The most important part of this piece is the very last sentence:
>>> when it becomes apparent [those key values] are no longer serving the company, [the Old Guard] must be willing to let those values evolve.
I would go even further: if your values aren't evolving with scale, something is wrong. As you scale, you get different priorities and as you get different priorities, the optimal values for your company will change.
For example, generalists are far more useful early in a company's life. The first few people need to create a UX, set up a data store, create a deployment mechanism, talk to users, make more features, etc. If something becomes a priority, it's great to be able to shift everyone up and down the stack as needed. A generalist culture tends to shun documentation because things change so quickly and enjoys less structure because moving fast is the priority. Near-sightedness - doing what is good in the short term - is optimal.
However, as a company ages, generalism become rarer by necessity. As each aspect of the stack becomes more complex, you need specialists in each area to make progress. Each group depends on other groups to provide something stable and predictable. You require more documentation, more tests and planning in advance to state what each internal service within the company needs to provide. Far-sightedness becomes optimal.
Typically, you end up getting a bunch of distinct groups within your organization, each responsible for a different service AND a structure on top of those groups to handle the cross group communication and planning.
So yes - Old Guard needs to make sure this transformation is culturally kosher but they also need to be on the constant lookout for what old processes are beginning to fail.
The older engineers are usually the nicest. They exist peacefully in a privately-defined world of polygon rendering, or TCP stacks, or vector math. They're the REAL thinkers. They won't hassle you.
They're on autopilot half the time anyway; they wrote all their best games/apps/whatever a long time ago and now they just kinda float around soaking up compliments and contributing advice.
They lead quiet, comfortable lives with a history of industry respect and good stock options. But: It's usually easier for a contractor to predict when his or her actual, final day on the job will be. Yay for Q.A.!
Till something goes pear shaped in multi threaded database optimizer written in C. They contemplate core dumps and sources for few days and magically come up with an answer. Source: I've seen that happen.
>>> when it becomes apparent [those key values] are no longer serving the company, [the Old Guard] must be willing to let those values evolve.
I would go even further: if your values aren't evolving with scale, something is wrong. As you scale, you get different priorities and as you get different priorities, the optimal values for your company will change.
For example, generalists are far more useful early in a company's life. The first few people need to create a UX, set up a data store, create a deployment mechanism, talk to users, make more features, etc. If something becomes a priority, it's great to be able to shift everyone up and down the stack as needed. A generalist culture tends to shun documentation because things change so quickly and enjoys less structure because moving fast is the priority. Near-sightedness - doing what is good in the short term - is optimal.
However, as a company ages, generalism become rarer by necessity. As each aspect of the stack becomes more complex, you need specialists in each area to make progress. Each group depends on other groups to provide something stable and predictable. You require more documentation, more tests and planning in advance to state what each internal service within the company needs to provide. Far-sightedness becomes optimal.
Typically, you end up getting a bunch of distinct groups within your organization, each responsible for a different service AND a structure on top of those groups to handle the cross group communication and planning.
So yes - Old Guard needs to make sure this transformation is culturally kosher but they also need to be on the constant lookout for what old processes are beginning to fail.