This is a blog on organisational management, from Max (Exec Director of Forethought) and Brenton (COO of 80,000 Hours).
We’ve been geeking out about management for much of the past decade. We’ve accumulated experience, mistakes, and a backlog of Google documents on how we think management should be done. Now we want to share that writing.
Why write another blog about management? There are hundreds of books out there, and thousands of people more qualified than us.
It’s because management advice is heavily context-dependent. Canonical texts like The Lean Startup and High Output Management are very good: but they’re written for contexts that only partially overlap with ours. We’ve had to pick and choose what applies.
This blog is our attempt to describe what we’ve found works for organisations like ours.
Here’s what the organisations we’ve worked at look like:
The people: Staff are unusually mission-aligned and smart. They’re precise thinkers who value explicit communication, high reasoning transparency, and accuracy—even in management contexts where most organisations tolerate more ambiguity. They tend to be very kind.
The stage: We’ve worked in teams from 2–50 people. They’re growing quickly, though aren’t usually hypergrowth.
The industry: Non-profits. Normally well funded, typically in (or adjacent to) effective altruism. They might be part research institution, part startup, part advocacy non-profit, and part media organisation.
If you work in a similar context, then we hope this is useful to you too and that you’ll let us know what we’re missing.
