Image credit: mzacha CC license

Do you use Google Alerts? I do and one of mine is for ‘corporate culture’. Friday listed a title so intriguing that I just had to click on it.

What caught my eye was Mel Lester’s Natural Selection vs. Intelligent Design on E-Quip Blog—remember that this was an alert for corporate culture.

So I clicked over (and highly recommend that you do,too) and found an excellent article propounding that corporate culture is formed in one of three ways—

• accidentally, through unconnected, random circumstances;
  
• by intentional design; or by a
  
• combination of the two he calls “natural selection”.

Over the last decade or so, corporate culture has gone from intangible, smoke-and-mirrors, touch-feely consultant talk to a recognized, dominant factor in corporate success.

“Harvard business professors John Kotter and John Heskett have conducted some of the most extensive research on this subject. They found that firms with a strong (deliberate) culture built upon a foundation of shared values outperformed other firms by a large margin:

• Their revenue grew more than 4x faster
• Their rate of job creation was 7x higher
• Their stock price grew 12x faster
• Their profit performance was 750% higher”

Mel explains each one, so I don’t have to and then goes on to talk list six steps to create your corporate culture.

1. Assess your current culture
2. Fortify your company values
3. Align strategy with your culture, or visa verse
4. Commit to regular communication
5. Take steps to promote a sense of community
6. Hire for cultural fit (this is critical!)

Good stuff, but exactly how do you hire for cultural fit?

I first wrote about using your culture to screen candidates in 1999 for the MSDN ISV Program Newsletter and have republished several times since then, most recently in response to Guy Kawasaki’s comments about Bob Sutton’s book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t.

Read Screen out turkeys, jerks and a**holes and if you have any questions, or want some help doing it, give me a call at 866.265.7267 between 8 am and 11 pm Pacific time. (Calls are better, email can get blocked by filters.)

And NO charge—I do it for fun.

In attending the AO 250 cocktail party last night, I was struck by something that differed significantly from the first ones I attended after moving to the US and getting involved with Garage Technology Ventures. Guy Kawasaki was a powerful force (he still is), as were the exuberance of youth in driving new technology and investment dollars.

This time around the surroundings were less lavish, as could be expected since we have all learned that spending money is not the same thing as making money. However, a significant difference was also the graying of the participants at the party.

Other than many of the people working at AlwaysOn (the conference co-host), most of the participants were over 35 years of age. Gone were the 22 year old CEOs that were the mainstay of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Now, the CEOs and management teams seemed seasoned and focused on clear drivers of value creation.

Not that I have anything against young CEOs; today they are creating significant value for investors—Facebook is just one example. However, the management teams are different today in that they are very business savvy, rather than having lofty concepts, ideals or delusions about how to create value.

Now, perhaps it is my perspective that has changed.  I’m 10 years older than the last time I participated in events like this and during that time I have been active in the investment banking, entrepreneur and venture capital arena in Europe and the US and consequently have matured slightly. At present, I’m running my fourth startup; Emanio is actually a restart from a European company I co-founded and brought from Scandinavia to the US in 2000.

Along the way I’ve learned a few lessons, especially during the past 5 years during which I not only raised money, but also did acquisitions in a difficult market. Doing this while bootstrapping the company (building it up without any outside investors) has taught me these lessons through considerable pain. Bootstrapping is definitely not for the faint of heart—everything takes longer and is more difficult than when one is well funded—but it does force one to possess a certain discipline.

Having become one myself, it warmed my heart to interact with all these entrepreneurs, as well as with Tony Perkins, Marc Sternberg and the others at AlwaysOn, and sharing in their stories. It was truly inspirational.

Come back for more of KG’s impressions tomorrow.

KG Charles-Harris is CEO of Emanio and a special contributor to MAPping Company Success.

I loved David Zinger’s comments today at Slacker Management on Guy Kawasaki’s hilarious take on a list of management theories. (I’ve loved Guy’s commentary on the world since I met him in 1999 when his first book, Rules for Revolutionaries, came out, I still have my autographed copy).

Guy says, “You can use the page as a test: Anyone who knows all these theories is someone you shouldn’t hire.”

David says, “Go ahead, let’s see you communicate and obfuscate at the same time.”

My first thought when I saw the list was, “what an addition to the BS Bingo matrix!”

Take the time to read the posts because I’m not going to rehash them, but I would like to take it a step further and talk about why it’s so crucial for managers to truly communicate with their people.

For managers, communications is about more than talking clearly, it’s about providing all the background necessary for people in the company to understand why they are doing their jobs, as well as what jobs they are to do.

Think of it this way, operational communications provide people information on how to do their jobs, while management communications tell them what their jobs are and why they do them, giving form and purpose.

Many of the problems that managers face daily are created by their own poor or inaccurate communications, often as a result of using jargon in an effort to sound sophisticated, knowledgeable and with it.

This doesn’t work for two reasons. even if you, as a manager, really do understand the jargon—often not the case—it’s unlikely that all of your people will. Worse, they may have their own individual understanding that has nothing to do with your intended meaning. This happens frequently enough with words of one or two syllables, let alone multi-syllabic management-babble.

You can eliminate a propensity in this direction by remembering three points…

Your goal is to provide your people with all the information needed to understand how to perform their work as correctly, completely, simply, and efficiently as possible.

You do this by providing clear, concise, and complete communications at all times.

Your results will be to make your company more successful, you a more effective manager with better reviews, and your employees happier and more productive.

Yesterday I was reading Guy Kawasaki’s follow-up to his original comments about The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, written by Stanford professor Bob Sutton.

And that made me think about something I’d written in January and that brings me to what I want to share with you today.

For any company, there’s a variety of types that you don’t want to hire—no matter how great their skills are. Whether they qualify as turkeys, jerks or a**holes, they spell bad news to your people and their productivity. While turkeys and jerks come in many flavors, all of which are bad for your company, a**holes are completely toxic.

Way back around 1998 or so, I wrote and article for MSDN about how to use your company’s culture as a screening tool to avoid hiring turkeys—and it works equally well for jerks and a**holes.

Here it is again, just as it was written, except for some slight formatting changes.

Don’t Hire Turkeys! Use Your Culture as an Attraction, Screening, and Retention Tool and Turkey-Proof Your Company.

Companies don’t create people—people create companies. At the beginning, most start-ups have great cultures that attract great people, but when business heats up, cultural focus is often overwhelmed by other priorities.

It takes a certain kind of person to brave the early days of a start-up. Generally, these people don’t like bureaucracy, politics, backstabbing, etc. In the beginning, it’s easier for startups to hire people “like themselves.” First, they hire all their friends, and then their friend’s friends. Then what? New positions have to be filled and the only people available are strangers.

So how do you hire strangers and not lose your culture? Since your culture is a product of your people, hire only people with matching or synergistic attitudes. The trick is to have a turkey sieve that will automatically screen out most of the misfits and turn on the candidates with the right values and attitudes.

• Your sieve is an accurate description of your real culture.
• It must be hard copy (write it out), fully publicized (everyone needs to know and talk about it), and, most important of all, it must be true.
• Email it to every candidate before their interview and be sure that everyone talks about the culture during the interview and sells the company’s commitment to it.
• Everybody interviewing needs to listen carefully to what the candidate is saying and not saying; don’t expect a candidate to openly admit to behaviors considered negative, since he may be unaware of them or not consider them negative at all (remember “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap).
• Red flags must be followed up, not ignored because of skills or charm.
• Consider the environment the person has been working in, find out if he agreed with how things were done, and, more importantly, how he would have done them if the decision were his.
• Whether or not the candidate is a manager, you’ll want to find out about his attitudes and approaches to managing as well as his work function methods.
• Probing people to understand what their responses, conscious as well as intuitive, are to a variety of situations reveals how they will act, react, and contribute to the company’s culture and its success.

Finally, it is up to the hiring manager to shield the candidate from external decision pressures, e.g., friends already employed by the company, headhunters, etc., and, above all, it is necessary to give all candidates a face-saving way to withdraw their candidacy and say no to the opportunity. If they don’t have a graceful way of exiting the interview process they may pursue, receive, and accept an offer, even though they know deep down it is not a good decision.

A bad match can do major damage to the company, people’s morale, and even the candidate, so a “no” can actually be a good thing.

Remember, the goal is to keep your company culture consistent and flexible as you grow. From the start, you need to consciously identify what you have, decide what you want it to be, publicize it, and use it as a sieve to be sure that everyone who joins, fits.

Doing so means that the people who join in year three will have as much fun as those who started the company in year one.