There’s a very smart software VP over at Dovetail Software (was First Choice Software) whose approach to building his department’s corporate culture has great balance.

Balance between what? Between the serious aspects of a productive environment and the fun that is the glue that holds it all together, “I work at this - building a special kind of culture in my team at Dovetail. Some of it is big stuff - learning how to communicate more effectively, mutual respect, and so on - and some of it is little stuff - giving everyone putty to play with. Silly? Perhaps. But there’s something magic that happens in a group that plays this way.”

Anything about people is about relationships and the interactions are incredibly complex. Take three people and you have at least 12 sets of dynamics circulating,

• A (alone)
• A & B
• A & C
• A & B/C

etc. for each person, and this model grows exponentially as the group gets larger.And because people grow, change and have moods those dynamics are fluid, changing, and not particularly stable—so you need glue.

It doesn’t matter if it’s silly putty, limerick contests, nerf balls or what, the goal is laughter with each other, not laughter at another’s expense, and it’s easy to tell the difference. It’s at if the explanation, “…but I was laughing with you” is ever uttered.

Yes, you may find that the big building blocks of great culture, such as clear and constant communications, a well-crafted, well-shared vision and multifaceted respect at all levels, internally and externally take most of your energy, but if you forget to make it interesting and fun you lose the glue, which may not matter in good times, but that’s what holds the edifice together when an earthquake hits.

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Over the years, I’ve had many managers (and individuals) explain to me why they don’t spend more time/energy on strategy—real strategy, not a to-do list for the following quarter.

Reasons not to plan/develop strategy are endless, but here are the most common

• I don’t know what strategy should cover or how to plan it. This is the most annoying because it’s based on pure laziness. There are yards of excellent books, thousands of websites and hundreds of consultants all anxious to help you develop and plan your strategy.
• The idea [of developing strategy] scares me. This has the distinct advantage of being honest. It’s usually not the envisioning part that’s scary, but the planning required achieving it. I’ve found that planning often scares people, but it won’t if you treat it like the Times crossword and do it in pencil rather than ink. That will remind you that it isn’t carved in stone.
• What’s the big deal? What do I really need it for? The reasons to plan strategy are legion and millions of words have been written and spoken about them, but I can sum them all up with a quote from a book I read years ago. I’ve forgotten the name of the book and, after googling around for a while, I couldn’t find any reference to Savielly Tartakover, but I’ll still attribute it to him.

‘Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do.
Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.”
— Savielly Tartakover, Polish Grand Master

And that pretty much says it all.

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I’ve written several times in the past on the longevity of anything posted on the Net as well as the likelihood of it being seen by the unexpected—recruiters, bosses, spouses, parents, etc.

But the age-old warnings not to mix business and pleasure seem to have gone by the wayside, as has any real meaning for the word “friend.”

It all rose to a new level when using Facebook for business became the topic du jour within some of my business groups.

The interest was confirmed in an August 20 article in Business Week that said, “The number of unique Facebook visitors 35 and older more than doubled in June from a year ago, to 11.5 million, according to market researcher comScore Media Metrix.”

“”The lines between what’s business and what’s personal have blurred,” says Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 23…but it’s likely Facebook’s new demographic will demand even more ways to differentiate between various levels of “friends.” (Level one: ex-dorm buddies, girlfriends. Level two: sales contacts, fantasy-league teammates. Level three: anyone who signs off on your performance review.)”

On September 17, Business Week’s MediaCentric columnist Jon Fine explored the potential conflicts you have when creating a mashup of the personal and professional, “You didn’t have to explain your more colorful old friends, the ones pursuing batik or semi-pro skateboarding, to your clueless, business-casual office frenemies. Now that social networking has grown up-or grown out, now that Facebook attracts practically everyone-you will.”

As a closet Luddite I don’t do a lot of social media, I’m on LinkedIn because it’s useful and offers a lot of control, but that’s about it. And I don’t accept all the invitations from people I’ve never heard of, who don’t even respond to a reply suggesting we get to know each other. Nor would I have much confidence in a recommendation from someone with thousands of connections. I’m sure they know some of them well enough, but there’s no way to tell if they actually know the person they’ve recommended.

But I’m not hard to reach, that’s why there’s both an email and a toll-free phone number in the right column. Go ahead, contact me and let’s get to know each other.

Finally, lest you think I’m judging all this, I’m not. I can only decide what works for me, not for anybody else. I just think that people need to give more thought, look before they leap, and always remember that there’s no delete key for stuff on the web.

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I’m sure many of you saw the story abut the escalating talent war between Vmware and Google,“Trip Chowdhry, an analyst at Global Equities Research, estimated that Palo Alto, California-based VMware is paying $130,000 to $160,000, plus stock options –compensation that only Google can match, he said.

The programmers I know say that most offers are still tied closely to industry averages and that no one “wants to see the craziness of the ’90’s again”—except, of course, the programmers who are getting those salaries and the ones who feel they should be.

But many managers will still blow their in-house salary curves and start throwing in sign-on bonuses and other perks when chasing talent, totally ignoring the proven adage that “people who join you just for money and stock, will leave you for more money and stock.”

When the talent market gets tight is the time to remember that the best performers didn’t necessarily

• have the best grades;
• attend a prestigious school;
• work for your competitor or
• even in your industry;
• have a full head of hair that has no gray; or
• fits easily into your comfort zone.

This is the time when your hiring skill really matters; when your ability to recognize jewels where others see only lumps of coal.

Real loyalty can’t be bought with either money or stock options, it’s earned through your actions, your willingness to take a chance, to provide the place where the coal has the opportunity to become a diamond.

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An interesting pair of articles came my way this weekend. The first, was in Canada’s Vancouver Sun regarding the exiting of women from law firms.“Of 1,400 Canadian lawyers surveyed, 84 per cent of women and 66 per cent of men rated “an environment supportive of my family and personal commitments” as an important factor in choosing to work at another firm. Money and career advancement were well down the list. And nearly a third of the women and half the men said they expected to leave their current employer within five years.

Work-life balance may have become something of a cliche but the evidence is incontrovertible: Professionals — yes, even lawyers — want a life as well as a career.”

Back to corporate culture, where much of the management talk doesn’t match individual managers’ walk. If you’re struggling with the similar turnover, then the key words you should focus on aren’t what people want, but what it costs per hire to ignore it.

“Focus isn’t the problem. Every organization, public and private, should keep an eye on the bottom line. The question is whether a model that incurs a dropout rate of experienced, talented women that’s twice the rate of men makes any business sense. One estimate put the cost of an associate’s departure – taking into account recruitment, training and severance — at $315,000.”

Yours may not be that high, but considering the same items, you can rough your cost by figuring one to three times the annual salary of the position, whether it’s a receptionist or CEO.

And please don’t be tempted to snicker thinking it’s a Canadian problem, it’s a global problem, and it’s going to get worse.

The second article, in Boston.com, talks about the lengths some companies are going to to recruit moms—those women who took time out to have kids and the potential for flexibility that should be built into future careers.

“In just the past few years, spurred largely by a tight market for white-collar labor, firms such as the investment banks Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs have launched targeted recruiting programs. A new class of headhunters and human resources consultants has emerged to help smaller companies do the same. Other companies, including the accounting firm Ernst and Young and management consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton…. Elite business schools like Dartmouth’s Tuck School and the Harvard Business School have programs similar to Wharton’s, and the how-tos of finding and hiring women coming off a career break - women who are “onramping,” in the current human-resources parlance - are hot topics in business school classrooms.”

“And it shouldn’t just be women of child-bearing age who take advantage of them, according to many of the executives and academics working on these programs. The broader goal, they say, is for careers with periodic off- and onramps to become a mainstream option for men and women.”

“We’re starting to look at flexibility over the course of a career rather than just in the course of a year or week,” says Carolyn Buck Luce, a global managing partner at Ernst and Young and chair of the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force. “It’s just the beginning.”

It may be just beginning, but the shortage of people at all levels and in all fields, not just professionals, is now, so for the smartest CEOs, the future culture is now, too.

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