Jon Oringer Quotes

As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.

As Looker got larger, the talented people we hired started to see things that we couldn't. And what had looked like a company the three of us could run out of our houses for a few hours a day became something bigger. Much bigger.

Many corporate leaders and employees have the right intentions, but it can be overwhelming when you consider how everything is affected from leadership styles, to organizational structure, to employee engagement, to customer service an marketplace.

My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.

I'm fascinated by management and organizations: how organizations get things done and how successful organizations are built and maintained, how they evolve as they grow from start-ups to small companies to medium companies to big companies.

Growth is always essential. Running any tech company, you want to make sure you're growing. Putting in place all of the right structure to be able to ensure growth.

A new 'look' for any organization cannot be a papier-mache cover, tacked on with Scotch tape under the heading of 'beautification.' It has to be based on a probing examination of the company and the people who work for it. As a result, the eventual external visual design becomes the graphic extension of the internal realities of a company.

With scale, there always becomes this tension of, how do you keep the start-up philosophy?

My goal is to change NXT. It is to change every company I've ever been to, and I've changed every company.

When we opened Babbo, we were an indie band. Now we're kinda Apple. We have 19 restaurants and 2,800 employees, we are no longer perceived as the indie band although we think of ourselves as the indie band, and we operate our restaurants as individual indie bands.

Bill Gore from Goretex was a very strong influence because he was one of the first larger companies to experiment with freedom in the workplace.

The Macintosh having shipped, his next agenda was to turn the rest of Apple into the Mac group. He had perceived the rest of Apple wasn't as creative or motivated as the Mac team, and what you need to take over the company are managers, not innovators or technical people.

Most companies don't have the luxury of focusing exclusively on innovation. They have to innovate while stamping out zillions of widgets or processing billions of transactions.

Basic philosophy, spirit and drive of an organization have far more to do with its relative achievements than do technological or economic resources, organizational structure, innovation and timing.

It's difficult to do something radically new, unless you are at the heart of a company.

Organizations can get in the way of innovation, because if people are all bound up, and if they don't know if they get to make the decision or somebody else, and if they do, what happens to them, and so on and so forth.

We're no longer a small business; we're a large organization spread around the world. I can't imagine Netscape growing as fast as it has if it weren't for the way we use our products.

Turning a culture around is very difficult to do because it's based on a series of many, many decisions, and the organization is framed by those decisions.

Many Chinese companies are run like military camps with military discipline. We do not run a company that way. It does not help the creative process.

One of the banes of successful innovation is that companies may be so committed to innovation that they will give the innovators a lot of money to spend.

It all sounds almost silly, but the fact is that the only way to change a corporate culture is to just change it.

We want to move along and make sure, both internally and externally, that people realize how the company is being run, and it's being run by a group of people now, not just me.

Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset. As people have been noting for years, the majority of strategic initiatives that are driven from the top are marginally effective - at best.

As they grow, companies saturate their markets, become more complex and difficult to manage, and face larger and more entrenched competitors.

At around 50 employees, you get to the point where you can't see what's going on all the time. So you start to have weekly check-ins, and you have days that go by without knowing exactly what's going on.