Charles Koch inherited a tiny company in 1967 and turned it into one of the world’s largest ones. Let’s go through a few ways I think startups (and any companies) can take notes from what Charles Koch has accomplished.
Measuring results
Koch’s approach to a lot of this boils down to holding business units and even individual plants accountable for their profits and losses. This creates essentially 100% alignment with the management of those units/plants and what the company wants (maximize profits)!
Creating a culture of entrepreneurship
One tenet under Charles Koch’s school of thought called Market-Based Management (MBM) is “principled entrepreneurship”, meaning let everyone in the company think about their job as a business owner.
Encouraging long-term thinking
Creating long-term alignment between the employees and the company is crucial, or you will hire careerists who are self-optimizing.
Fixing the unintended
Charles Koch’s invention is something he calls 10,000% compliance (100% compliance, 100% of the time).
Creating a corporate culture
Senior leaders at Koch Industries phrased everything they said in the vocabulary of Market-Based Management. One of Charles Koch’s indisputable accomplishments over the preceding thirty years was creating an organization where every employee—to a person—publicly subscribed to the same intricately encoded philosophy