Leadership courses

Browse public Leadership courses with structured lessons, visuals, and practice on Wondering.

• Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building

  Learn how to build repeatable operating systems to hire top talent, develop high-performing teams, and lead with clarity as your organization grows. * **Build scalable hiring rubrics** for faculty and research talent * **Design clear development frameworks** to mentor growing academic staff * **Run consistent operating rituals** for cross-department feedback and alignment * **Scale team-wide performance systems** across expanding educational programs

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things

  Ben Horowitz examines the decisions leaders face when no easy answer exists, drawing on his experience building and running technology companies. The course explores crisis leadership, layoffs, executive management, organizational growth, and the psychological demands of making consequential decisions under uncertainty.

• Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building

  Claire Hughes Johnson turns lessons from scaling Stripe into practical systems for company building. The course covers operating principles, organizational design, hiring, development, feedback, and performance management as connected tools for helping a growing organization stay effective.

• No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

  No Rules Rules reveals Netflix's unconventional management philosophy that prioritizes talent density, radical candor, and freedom over rules and processes. The book provides a detailed blueprint for building high-performance cultures where exceptional people thrive through autonomy and accountability rather than bureaucratic controls.

• Founder Mode

  Paul Graham identifies a fundamental disconnect between how founders successfully scale companies and the conventional management advice they receive. When founders follow the standard guidance to "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs"—advice designed for professional managers—it often damages their growing companies. The essay introduces "founder mode"—a way of operating that differs fundamentally from traditional "manager mode," involving direct engagement across hierarchical levels, selective deep involvement in specific areas, and approaches that professional managers would consider inappropriate.

• High Output Management

  Former Intel CEO Andrew Grove's 1983 management classic provides timeless insights on increasing managerial output, defining it as the output of your organization plus neighboring organizations under your influence. The book applies manufacturing principles through a "Breakfast Factory" analogy, introducing objectives and key results (OKRs) that became foundational to Silicon Valley management. A cult classic praised by Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Williams, and Brian Chesky, it demonstrates techniques for creating highly productive teams and achieving peak performance through motivation.

• High Growth Handbook

  Silicon Valley veteran Elad Gil provides the definitive playbook for scaling startups from 10 to 10,000 people, focusing on later-stage growth after achieving product-market fit—a rarity since most entrepreneurship books focus on early stages. Drawing from his experience scaling companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Google, Stripe, and Square, Gil covers CEO role evolution, board management, executive recruitment, M&A, IPOs, and late-stage funding with painfully tactical advice. The book features crystal-clear guidance informed by interviews with Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, and Aaron Levie, helping founders navigate hypergrowth's most complex organizational challenges.

• Stripe Hiring and Operating

  A founder-focused synthesis of Patrick Collison's talks and interviews on Stripe's hiring bar, recruiting discipline, writing culture, decision systems, delegation, and the CEO's changing job as headcount scales.

• High Output Management Deep Dive

  A chapter-by-chapter course on Andrew S. Grove's management classic for managers, founders, and team leads who want to turn output, leverage, organization design, and people systems into practical operating habits.