South China Morning Post – Two-Pizza Rule Helps Companies to Start-Up or Scale Up

Big businesses are often slow to adapt and innovate, while start-ups struggle to build teams and systems to scale up their businesses. How can firms break this mould? By learning from one another, writes Egon Zehnder’s Catherine Zhu in the Career Doctors section of the South China Morning Post. She advises firms to follow Amazon’s example by applying the “two-pizza rule”. This means structuring the business so that every team is small enough to be fed by two pizzas, retaining the nimbleness, creativity and sense of ownership that characterize a start-up culture. The ideal is to achieve entrepreneurship and scale. “Entrepreneurial CEOs understand that they themselves need to develop constantly to build a culture of trust that enables others to take responsibility and lead. They know that the best answers will come from their teams–not necessarily from themselves,” notes Zhu.

Full story: Catherine Zhu: “The “two pizza rule” can be instructive for start-ups and big corporations alike” in the South China Morning Post (16 September 2017).