The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship comes to my mind here. I’ve never been in a position where I’ve been responsible for these sorts of managerial/operational questions, but if I were, the first thing I’d do would be to survey whatever (formal and informal) literature is out there (or hopefully delegate that). It’s the sort of thing many organizations face, so I’d assume that there’s some research on it, or at least smart people with opinions that can be surveyed and consolidated. Shoulders of giants to be stood on.
Things I’ve read / advice I’ve gathered that influenced me a lot, are:
Paul Graham’s essays and YCombinator’s startup philosophy
lean manufacturing philosophy
Elon Musk’s operational principles (there’s a ton of junk content about this online, but I’ve been able to find some good first-hand accounts from people who work at tesla and spacex, as well as probably the single best piece of content, which is the 2-3h starbase tour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw ). Tesla also has a “25 Guns” team that runs on a to-me very similar philosophy
first-hand or second-hand conversations with the founders of FTX
I feel like this is where taste comes into play though. If you have good taste, you can find the resources/people that are worth paying attention to. And similarly, you can ask the right people to point you to the right resources. No?
Relatedly, a working hypothesis of mine is that a big benefit of reading peoples blogs is that you develop an epistemic trust in them, and could then use them for reasons like this. Or maybe use them indirectly: you trust Alice, Alice thinks highly of Bob, Bob thinks Carol is a good resource on operations and recommends a given textbook, so you read a few of Carols posts, pick up the textbook, skim it, and look through the sources that the textbook cites. And it all starts with you having epistemic trust in Alice.
The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship comes to my mind here. I’ve never been in a position where I’ve been responsible for these sorts of managerial/operational questions, but if I were, the first thing I’d do would be to survey whatever (formal and informal) literature is out there (or hopefully delegate that). It’s the sort of thing many organizations face, so I’d assume that there’s some research on it, or at least smart people with opinions that can be surveyed and consolidated. Shoulders of giants to be stood on.
Things I’ve read / advice I’ve gathered that influenced me a lot, are:
Paul Graham’s essays and YCombinator’s startup philosophy
lean manufacturing philosophy
Elon Musk’s operational principles (there’s a ton of junk content about this online, but I’ve been able to find some good first-hand accounts from people who work at tesla and spacex, as well as probably the single best piece of content, which is the 2-3h starbase tour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw ). Tesla also has a “25 Guns” team that runs on a to-me very similar philosophy
first-hand or second-hand conversations with the founders of FTX
honorary mention, because it’s not advice inasmuch as a benchmark: https://patrickcollison.com/fast
Sadly, it’s a leprechaun/ribbon situation.
I feel like this is where taste comes into play though. If you have good taste, you can find the resources/people that are worth paying attention to. And similarly, you can ask the right people to point you to the right resources. No?
Relatedly, a working hypothesis of mine is that a big benefit of reading peoples blogs is that you develop an epistemic trust in them, and could then use them for reasons like this. Or maybe use them indirectly: you trust Alice, Alice thinks highly of Bob, Bob thinks Carol is a good resource on operations and recommends a given textbook, so you read a few of Carols posts, pick up the textbook, skim it, and look through the sources that the textbook cites. And it all starts with you having epistemic trust in Alice.