And make every team write down how they do things: What’s the marketing process? What’s the engineering process? What are the phases for how we make a product? How do we work together? It can’t just be left in people’s brains. People leave. New people join. If you’re growing geometrically—in all directions at once—then you need a strong, stable core at the center. Your experienced employees have to be able to walk new employees through how you do what you do, or else everyone gets lost.

If you want to build a great company, you should expect excellence from every part of it. The output of every team can make or break the customer experience, so they should all be a priority. [See also: Chapter 3.1: Making the Intangible Tangible.]

There can’t be any functions that you dismiss as secondary—where you casually accept mediocrity because it doesn’t really matter.

Everything matters.

And it’s not just about you.

If our organizations are inhuman, it’s because we designed them to be so—whether consciously or not. Every institution is an assemblage of choices about how best to organize human beings in light of some particular goal. The premise of this book is that most of these choices can and must be revisited.

And just as no cell can be too far from the blood supply, no team can be too far removed from the action of the marketplace — or so big that it becomes unwieldy and unresponsive…

Divide big teams into smaller ones aligned around projects, product lines, customer segments, geographical locations, etc., based on the idea of getting everyone in the organization into small teams and as close to his or her respective customers as possible. This is a way to increase the surface area of the company, giving the maximum number of employees a chance to interact with the marketplace.

To help people apply this lesson, we’ve run the Subtraction Game with at least a hundred organizations, including: the top eight executives at Bloom Energy;100 credit union executives; 150 Netflix film postproduction employees; 300 partners in a big law firm; 400 Microsoft executives; and 60 Stanford staffers at a “Help Center” workshop. We ask people to start with solo brainstorming, to “think about how your organization operates. What adds needless frustration? What scatters your attention? What was once useful, but is now in the way?” For some organizations, we add, “Identify impediments that are within your sphere of influence and that are systemic at your company.” Next, people meet in small groups or online rooms for ten minutes or so, discuss the impediments each member generated, and brainstorm more potential subtraction targets. Then, to focus their attention, they select a couple of targets and outline rough implementation plans—who would lead the charge to eliminate these obstacles, whose support they would need along the way, and which people and teams might push back against the change.