It’s pretty well accepted these days that culture eats strategy in terms of moving a company forward.
It’s also a given that you need to take time to consciously build your culture, whether for company, group or team, since culture will happen regardless.
However, your cultural structure won’t stand long without some very pragmatic infrastructure.
In other words, culture needs to have teeth.
If you’re counting on an honor system where nothing happens to those who violate the culture then, over time, it will erode.
Not because you hire “bad” people, but because you hire humans and humans often tend to do what is convenient, instead of what they should do.
They also tend to follow a “monkey see/monkey do” pattern, so if a new hire sees an old hand cut a tiny corner here and skirt a little something there and nothing happens, then expect her to think it’s OK.
Teeth aren’t about bureaucracy they’re about the obvious repercussions that happen when the culture is violated.
They aren’t sneaky or hidden; they don’t demean or embarrass.
Above all, teeth don’t bite selectively; they apply equally to everybody—which is why they work.
Their purpose is to strengthen your culture, not undermine it — which is what happens the moment someone becomes exempt.
How would you respond if you were head of a global professional company with more than 1,400 partners, 18,500 employees and a culture built on values, trust and honor when the values were ignored, trust was broken and the organization dishonored by someone at the highest level?
The values that Marvin Bower, its longtime managing director, instilled included putting the clients’ interests above the firm’s, providing independent advice and keeping confidences. These ideas were imparted from one generation to the next, mentor to apprentice. But after Anil Kumar’s arrest [he pleaded guilty] in late 2009, Mr. Barton, who had been elected to head the firm just months earlier, decided that the honor-driven, values-based system was not enough. What the firm needed was some rules.
Powerful people do not take kindly to rules and nobody takes kindly to rules that result from someone else’s actions—especially when they impact one’s income.
Ethical people like to believe that defining values and modeling them across the organization from the top down is enough.
It’s not.
An exceptional CEO I worked with who detested politics believed it was enough that his senior staff couldn’t use politics to get ahead with him. What he refused to recognize was that even though the political games didn’t work on him they wreaked havoc on those below the game-players.
This is especially true in the current world where greed, whether for wealth and/or power, is epidemic and “enough” no longer has any meaning.
But to work, the rules must apply evenly to everybody, at all levels, including the rule maker.
It’s funny, most bloggers release products, immediately write about them on their blogs and then all of their blogger friends write about them. It’s logical to do so, even reasonable.
So why haven’t I done it? Actually, I announced it in August, but there was no reaction or comments you, my readers, or any of the bloggers I contacted (but more on them in another post).
Going forward, I thought it would be fun to share some of the challenges, problems and results of our marketing effort, since it turns on subjects about which I frequently write.
In case you don’t remember, Option Sanity is a totally new, values-based way to allocate stock options, with a focus on fairness. It levels the playing field and even makes investors happy.
To give you a much better understanding of how it works, here is the video tour. There is additional information on the website and for those who are really curious, you can play with the full app demo and post your thoughts, opinions or questions here or on the review page.
Have you noticed that all the stuff written about culture and how to create one that sparks innovation, attracts Millennials, boosts productivity, retains people, etc., consistently boils down to some pretty simple advice.
Now think about the kind of culture created when the boss provides them,
Tell me my role, tell me what to do, and give me the rules.
Discipline my coworker who is out of line.
Get me excited.
Don’t forget to praise me.
Don’t scare me.
Impress me.
Give me some autonomy.
Set me up to win.
The descriptions change from writer to writer, but the underlying principles stay the same and have for decades. In fact, workers have craved these basics for centuries, long before the idea of business culture took form.
So, if the desire is that ancient and the pay-back that great why don’t more managers provide the desiredenvironment—they certainly talk enough about it.
Years ago I watched a 40 story office tower being built in San Francisco’s Financial District across the street from where I worked. I learned that when building in earthquake country enormous pilings are pounded down into the fill and the building goes on top of them. It’s all about flexibility; the pilings act like giant springs so the tower can sway during an earthquake instead of cracking because it’s rigid.
And I’m here to tell you that sway they do; I know having several years in an office on the 35th floor of 50 California Street (and in the bar on the floor above).
Your culture needs the same flexibility if it’s going to survive the quakes and storms implicit in the business world.
A few weeks ago I offered a list of what I call IBBs that provide structural support to culture and the stressed the importance of not allowing them to morph into bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy shouldn’t be confused with process.
Process is good—it helps get things done smoothly and efficiently;
bureaucracy is bad—it’s process calcified, convoluted, politically corrupted, or just plain unnecessary and it feeds on people’s fear of change.
Of the three categories of IBBs, philosophy, attitude/style and policy, the first shouldn’t change at all; the second may morph to take advantage of new technology or show different styles; the third, policy, is the most likely to cause problems.
Here are five actions you can implement to avoid those problems.
Watch out for dozens of variations of “because we’ve always done it that way…” attitude in you and in others—some are very convincing, so pay attention.
Review and revamp your IBBs regularly.
Encourage input and take suggestions from all levels of the company and act on them.
Understand, and make sure that your people understand, things will change based on company growth, the economy, etc., but that the really important stuff, such as fairness, open communications, etc., will be preserved.
Communicate any/all changes to everyone.
Culture is a living entity and IBBs are its limbs and organs. Every living organism requires TLC and feeding—culture is no different.
The list of basic cultural IBBs prompted a phone call from a reader asking for more information on the dual career ladder. When we were done, he suggested that I put that information on the blog this week. Who am I to argue with a reader?
I’m not an historian, but I think that the need for the ladder was seen first in the technical world at least 40 years ago and although they may not have been the first, IBM and the original Bell Labs were two of the highest profile early adopters.
People work to improve their situation, but companies need only so many managers and only so many people want to manage. This is especially true in tech companies where many people are ill-suited to management roles, yet that was the only road to a raise.
So the two driving facts behind the dual ladder were
a limited number of management positions—the number is still shrinking as corporate structures keep flattening; and
recognition that not everyone is suited to management.
Enter the Dual Career Ladder; it’s simple, logical and most easily explained with this graphic
IBM Called their highest level Sr. Fellow, Bell Labs used Principal Engineer. Both positions were more than just an honor for which people strove, since they carried with them the same compensation and status as a director or vice president.
My caller asked why the model wasn’t in wider use if it was so effective.
That’s easy, ego and culture.
Accepting, for example, that a software architect is of equal value to the company as a vice president and should be compensated accordingly is hard to swallow. Few executives are comfortable with the idea that people who do hands-on work are as valuable to the organization as they are. This plays out at every level of management from team leader up.
And it’s not just in tech that this happens. I still remember when the top salesman in a certain industry had his commissioned cut because he had sold so much product that his earnings were more than the company president’s salary. That was deemed “unseemly” and so the decision to cut his commission. His reaction was what you would expect and he gave his notice less than a week later.
Because of that ego, the ladder needs to be deeply embedded in the company’s culture so it can be implemented fairly and evenly throughout the organization.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Continuing yesterday’s conversation regarding the need for good process in every size organization — the key word being “good.”
It’s pretty well accepted these days that 
Years ago I watched a 40 story office tower being built in San Francisco’s Financial District across the street from where I worked. I learned that when building in earthquake country enormous pilings are pounded down into the fill and the building goes on top of them. It’s all about flexibility; the pilings act like giant springs so the tower can sway during an earthquake instead of cracking because it’s rigid.
