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Ricardo Semler, author of the book Maverick. He said that only two things grow for the sake of growth: businesses and tumors.

Jason Fried is a founder and CEO of 37signals, a software company based in Chicago. Fried also treats 37signals as something of a laboratory for innovative workplace practices--such as a recent experiment in shortening the summer workweek to just four days.

If you’re a short-term thinker you’d think so, but we’re long-term thinkers. We’re about being in business for the long haul and keeping the team together over the long haul. I would never trade a short-term burst for a long-term decline in morale. That happens a lot in the tech business: They burn people out and get someone else. I like the people who work here too much. I don’t want them to burn out. Lots of startups burn people out with 60, 70, 80 hours of work per week. They know that both the people or the company will flame out or be bought or whatever, and they don’t care, they just burn their resources. It’s like drilling for as much oil as you possibly can. You can look at people the same way.

This emphasis on organic growth has a side benefit of distributing authority. In Holacratic systems, individuals operate without managers because many of them have decision-making power in a particular area.

Decision-making is further aided and hastened by airing ‘tensions’ in meetings. Stirman defines this use of tension broadly, calling it “any difference between what is and what could be.” In this sense, tensions can be negative (e.g. I don’t have time for that project, my chair isn’t ergonomic, etc.) or positive (e.g. I have a vision for a feature we should create).

“Once you identify what a tension is, you can feel it in your shoulders, in your ears. You know you’re worried about something. Now, when I identify a tension, I jot it down. If I can’t resolve it by myself, I bring it to my circle’s next tactical meeting. With these meetings, you’re always making things a little bit better.”