WORK TOGETHER TO ALIGN EMPLOYEE, MANAGER, AND COMPANY. Once everyone’s values and aspirations have been articulated, all parties should work together… - Reid Hoffman

Blitzscaling means that you’re willing to sacrifice efficiency for speed, but without waiting to achieve certainty on whether the sacrifice will pay off. If classic start-up growth is about slowing your rate of descent as you try to assemble your plane, blitzscaling is about assembling that plane faster, then strapping on and igniting a set of jet engines (and possibly their afterburners) while you’re still building the wings.

What happened? Many things. But the overriding problem was this: The auto industry got too comfortable. As Intel cofounder Andy Grove once famously proclaimed, “Only the paranoid survive.” Success, he meant, is fragile — and perfection, fleeting. The moment you begin to take success for granted is the moment a competitor lunges for your jugular. Auto industry executives, to say the least, were not paranoid. Instead of listening to a customer base that wanted smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, the auto executives built bigger and bigger. Instead of taking seriously new competition from Japan, they staunchly insisted (both to themselves and to their customers) that MADE IN THE USA automatically meant “best in the world.” Instead of trying to learn from their competitors’ new methods of “lean manufacturing,” they clung stubbornly to their decades-old practices. Instead of rewarding the best people in the organization and firing the worst, they promoted on the basis of longevity and nepotism. Instead of moving quickly to keep up with the changing market, executives willingly embraced “death by committee.” Ross Perot once quipped that if a man saw a snake on the factory floor at GM, they’d form a committee to analyze whether they should kill it. Easy success had transformed the American auto

Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.