Do not attempt to address behavioral issues without both executives in the room. Doing so will invite manipulation and politics. - Ben Horowitz

Once we pushed the Opsware stock price back above $1, the next problem was to rebuild the executive team. We had cloud services executives, but now we were a software company and needed software executives. In enterprise software companies, the two most important positions tend to be VP of sales and VP of engineering.

The first rule of organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad. With any design, you will optimize communication among some parts of the organization at the expense of other parts.

That’s the nature of culture. It’s not a single decision — it’s a code that manifests itself as a vast set of actions taken over time. No one person makes or takes all these actions. Cultural design is a way to program the actions of an organization, but, like computer programs, every culture has bugs. And cultures are significantly more difficult to debug than programs.