---
title: "The Twelve Tenets"
book: "Collapse or Collapse"
author: "Vinay Pasricha"
url: https://vinaypasricha.com/books/collapse-or-collapse/twelve-tenets
status: "On Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HNL53J5R. The full text is shared on vinaypasricha.com with the author's permission."
---

# The Twelve Tenets

I. **The department was a workaround.** Functions existed because no one person could hold every skill a result needs. The constraint has gone.

II. **Organise around outcomes, not activities.** Work that produces a result is an Outcome; work that serves a result is an agent. There is no third thing, and no function sits beside the Keeper.

III. **Every outcome runs on a vector.** One result, one market, one chain of agents, one pair of humans by default.

IV. **Machines hold the baseline; humans supply the peaks.** The chain carries the continuous work; the human is spent only where a human changes the result.

V. **Pay for intention, not skill.** Skill is in the chain and cheap. Intention that holds is rare, and is paid very highly, far above the market.

VI. **No silent stalls.** Every agent reports its own flow; a vector that can stall unseen is a department with software.

VII. **Every vector has a standby.** The tuner for the aligner, another master for a master, a board member for the Keeper; reversible gates default open after the period the playbook sets.

VIII. **Count vectors, not employees.** The unit of production is the vector; the company’s size is the number of results it carries at once.

IX. **The aligner’s clock is her own.** The agents work on the customer’s clock; she works on hers, for hours she fixes and keeps.

X. **Hire for intention; measure attention.** Intention is selected once, at the door, on the eight values. Attention is read every day from the work, never from the person.

XI. **Measure, don’t price.** Outcomes serve each other without invoices. Value between them is measured and not priced.

XII. **A vector is a vector, whoever pays it.** Employee, contractor, agency or lent chain: whoever works from a cockpit and is read by a control room is inside the company.