Everyone has an opinion on Snapchat turning down a $3 billion offer from Facebook (here’s the thinking of others who have been there), but the comments that caught my eye were from Gary Burnison, Korn/Ferry’s CEO, who focused on the cultural aspect.

Burnison said that based on his company’s experience, “…people are hired for what they know, they are fired for who they are.”

Very true, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise, as I said five years ago when I wrote Culture Trumps whether Hiring or Acquiring.

The problem is that managers often ignore culture, because they believe they that theirs is ‘right’ and the other will change. It’s not a case of you/your company being right and ‘her/them’ being wrong, it’s a case of the pieces don’t fit—and 98% of the time you should see it coming.

The power of culture has been at the forefront of many discussions, with top CEOs focusing on culture above everything, including strategy. When his investors wanted to cash out, Tony Hsieh knew going public would destroy the culture, so he sold Zappos to Amazon instead.

Burnison also said, “I never thought I would see culture trump money with $3 billion on the table.”

I did, but I thought it would take a lot longer before a CEO, let alone a founder, had the insight to understand that a successful culture is priceless.

Flickr image credit: Neil T

It’s fairly well-established that, as Tony Hsieh keeps saying, happy employees are more productive and are less likely to leave.

Happy employees enjoy their work and feel like they are having fun.

In fact, an entire nitch business has arisen (as it always does) promising to show managers how to make work fun through gamification.

Surprise, surprise, it doesn’t work.

But this new study, a working paper from a pair of professors at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests there’s a big difference between workplace games employees may decide to play on their own and games that are mandated by management.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone for two reasons

1. “Natural” doesn’t lend itself to being replicated.
2. What comes naturally is very different from having something contrived and synthetic shoved down your throat.

Fun doesn’t just mean acting silly or playing games.

Fun includes overcoming challenges, making a difference and all kinds of subjective intangibles.

Bosses may provide the guiding values that create the skeleton of culture, but fleshing it out requires contributions from all levels and each person—especially when it comes to fun.

Flickr image credit: Wilson B

Mortgage originators are rarely great places to be, whichever side of the desk you are on.

The exception is Quicken Loans.

Quicken Loans was rated highest in customer satisfaction among mortgage originators in 2010, 2011 and 2012, according to J. D. Power & Associates. The company has also been ranked in the top 30 of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” for 10 consecutive years.

What makes Quicken different?

Founder Dan Gilbert’s and CEO Bill Emerson’s focus on intentional culture—emphasis on ‘intentional’.

“If you don’t create a culture at your company, a culture will create itself,” Mr. Emerson said in a phone interview. “And it won’t be good. I sometimes hear people say ‘We don’t have a culture at our company.’ They have one. But if it hasn’t been nurtured, if no one has spent on any time on it, you can assume it’s the wrong culture.”

Call it Intentional Culture.

Of course, intentional culture comes in two flavors—positive (good) and negative (bad).

Tony Hsieh at Zappos is a master of good culture; Bob Nardelli is a master of the opposite.

If you aren’t sure how (or if) your own culture is intentional you should ask yourself the following questions.

1. What are the primary features of my group’s culture?
2. How did it happen, i.e., who originated it?
3. Does it reflect values in which I believe?
4. Does it drive the actions and attitude I want from my team?
5. Are new people coached in the culture and current people reminded, so it permeates our business every day?

Then ask yourself what you can do to enhance the best parts and realign/correct any parts that have gone astray.

Flickr image credit: Rodney Campbell

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer started a brouhaha recently when she ended the company’s policy of allowing staff to work from home; many insiders said it was a good move, because remote workers weren’t performing.

However, low productivity and lack of accountability is a management problem, so if she only brings people on-sight without directly dealing with the underlying management problems the results probably won’t improve much.

Hubert Joly, the new Best Buy CEO, dumped the ROWE culture in favor of 40-hour on-site workdays for the headquarters staff as the best way to boost performance in the turnaround; he also wants to  sure that everyone knows they are dispensable (himself included).

However, nothing I’ve seen indicates that the work wasn’t getting done, so dumping ROWE may prove of questionable value.

Tony Hsieh thinks on-site is better not because of accountability, but because “companies with strong cultures outperform those without in the long-term financially. So we’re big, big believers in building strong company cultures; note that Zappos’ business lends itself to having all its staff on-site.

Whereas IBM has a strong, unified culture in spite of being a global company with thousands of employees who work off-site.

Bottom line: It’s not a matter of on or off-site; it’s a matter of the strength of the culture, which is dependent on the skill of the management.

Flickr image credit: Gidzy

Do you read Agnes? A few days ago she asked her friend if she was superstitious; when her friend said not often Agnes told her she was sortofstitious. Agnes then made an over-the-top superstitious comment and her friend said she was megastitious.

The wordplay got me thinking.

In reality, most entrepreneurs are superpreneurs or they won’t make any headway.

Then there are the megapreneurs who manage to innovate, create successful companies and then do it again (think Tony Hsieh) or stay in the same place and keep innovating (think Steve Jobs, the Google Guys or Intuit’s Scott Cook).

However, there are still plenty of sortofpreneurs, who create me-too businesses (think daily deals), that stand little chance of success (although they often get funding), instead of real innovation.

They have may have the passion of a superpreneur, but in their rush to riches they want to skate—not innovate, i.e.,

• not solve a problem that needs solving or create something that nobody even knows they want;
• not provide real value to stakeholders; and
• not create an entity that provides jobs and futures to its people.

It’s not that sortofpreneurs can’t become superpreneurs, but to do so they need to give up (relatively) instant gratification and be willing to both slog and pivot as necessary.

A tall order for someone who is in it for the money.

Flickr image credit: 401(K) 2013

Last week I told you about an entrepreneur who insisted that a new winery was a business, not a startup and why I thought that was ridiculous.

Based on his thoughts, Zappos was not a startup nor was it scalable, but I’m sure that founder Tony Hsieh and acquirer Amazon have more than a billion reasons to disagree.

Now comes Milk& Honey, another startup that sells shoes online—a business using e-commerce; not exactly revolutionary, but one that is scalable and, once it proves itself, a prime acquisition target for someone like Zappos/Amazon.

In Ms. Howard’s case, that meant starting a business with her sister, Ilissa Howard, 39, in a field where neither had any business experience: fashion.

Make that two fields. Milk & Honey Shoes, their shoe company that allows women to design their own stilettos and pumps with the click of a mouse, is also an e-commerce business despite the fact that the sisters had zero tech expertise when they began.

Yes, they added a major tweak so that customers can design their own shoes, but even that isn’t original, Shoes of Prey is a direct competitor and Nike and Converse do it for sneakers.

What’s more, the sisters did the original funding from their savings; Milk & Honey, started in 2011, has already doubled sales, the company is profitable and they are now looking for investors.

Just as entrepreneurs come from many backgrounds, startups come in many flavors.

It’s a good lesson that applying labels and limits to human creativity, let alone human will, is a losing proposition at least 99% of the time.

Flickr image credit: Milk & Honey Shoes

Of all the high profile entrepreneurs who have built wildly successful companies my favorite is Tony Hsieh.

Hsieh is amazing from his MAP and the culture it engenders to the lengths he’s willing to go to propagate and share it—which includes renovating an entire city.

Hsieh is one of those increasingly rare people with an abundance of common sense who eschews ideology and focuses on doing real good in his community well beyond what’s necessary.

A healthy take on doing good by doing well in a very capitalistic way.

Hsieh calls this effort the Downtown Project, a $350 million urban experiment to build “the most community-focused large city in the world” in downtown Las Vegas.

The $350 million breaks out as follows, $200 million invested in land and buildings; $50 million for small businesses; $50 million for tech startups/companies and $50 million to be used for education.

Typically companies like Zappos build spectacular campuses offering their employees all the amenities in their own little world, but that approach actually went against parts of the Zappos culture, which promotes unstructured interactions among the staff.

Hsieh took that attitude and created a different vision for the new campus.

He leased the former City Hall — smack in the middle of downtown Vegas — for 15 years. Then he got to thinking: If he was going to move at least 1,200 employees, why not make it possible for them to live nearby? And if they could live nearby, why not create an urban community aligned with the culture of Zappos, which encourages the kind of “serendipitous interactions” that happen in offices without walls? As Zach Ware, Hsieh’s right-hand man in the move, put it, “We wanted the new campus to benefit from interaction with downtown, and downtown to benefit from interaction with Zappos.”

In typical Hsieh fashion the effort is summed up in a way that reflects what is really needed from today’s business leaders.

“Every factory in the world is doing everything to maximize R.O.I. We’re doing everything to maximize R.O.C.—Return On Community.” –Tony Hsieh.

Flickr image credit: Charlie Llewellin

The word “leader” is all over the news; media loves talking about individual “leaders.” Executives and people in positions of power have worked hard for decades to perpetuate the myth that leaders are magical and larger-than-life; special, unique, irreplaceable and, above all, can’t be duplicated. But that emperor has no clothes, according to HBS Assistant Professor Gautam Mukunda, who, in his new book, Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter, kicks large holes in the myth that individual leaders really make a difference. (Book excerpt)

The result was his Leader Filtration Theory, or LFT, which states that a leader’s impact can be predicted by his or her career. The more unfiltered the leader, the larger the prospect of big impact. The more a leader has relevant experience, the less chance of high impact.

No where is the talk of “leaders” greater than in the political arena, especially during a Presidential election. An opinion piece focused on whether being gregarious is a requirement of leadership.

Culturally, we tend to associate leadership with extroversion and attach less importance to judgment, vision and mettle. We prize leaders who are eager talkers over those who have something to say.

The commentary reminded me of an excellent article last year by Douglas R. Conant, retired Campbell Soup CEO, on why introverted (as defined by Meyers-Briggs) bosses are just as capable and actually may have an edge.

As an introvert, I enjoy being by myself. I sometimes feel drained if I have to be in front of large groups of people I don’t know. After I’ve been in a social situation — including a long day at work — I need quiet time to be alone with my thoughts and recharge.

One way so-called leaders, (I prefer the more neutral term ‘boss’) can make a difference is found in how they treat people; one trait they all have in common is their approachability and engagement with everybody, not just their senior staff.

68 year-old Mickey Drexler, CEO of J. Crew, is and a well known face in all aspects and locations of the company—with employees and customers.

He visits every office, store and distribution center, and makes an effort to meet every new employee, although he’s always Mickey, not Mr. Drexler. (…) He’s been known to personally respond to a letter from a shopper who has a problem or a suggestion.

That involvement and initiative encouragement isn’t age-related. Thirty-something Ben Lerer, co-founder and C.E.O. of the Thrillist Media Group, encourages the same kind of action from his people through the culture he built.

One thing that we preach at work all day long is “don’t hope.” What that means is don’t wait for somebody to do something for you. Don’t do something 90 percent well and hope that it’ll slide through. Don’t rely on luck. You have to make your own luck. The only thing you can do is try your absolute best to do the right thing.

Finally, for those of you who want more on leadership checkout the information and interviews available at McKinsey’s Leading in the 21st century (free registration required).

In today’s volatile environment, leaders of global organizations must master a slate of challenges unseen in business history. In this feature, McKinsey talks with seven leaders and Wharton professor Michael Useem about the new fundamentals of leading in the 21st century.

Flickr image credit: pedroelcarvalho

Whether your team is virtual or on-site drugging them with oxytocin will keep productivity humming, drive innovation, boost retention and put your organization on the ‘best places to work’ list.

The upside of oxytocin is that it’s totally legal; the downside is that it’s directly tied to your management/leadership skills.

“Whether it’s online or in an office, the leader’s role is to empower individuals to be more successful,” says Paul Zak, a professor of economics and director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif. “If you keep making me successful, I’ll want to keep working for you.”

That’s because oxytocin is a neurochemical produced by the brain in response to certain stimuli that bosses like Tony Hsieh are experts at keeping it flowing.

The economist’s studies tell him that oxytocin is produced in high-performing workplaces. “The classic way to get people to do what you want is fear, but people acclimate to that,” he says. “If you want to keep people on task all the time, you want oxytocin-producing situations.”

Increasing oxytocin is a byproduct of the traits and actions evangelized by management, leadership and corporate culture experts not to mention 110% of the general workforce.

The leadership traits he has identified to produce this include praise, given unexpectedly and in public; transparency in identifying tasks and setting goals; authenticity; effective delegation of work; empathy to others’ situations; anticipation of challenges; and autonomy.

Not exactly rocket science; in fact, you need to be from another planet not to have heard of the value of these traits.

If you don’t already, start practicing them; if you do practice them look for ways to increase/enhance your actions.

Be the drug dealer your people will love.

Wikimedia image credit: Edgar181

A few years ago I wrote about the value of learning to insult with class, instead of crass.

A few weeks ago I read a post that reminded me how much language reflects company culture.

But I found myself in the middle of a conversation about how a class of vendors would “rape” the company being discussed. There were 10 men in the room and me, and the word kept getting repeated, with intensity, from person to person as the discussion grew.

Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain, found herself “distressed and very uncomfortable.”

That reaction from a woman weaned on blue language and sexual harassment a la the semiconductor industry—not an environment conducive to shrinking violets or sensitivity—says volumes for the effect of language in the workplace.

Think about it.

Can you imagine Tony Hsieh, who created a culture that produced what is arguably the best customer service in the world and now teaches others how to replicate it, use violent language, whether raping a company or killing the competition, to get his point across?

Yet he succeeds admirably.

People with poor verbal communication skills often resort to four-letter words either from ignorance or laziness.

‘Rape’ and ‘kill’ are four-letter words.

Flickr image credit: Jonathan Assink