Three perspectives
Newsroom.
Thoughts we are working on. Positions we stand behind. Reporting by people outside Atlas. Three perspectives, deliberately kept apart, because each should be read differently.
Thoughts from Atlas, insights into our work and perspectives from outside.
Library
Every piece, newest first.
- The coordination taxThe larger part of what coordination costs a company is elapsed time rather than working hours, and its causes are properties of how work moves rather than gaps in software.
- Self-running does not mean emptyA self-running company is not a company without people. It is one in which people have stopped being the connection between its systems, and we would rather say plainly what that changes than let the phrase be read the wrong way.
- Approval is not a formControl over an autonomous system works when it is a property of each action, set by what that action costs to get wrong, rather than a single gate placed around the whole system.
- The exception is the jobA worked example runs five clean steps from an enquiry to a quote. Most enquiries do not run that way, and what a system does at the step it cannot complete decides whether it is worth having at all.
- Storage is not a company modelAtlas OS holds one coherent model of a company, read live from the systems that own each part of it. That is a different object from a warehouse, a dashboard or a wiki, and the difference decides what a system is able to do.
- The recommendation is the productSignal hands over one recommendation to approach one company now, with the evidence and its sources attached. That unit is what makes everything after it checkable.
- The meaning sits between the numbersCommand reads a company’s figures against each other and against the goals in force, and returns a position, a diagnosis and a direction. The reading is the product, not the display.
- Work is not a workflowForge works out how the work in front of it gets done, carries it out in the systems the company already runs, and checks the result before calling it complete. That is a different product from an engine that runs the steps somebody drew.
//Newsroom\\
Questions about a piece? Write to us.
Anyone who wants to push back on an argument, ask a question or write about Atlas reaches the founders directly, with no communications team in between.