Starting Fires on Purpose : When and How Leaders Need to Break the Rules - Paul Berry

When Paul Berry was CTO of The Huffington Post -- where he grew their audience from zero to more than 110 million monthly readers -- President Greg Coleman and CEO Eric Hippeau had a running joke that they needed an armed military vehicle to bring him to and from work, because he was too darn valuable.
"If you die on the way here, Paul, we're all screwed," they'd say. "You have to start hiring people who are as good as you so that we can replace you if we have to." So that's exactly what Berry did, and his management style attracted incredible talent. His secret: he instituted very little process for the technology team as it grew. As you'll see, structure isn't really his thing.
Now as Founder and CEO of publishing platform RebelMouse, Berry compares the magic of a startup's early days to the way Jimi Hendrix pursued his music career.
"We were the startup that never knew the startup rules," he says. "I did everything very intentionally not by the book. We never talked about management, team, structure, or process. The rules felt wrong to me."
But inevitably at both The Huffington Post and RebelMouse, Berry had to shift gears from operating like Jimi Hendrix to implementing structure and procedures that would allow scale without stifling originality. To keep things fresh, he built a rule-breaking mindset into this structure.

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