplete, so the imitator is copying a fiction; (2) the imitator doesn''t hold the underlying conditions, so the imitation looks performative and the team isn''t fooled.
For every imitation move you''re making — Jobs-style, Musk-style — ask: is this who I actually am? If no, the team can already see the gap.
“I go back to the Jeff Bezos comment to Jack Dorsey. "Jack, there are lots of different ways to be successful." I think the mistake that CEOs make is they read the Walter Isaacson book on Elon Musk or the one on Steve Jobs and they think this is the map.”Dick Costolo
“If you try to be someone you're not, nobody is fooled. ... Nothing is more miserable than trying to be someone you're not.”Dick Costolo