Ducks in a Row: Cultural Insights from Biz Stone and Matt Mullenweg
by Miki Saxon
Matt Mullenweg, founder/CEO of Automattic and creator of WordPress, runs a company valued at a billion dollars with a 190 employees who mostly work from home.
While he doesn’t believe there is one silver bullet that creates great culture, he does have an overarching belief that is easy for any boss with the correctly corresponding MAP to appropriate.
“It’s hard to reduce it down to one thing, but I think regardless of what tools you use to communicate if you give people autonomy to execute on something meaningful, and bias the environment to moving quickly, amazing things can happen.”
Unless you live on a different planet or alternative reality you will have heard that Twitter went public. Biz Stone is Twitter’s co-founder and says his most important lessons came from places he failed.
Such as Xanga…
“The lesson I learned was that company culture at the beginning is incredibly important. You have to tend to it…almost as much as you tend to your product.”
And then there’s Google.
“Google had its list ordered: Technology. People. I think the right order is: People. Technology. You have to think about people first and technology second.”
People. Culture.
Or you can look at it this way, people = culture.
Culture isn’t reality.
There can be no overall reality, because each person’s reality reflects back the sum total of their experiences from cradle to present.
The result is that culture needs a firm, but gentle, hand on the rudder and constant, consistent, intelligent course correction.
The most brilliant technology now or in the future can’t do that.
As long as there’s a human race perceptions between individuals will not be uniform.
Nope, not even the much-vaunted hyper-connectivity can come close to creating a true hive mind.
And I’m even willing to bet that if humans are supplanted by robots, as discussed here on Halloween, uniformity still won’t happen.
Flickr image credit: Josh Gee Photography
