Ovidiu Podariu's Key Ideas from Team of Teams
by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell

The way you organize your office space affects how people behave. The open office was created to encourage cooperation, spread ideas, and promote interaction between employees distant from one another on the org chart. As an executive, try to be as close to the open office as feasible, ideally within it, to keep a finger on the pulse of the company.

"If you lock yourself in your office, I don't think you can be a good executive", said Michael Bloomberg after he became mayor of New York City and converted a big hearing room into an open office with cubicles, and put himself in the middle of it.

As a leader, you should spend your time on decisions where you bring the most value. For everything else, empower your team to decide without waiting for your approval. It costs less to fix the errors you would have spotted than to wait for your approval and delay the decision.

In the past, leaders approved everything because they had the most information, communication was slow, and companies moved at a predictable pace. But today, your team often knows more than you about what’s happening on the ground, and speed matters more than perfection.

It’s tempting to play the heroic leader that makes decisions, solves problems, and saves the day. It feels productive and wins praise from your team and boss. But it turns you into a bottleneck and trains your team to wait for answers instead of taking ownership.

Your real job is to shape the culture, setting up systems (routines, habits, communication flows) that keep your team in sync and help them solve problems on their own. You get faster decisions, more ownership, and a team that runs smoothly even when you're not around.

It’s a shift from short-term control to long-term scale.

Culture isn’t what you say. It's what you do, reward, tolerate, and repeat. And you're shaping it every day, whether you mean to or not. In a small startup, those signals are amplified and every action sets a precedent, so lead by example, even when you're moving fast.

Pay attention to:

• How decisions get made
• How problems get handled
• How you communicate and share information
• The habits you reinforce
• The behaviors you call out
• The things you let slide