Action Principles

The fastest is the best. Everyone will amp us up. To be the fastest and amped up, you, a Flattmate, will share Mission, Vision, and Values.

More specifically, in your daily actions, you will:

Decide and execute.
Disagree and roll forward/back.
Note or code.
Secure it.
Pick up the pace.
Increase the standards.

These action principals sometimes conflict with each other. It's okay because every tention will be resolved eventually and that will tells us which principals are more important than others.

Decide and execute

You decide, you execute, under your mission. Do not let someone else decide for you, and do not let someone else execute for you. As long as you have an excellent sub-mission under our mission, you are always the best person to decide and execute it.

Here a mission is what explains why + key results + budget/resource. Your mission should be basically delegated directly by CxO. Your CxO will not explain what you should do for that, and it is still you who decides and executes. Sometimes, we may have a team for a mission and a leader within a team, but the leader is not a manager. The leader is a role that divides and conquers the mission into sub-missions and delegates them to the team members. The leader doesn't manage the team members. If you are a CxO or a team leader, making a convincing mission is your job.

Wonder if you have permission to do something under your mission? It is YES if your actions do not conflict with other ones' missions. You don't even need to get approval from others, while you still need to code or note as described later. Otherwise, you should disagree and roll forward/back if necessary.

Wonder if you can get a better budget/resource? You should disagree and roll forward/back with CxO if necessary.

When you decide to execute your mission, please be always confident in your decisions and be open to judging the output as failure quickly. Confidence before execution and humility after execution can be compatible. A simple inequation follows ― Sucess > Failure with faster identification > No action > Failure without identification.

The more accountable for your decision you are, the more good decision-maker / executor you are. However, you don't need to be completely logical: our recommendation is to make a decision with 50% logical thinking, 30% passion, and 20% intuition. Everyone knows any decision includes uncertainty, and 30% passion and 20% intuition are the key to making a good decision under uncertainty. You may sometimes be completely illogical; if you're fully passionate about something and your intuition also supports it truly, do it.

Disagree and roll forward/back

Disagree if what you see is wrong under our mission, and roll it forward by yourself with a reasonable story.

You roll it back (i.e., stop it) if it is not aligned with our mission. The mission is king. Focus our precious time on the mission.

You roll it forward if it is aligned with our mission. As long as it plays a vital role in our mission, make it better and faster.

You don't need to get approved for rolling anything forward with a two-way doored way; you just need to inform them. This should cause chaos and conflicts ― but don't be afraid of them as long as they are healthy ones: they are basically the best ways to drive us forward, avoiding silos. Note that anything that should require approvals, like accessing customer information, should be blocked and constrained by nature.

If you face a one-way door problem, you must ping wider stakeholders anywhere that is public to everyone, and get explicit approvals from more than 90%. Everyone who got ping-ed should also try to roll forward/back if they disagree with the decision.

You should also ignore the team structure to settle things down. Do not hesitate to ping anyone, even if they are not your team members. If you are managing a team, you should also be open for anyone in your team to ping anyone else without your permission.

Code or note

All of your actions should have either of the following forms: code or note.

If you are an engineer ― automate everything around you, or leave a note in your mind as much as possible. Anything stacked into our code base or knowledge base can always be visible to your colleagues, but anything only in your head is not. The "Code or note" principle is for making your work completely visible. Engineering projects always start from "archeology" or "reverse engineering" of the existing code/knowledge base ― you should make it easy.

Even if you are not an engineer, the same principle applies: you can start by noting your ideas and footprints at Slack. You can work with engineers to automate your work if it commits to our momentum toward the mission. Even if you are able to try to automate your work by yourself, nothing prevents you from doing that.

Note that this is not for micromanagement. This is not for reporting something to someone. This is for piling up your work into our shared space so that others can add another layer on top of it (or "disagree and roll forward/back").

Secure it

Security is our core. We are a cybersecurity company, and we are building a security product, so we should be the most secure company in the world. Do not trade security for anything else.

However, note that stricter ≠ more secure. Being strict is not being secure. Always be aware of what is the core assets of us and our customers, what can threaten them, and how we explain they are protected from those identified threats. If you don't have any stories to explain that, your action may be wrong.

Pick up the pace

Speedy growth pays off everything. Even chaos is fun. Everyone picks up the pace. Avoid spending your precious life on something dull and slow.

This doesn't bring you to work too hard. You live your life. The importance is not in the amount of time you spend on something, but in the cycle time of your actions.

We have only 52 weeks in a year, so setting a deadline next week means deciding to spend 1.9% of your year on it, and we can have only 52 loops in a year. If we challenge something daily, we have 365 chances in a year. This is why we pick up the pace; encourage ourselves to make a contribution than yearly, monthly than quarterly, weekly than monthly, daily than weekly, hourly than daily.

If you feel like it's not worth setting a close deadline, it may not be worth doing it. Just note it somewhere else and leave it for later. Here, you also decide and execute.

Increase the standards

Always raise the bar. This is the only way to make us better. Everything gets more significant, more complex, and more critical. The only way to keep up with that is to increase the standards.

We know this is a never-ending journey. It's always easy to lower the standards. However, it doesn't pay off, or it even makes us worse.