The bigger my staff became, the more urgent it was that I figure out how to manage them. I created a flat organizational structure, much like I’d experienced in academia, largely because I naïvely thought that if I put together a hierarchical structure—assigning a bunch of managers to report to me—I would have to spend too much time managing and not enough time on my own work. This structure—in which I entrusted everybody to drive their own projects forward, at their own pace—had its limits, but the fact is, giving a ton of freedom to highly self-motivated people enabled us to make some
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