5. Winging it without a process or structure.
Company: MailChimp
Headquarters: Atlanta, Ga.
Founded: 2001
Early on, when MailChimp was still in startup mode, we were nervous about imposing too much structure on our teams. We thought that process would crush our creativity and thought that our values were obvious to everyone in the company. But as the company began to get bigger and bigger, we realized that we really needed—and that our employees really wanted—to deliberately promote our values and organizational processes in order to grow. Resisting structure early on made it more challenging for us to put it in place when we really needed it.