Organisation and governance
How should we organise, govern and run the company?
Culture, decision processes, ownership and control, relations with investors, and the structure of teams.
Fewer than ten resolved cases. Read this page as a set of examples, not as a base rate.
What the cases suggest
The organisational decisions in the record come mostly from memos in which leaders explained how their company would work. The ones that held up made a durable choice explicit and accepted its cost in advance: Amazon’s willingness to trade profit for growth, Google’s founders’ control, Bezos’s distinction between reversible and irreversible decisions.
What separated the decisions that worked
- Statements that set expectations with investors before a hard period aged better than those that announced values the company later found hard to keep.
- Replacing people with software at scale, as Klarna tried with customer service, failed when quality fell and had to be reversed.
Where this evidence is weak
Memos have no process grade on this site, and their outcomes are judged at the level of the whole company, which mixes many other decisions.
By who decided
| Decision-maker | Cases | Paid off | Mixed | Backfired | Too early |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Market leader | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Challenger | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Young company | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
The cases
Each links to the essay, memo or road not taken where the decision is described and judged, with its sources.
- Tell investors in advance that Amazon would sacrifice short-term profit for long-term market leadership, and how it would make that trade. Write down your trade-offs before you need to defend them; it changes how later decisions are judged.
- Go public on Google’s own terms: a dual-class share structure that kept control with the founders, no traditional earnings guidance, an auction-based offering and an explicit commitment to long-term, high-risk projects. Set expectations publicly before the pressure arrives; a letter written at the IPO governs how later decisions are judged.
- Use different decision-making processes for irreversible and reversible decisions, and fight the tendency of large organisations to treat every decision as irreversible. Before choosing a process, ask how reversible the decision is; speed is appropriate where mistakes are cheap to undo.
- Replace most rules and processes with high talent density, candour and context, and let people go who are merely adequate. Culture documents work when they describe decisions (who is hired, rewarded and let go), not when they list virtues.
- Tell public investors that Facebook’s mission came before profit and that it would keep a culture of rapid, iterative building, which Zuckerberg called the Hacker Way. A culture optimised for speed needs explicit limits for decisions whose consequences cannot be undone.
- Replace much of customer service with an AI assistant, then reverse course and hire people again Measure AI on the cases that matter most, not on the share of cases it can close.
Other kinds of decision
- Opening or closing
- Business model and pricing
- Make, buy or partner
- Acquisitions and sales
- Technology bets
- Product design
- New categories and markets
- Distribution and positioning
- Focus, exit and investment
- Trust, safety and privacy
- Executing large change
- Public rules
Shrikant Kumar. “Organisation and governance.” The Telos Decision Record, Telos, version of 2026-11-03. https://shrikantk.com/record/organisation/