3 TIPS FROM ETSY ON ADOPTING A BLAMELESS CULTURE:
Assume good will.  "Employees are making decisions based on what they think is right for the company," said Allspaw.
Identify causes, not culprits. Accountability happens naturally as people learn the facts. Focus on exploring what happened—and recognize that in complex systems, there's rarely one root cause.
Take your time. People used to blaming cultures may take time to come out of their shell and share mistakes and learnings freely.

You have to make honest feedback a positive experience. It was almost like that red was a gem. We had found an issue that needed special attention. I had to demonstrate with my behavior that I welcomed it: “That’s great visibility. Thank you for sharing. What can we do to help you out?” I’ve been in environments where it’s not as safe to share. You can’t improve if you don’t know what the real situation is. Finally, you’ve got to act on it. If you get honest feedback and do nothing about it, then the feedback will stop.

Possibly the most important technique I've observed over the years is the executive session at the end of the meeting. This is when the Board meets without the CEO and team in the room and has a discussion of the meeting and what the key takeaways are. The executive session can be five minutes or it can be a half hour. Sometimes there is very little to discuss in executive session. Sometimes there is a lot. After the executive session ends, the CEO should either be invited back to have a debrief on the executive session or the Chairman of the Board should meet with the CEO to debrief on the executive session. This is an opportunity for the Board to provide feedback to the CEO on the business, the team, and performance, and the strategy. Boards should not miss this opportunity to provide feedback and CEOs should demand it of them

An excellent and in-depth look at how Yahoo! ruined Flickr and completely failed to anticipate the social web.

"Mistakes happen. When they happen at Etsy, they're reviewed in what's called a "blameless post-mortem.""

My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures. We thought that was a good thing, but it killed freedom and responsibility. After the company was acquired, I reflected on what went wrong.

The milestones for that acquisition were all based around integrating that local event data into Yahoo. Yahoo didn't care about Upcoming's users—the community that created the data. Yahoo's approach turned out to be completely backwards. The value of the the company was determined by the index itself, rather than how the index was built—which is to say, by the community.

- you could argue that this is about brand awareness but that means Facebook is getting screwed by selling ads on CPC

How an acquisition of an innovative startup can go so wrong.

When a big company gobbles up a smaller one, often only a fraction of the money is handed over up front. The rest comes later, based on the acquisition hitting a series of deliverables down the road. It's similar to how incentives are built into the contracts of professional athletes, except with engineering benchmarks instead of home runs.

Corpdev sets these milestones. They reflect the reason for the acquisition, and how the company—in Flickr's case, Yahoo—can leverage them. They're baked into the deal, and an acquisition integration team begins working immediately to make sure they are met. Typically, they're very engineering-based, designed to integrate the smaller company's product into the enormous corporate machine.

And because payment schedules are based on achieving those CorpDev terms, it means both companies have a vested (pun intended) interest in putting those milestones ahead of new features. They are a sledgehammer applied with great force to the feet of nimble development. Worse, they often completely ignore what made the smaller target valuable in the first place.