Leadership Principles

Practical operating principles for managing teams and organizations — distinct from abstract values statements.

Swinging the Pendulum (Shopify / Brandon Chu)

Rather than trying to hold two values simultaneously (e.g., “move fast but maintain quality”), swing the emphasis periodically from one extreme to the other. The desired middle ground is achieved over time as a long-run average, not as a moment-to-moment balance.

Why the balance doesn’t work: “We learned quickly this was too nuanced for a large culture to execute effectively. It led to too many inconsistent individual decisions, making key outcomes impossible to execute.”

Two second-order effects of swinging:

1. Breakthroughs — over-optimizing for one dimension without constraint enables innovations impossible under a balanced mandate (e.g., Shopify storefronts loaded 2× faster within a year after the company swung to pure performance focus)
2. Cultural resilience — teams learn to let go of sunk cost and embrace company > team > self; each swing trains the organization to handle pivots without dysfunction

The cost: “Swinging the Pendulum is hard to use because it makes you look inconsistent and disorganized as a leader.” It requires communicating the why effectively to avoid the appearance of management dysfunction.

Where this appears

• Swinging the Pendulum is My… (tweet)