About systems that scale
Enabling companies to grow without descending into chaos or bureaucracy
When companies scale, most attention goes to funding, product-market fit, and go-to-market. That is essential. But it is not enough.
Many teams with great products and strong demand still struggle. Not due to money, but because the way their company operates cannot keep up. What used to be simple and fast slows down. Decisions take longer. Priorities blur. Coordination overhead rises faster than output. Teams that once worked together well start pulling in different directions. People start saying "them" instead of "we".
This is what happens when a company's operating system cannot keep pace with growth. How to build an operating system that lets your company scale without descending into chaos or bureaucracy is what this blog is about. That is why it is called systems that scale.
The system great companies build
Jim Collins, after studying what separates truly great companies from merely good ones, concluded that great companies build a consistent system and then focus on managing it. This thought has stayed with me ever since I first read it.
But what does such a system actually consist of? How do you build it deliberately? How do you keep it strong as your company grows? Those are the questions this blog is built around.
Every company has an operating system, either by design or by accident. It is the set of elements that determine how work gets done: how people are organized, how priorities are set, how decisions are made. Companies that get it right can scale with focus, ownership, and speed. Those that do not accumulate organizational debt – silently, often invisibly, until it becomes impossible to ignore and very hard to fix.
The gap we are not fixing
Given its impact on a company's performance, the operating system is arguably the most important thing a management team is responsible for. And yet management, as a discipline, has spent little effort on clarifying how such a system can be built and maintained. And nobody seems particularly bothered about that.
Engineering has spent decades accumulating knowledge, codifying best practices, and building on what works. The average engineer today builds on an extraordinary amount of tested knowledge. Management, in contrast, relies heavily on improvisation and on-the-job learning. Even a degree from a reputable business school gives you remarkably little of what you need to know to run a company. Finance, yes. Strategy, somewhat. But practical ways to shape a company's culture, how to set and achieve goals, how to recruit well, or how to have difficult conversations with underperforming employees? Close to nothing.
The cost of that gap is not abstract. It shows up every day in the unnecessary misery endured by people working in badly run organizations. The misaligned teams working against each other. The broken processes that misfire the same way every week without anyone fixing them. The manager who should have been replaced years ago but was not. The meetings that produce nothing. These are not the unavoidable costs of doing business in a tough world. These are things we are doing to ourselves. For no good reason at all.
What you will find here
This blog is my attempt to contribute to fixing that gap – one post at a time.
Over time, it will include four types of articles:
- Operating system: How to build and run each element of a high-performance operating system – from the big picture to the practical details.
- Practices: Useful skills that will support you during implementation – from managing change to writing effective meeting minutes.
- Foundations: The beliefs underpinning the system – fewer posts, but the ones that explain the "why" behind everything else.
- Conversations: Other perspectives from people building and scaling organizations – to share different experiences and views beyond my own.
While I mostly write about "the company", the same principles apply at any level – for business units, functions, and teams alike. That is because a good operating system is fractal: you can start from wherever you are today.
Who shaped my thinking
When writing for this blog, I stand on the shoulders of giants: Roger Martin on strategy, Claire Hughes Johnson, Colin Bryar and Bill Carr on building systems, Jim Collins on enduring organizations, Kim Scott on good management, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden on goal setting. Their thinking strongly influenced mine – and by extension, what you read here.
Why I care
Ten years ago, as a freshly minted COO of a scale-up, I was living with the constant feeling that things were slipping through our fingers. That we were not really in control. That we were constantly pushed into reactive mode, even for things that should not have come as surprises at all.
I want this to become the blog I wish I had found back then. If you are building an organization and want it to grow without descending into chaos or bureaucracy, I hope this blog will be useful to you.
About me
My name is Thomas. I love figuring out how to build high-performance organizations and overcome the challenges of growth. My mind gravitates toward systems, which is why I have spent the last decade building, fixing, and improving many of them.
I have worked as a COO at a Swiss tech scale-up, at Bain & Company, and at u-blox, a global leader in positioning technology.
I help companies grow without falling apart. This blog is where I share what I have learned (and keep learning) about how to do that.
If you would like to connect or share feedback, you can find me on LinkedIn.