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Organizational Psychology for Silicon Valley
Don't lose sight of magic, in search of logic!
Laksh Raghavan
February 02, 2025
Organizational Psychology is a fascinating field. Understanding insights from this field can be amazing useful for Silicon Valley Tech. managers/executives and yet this field remains underrated in the mainstream.
Today’s post will explore the dynamics between managers/executives and their employees. In the past, I’ve covered related ideas at the intersection of leadership and psychology:
Table of Contents
Important, Underrated and Hard
The importance and applicability of organizational psychology is true irrespective of the size of the organization - people are people, whether they work for a large corporation or a small startup. Here are two quotes to set the context for today’s post (emphasis mine) and show how important but hard this is, in real-life:
There’s a good friend of mine named Brent Beshore who says, “Every successful business is a loosely functioning disaster.”
Every single successful business in the world, that’s as good as you can get.
That’s the highest peak... a loosely functioning disaster!
Every business is just a mix of personalities and emotions and imperfect information, and you’re just trying to hold the thing together and do the best that you can. And you really see that when you’re on the inside of any company that exists in world. That’s always apparent, for me, just as an outside investor, looking at any company or on the inside as well.
…internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.
A lot of this is intuitive to effective leaders… They can ‘read the room’ - understand (and empathize with) the body language and emotional disposition of their team members. They take it for a given that we humans are not perfectly rational creatures - we are also a bundle of emotions. They naturally factor in the human element in their strategy, organizational design, incentives, etc.
Let’s now look at a real-life story from the lens of organizational psychology.
NUMMI Transformation & the Andon Cord
Countless tech employees in the Bay Area pass by the Tesla Factory in Fremont, unaware of the remarkable transformation that took place there before Tesla took ownership. The real-life story of transformation offers profound insights for leaders in the tech industry (whose idea of improving productivity is firing the “bottom 5%”).
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