Poking through 14+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Focus on culture isn’t new, but it used to be a lot more positive. These days I see more about toxic cultures than about good ones, but what hasn’t changed is culture’s effect on performance, productivity and staffing. For better or worse, culture is still the most potent factor for any company.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Shawn Parr, whose company works with large corporations, such as Starbucks and MTV, on innovation wrote a meaty post called Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch.

It reminded me of something I wrote back in 2008, because the title is from a quote by Dick Clark, CEO of Merk and after rereading it I decided it’s worth reposting, so here it is.

Culture Trumps All

A post on Dave Brock’s blog led me to an article at IMD’s site called “An Unpopular Corporate Culture” and, as Dave said, it’s a must read for anyone who still thinks that corporate culture is some ephemeral concept with no real impact that consultants use to sell their services.

And a double-must for those who talk about culture’s importance, but don’t walk very well when it comes to creating a great corporate culture.

For those who prefer to put their faith in plans and strategy, hear the words of Dick Clark when he took over as CEO of Merck in 2005 and was asked about his strategy for restoring the pharmaceutical company to its former glory. “His strategy, he said, was to put strategy second and focus on changing the company’s insular, academic culture.” The fact is, culture eats strategy for lunch,” Clark explained. “You can have a good strategy in place, but if you don’t have the culture and the enabling systems that allow you to successfully implement it… the culture of the organization will defeat the strategy.””

If you’re looking for a best practice corporate culture silver bullet forget it—one size doesn’t fit all.

Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, describes that company’s top-down command and control culture of consistency and discipline as “the source of our competitive advantage,” and has made it a priority to reinforce it.

Meanwhile, Robert Iger and Steve Jobs, in their discussions about the acquisition of Pixar by Disney, have been concerned with avoiding an Exxon style command and control culture. Jobs says that, “Most of the time that Bob and I have spent talking about this hasn’t been about economics, it’s been about preserving the Pixar culture because we all know that’s the thing that’s going to determine the success here in the long run.””

It took Lou Gerstner a decade to remake IBM.

The key lesson Gerstner learned in his time with IBM, as he later reflected, was the importance of culture.”Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization’s makeup and success—along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like… I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game.”

The article is more than just additional proof for my favorite hobby horse.

The analysis of the role of employee complaints/negativity play in culture and the importance of what to keep when setting out to change a culture as opposed to what to jettison will give you new insight on your own company’s culture.

In case you still doubt the power and value of culture I hope that Dick Clark, Rex Tillerson, Robert Iger, Steve Jobs and Lou Gerstner combined with the articles in Fast Company and IMD have finally changed your mind.

Flickr image credit: Bengt Nyman

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Danial Adkinson was lucky. His first boss was a true role model and taught him one of the most important lessons anyone ever learns. He was especially lucky, because he learned it at a very young age and apparently pretty smart, because it stayed with him.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Washing dishes for Jeff was grueling, greasy work. But then again, making a pizza, or driving a truck, or baking a cake, or any of countless other jobs are not always enjoyable in themselves, either. Out of all the lessons I learned from that guy in the Pizza Hut tie, maybe the biggest is that any job can be the best job if you have the right boss. — Danial Adkison

People work for people, not companies.

People quit people, not companies.

They accept positions because of the culture and leave when it changes.

Bosses interpret company culture; they improve or pervert it; they add/subtract/polish/tarnish it.

What bosses don’t do is pass it on intact and untouched.

Flickr image credit: Susanne Nilsson

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

You can not imagine the thrill when I see the stuff I passionately believe in mirrors the beliefs of people I hold in high regard, such as Fred Wilson, who knows and has experienced far more than I ever will. It’s a definite high.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

A few days ago Fred Wilson wrote about the importance of culture and fit.

Some entrepreneurs and CEOs buy into “hire the best talent available” mantra. That can work if everything goes swimmingly well. But as I said, it often does not, and then that approach is fraught with problems. The other approach is hire for culture and fit. That is the approach I advocate.

That’s the same approach I’ve advocated for decades.

What many forget is that “the best talent available” refers to whoever will perform best in your culture as part of your team and focus on your company’s success.

Too many founders, CEOs, other execs and even lower level managers seem to hire for bragging rights instead.

I wrote about hiring and culture here last Sept and included a link to an article I wrote for MSDN way back in 1999 that explained how to use your culture as a screening tool when hiring.

I’ve always told clients that the fastest way to success is to always hire the right person at the right time and for the right reasons.

Good hiring is like cooking Chinese—80% of the time used is spent prepping and the balance doing.

There really are no shortcuts; especially not hiring other people’s stars.

Not to sound self-serving, but I’ve been surprised at how closely the ideas I’ve always believed in parallel Wilson’s thoughts.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

The lesson of these two posts is simple: culture can be good or bad; cults are always bad.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Two Sides Of Cult Culture

Did you do your homework from Saturday?

I asked you to read Heather Clancy’s take on great culture (content isn’t immortal; the link is a 404 error) and said that I’d explain today why I disagree.

The problem I have is with the idea of culture as a cult.

The definition of cult is given as “great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work,” and culture as “set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices;” Heather sees ‘devotion’ and ‘shared’ as interchangeable—and that makes me very uncomfortable.

Another definition for cult is “obsessive, especially faddish, devotion to or veneration for a person, principle, or thing.”

The examples she uses, Apple, Google and Salesforce.com, are superb companies.

But when someone says ‘cult’ to me I think of Jim Jones, whose followers had great devotion, so much that they followed Jones to the death—literally.

Lehman Brothers and other Wall Street banking houses had/have strong cult cultures as does AIG. Their people had great devotion and passion to cultures that were focused on winning no matter what and we all know where that got us. Another enterprise that comes to mind is Enron.

The point I’m making is that cult culture, like most concepts, cuts both ways.

When culture becomes a cult it can lose its flexibility and willingness to grow and change—necessities in today’s fast-changing world.

It’s always tempting to choose examples that highlight the positive view of a business (or any) concept, but it is imperative to avoid assumptions and remember that there are two sides to everything.

Image credit: Gúnna on flickr

Ducks in a Row: Culture Then and Now

Three years ago, in Leadership Turn, I talked about the dangers of allowing your culture to become a cult, but it seems that’s happening more and more.

The same day I explained here the benefits of what I called an ALUC culture.

ALUC is composed of four actions:

• Ask everyone for input, ideas, suggestions and opinions—not just your so-called stars.

• Listen and really hear what is said, discuss it, think about it.

• Use what you get as often as possible, whether in whole or in part, or as the springboard that leads to something totally different.

• Credit the source(s), both up and down, publicly and privately, thank them, compliment them, congratulate them.

The following day I offered some simple advice on implementing ALUC.

All three were worth reading then.

All three are worth reading now.

You want/need a culture, not a cult.

Flickr image credit: Antony Hollingworth

I had the opportunity to spend some time in Raleigh, NC this week in the Research Triangle. If you haven’t had an opportunity to spend some time here, I highly recommend it. Not only is the area full of beauty, it’s a melting pot of diversity that exemplifies the best of America. The hub of elite universities and top ranked tech companies make this a desirable place to raise a family, but also pursue a career with meaning.

I was here to spend some time with BMC software and was able to sit in and watch first hand on how they train their inside sales teams. I was thinking about how I wanted to approach this topic and this forum allowed for me to point out some real world examples of how a cultural revolution can be started.

A little background on BMC. They are one of the largest private software companies in the world and create products for enterprise IT systems to do everything from track assets, create help desk tickets, manage capacity and sit on top of complex environments to manage jobs.

In a real world example Starbucks is a customer and if BMC’s software failed at any time then Starbucks would be unable to accept any form of plastic.

I say all of this to say they are in big spaces doing the behind the scenes work that is required for us to live this modern life. They were acquired by Bain Capital a few years ago and have been in a massive growth trajectory lately.

One major change that Bain made was the expansion of inside sales teams, BDR’s and inside sales reps.

When you think of sales you think of someone wining and dining with customers and comping their dinners; these guys don’t live that life. They manage the sales cycles through phone, email and LinkedIn.

It is a special skill that is required and it can be taught. These teams add great value to the organization by sourcing leads, closing business and creating value for the customers and field representatives. 

An entry level role is as a BDR, Business Development Representative. My experience at other companies has been that these are young college grads that are hungry.

You have some of that at BMC, but they also have folks that have years of experience in other industries who are starting out in software.

You also have some that just enjoy that role and have done it for years. BMC takes these folks from all different backgrounds and shapes them to its vision and culture.

How do they do this?

One way they do it is by constant feedback and coaching opportunities. Now, this can be done the wrong way, but they seem to balance it well here where people seek out opportunities to learn and improve.

They also spend time highlighting team members who are doing something unique that works for them. They take folks that are young in their career and allow them to teach others. This does wonders for morale and also inspires others.

The last thing that I saw that helps is that they like to have fun as a team. They have happy hours, Vegas trips, president’s clubs. Constant incentives to allow people to reach their full potential.

I was impressed with the way they won as a team and built on mutual successes. They were not afraid to share best practices and they helped each other out as much as possible. 

Now, maybe we can’t all go to Vegas but some of the things they are doing are very scaleable, not rocket science, and can be repeated at any org. 

And then start the revolution.

Image credit: BMC

It’s amazing to me, but looking back on more than a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written. Golden Oldies is a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

For decades, ‘culture’ didn’t get much respect. Many managers considered it ephemeral; smoke and mirrors served up by consultants focused more on their bottom line than their client’s. Today, the critical importance of company culture is a generally accepted management subject. However, creating a great culture isn’t enough; it needs a solid infrastructure to sustain it and keep it flexible as the company grows. That said, the most important action any boss takes is found in the final sentence of this post. Read other Golden Oldies here.

When you build an edifice that you want to withstand the stresses of everyday living as well as crisis and catastrophe it’s important to include structural supports in the design.

The same is true for corporate culture and I call them “infrastructure building blocks” or IBBs.

There are three categories of IBBs—philosophy, attitude/style, and policy. There are many things that can be included, but here is a list of the most basic ones, some are fairly self-explanatory, others include commentary and links where possible.

The philosophy category includes

• Fairness: pay parity, merit promotions, egalitarian policies,
• Open communications: not a technology function, but a part of MAP.
• Business 101: basic information to reduce/eliminate naiveté, fuzzy or rose-colored views of the company’s business.
• No surprises
• Pragmatism

The attitude/style category includes:

• Manager vigilance: a constant awareness of what is going on and a willingness to deal with the reality of it immediately.
• Management-by-walking-around

The policy category is the concrete expression of the Philosophy and Attitude/Style IBBs. Just as the Preamble to the Constitution delineates the doctrines underlying it, each Policy IBB supports one or more of the IBBs described above.

Policy IBBs should be reasonably broad—macro rather than micro—since they support a flexible process, not ossified bureaucracy. They are your most potent infrastructure—the most tangible and, therefore, the hardest to corrupt or ignore, but also the most dangerous, because they can turn into bureaucracy in the blink of an eye if you’re not careful.

• Business Mission Statement (BMS)
• Cultural Mission Statement (CMS)
• Dual Mission Statement (DMS)
• Open-door
• Management by Box: actually a way to set your people free
• Dual Ladder Career Path: a series of hands-on positions that equate straight across the board with management positions.
• Hiring process: transparent and painless and easy to use for both candidates and hiring managers.
• Stock bonus plan (or similar)
• Sales incentives
• Reviews: Done correctly, they encourage personal growth, make negative behavior much harder to conceal and can even act as a screening tool during interviews.
• Surveys: useful for discovering problems, attitudes, product directions, company standing, etc. as perceived by employees and selected outsiders.

One caveat when implementing these and other approaches: lead by example; both managers and workers will do as you do, not as you say.

Image credit: flickr

Years ago, Neil Senturia, CEO of Black Bird Ventures posted his thoughts about CEOs, hiring and culture.

“Building a team is the key to creating a successful start up—picking the people who will fit into the culture. The CEO’s most important job is hiring well and being the visionary and model for the culture that you want in your company. There are great players but what wins Super Bowls are great teams.’

While everyone talks about building teams, the importance of teams, etc., bosses continue to hire skill sets without enough thought or rationalizing as to whether the candidates possessing them fit the culture.

It often takes the threat of a team revolt to force them to pass on candidates with great skills who obviously don’t fit.

Culture is high enough on the radar now that most entrepreneurs know that the wrong hire can derail their culture, but they still have a problem passing on badly needed skills.

It still takes guts to make the correct decision for the long-term in a world that runs on short-term.

It’s never an easy choice, but it is one that will pay off for years to come.

I wrote Don’t Hire Turkeys! Use Your Culture as an Attraction, Screening, and Retention Tool and Turkey-Proof Your Company 15 years ago and it’s just as true today as it was then.

Your culture is the sieve through which all people should pass—without contortions or rationalizations—preferably aligned with and passionate about it, but at the very least synergistic.

The keynotes of a culture are:

• Consciously developed – Cultures happen with or without thought. Those that just happen are the easiest to twist and manipulate.
• Flexible – Just as trees bend in strong winds and buildings are designed to sway in an earthquake, so you want to build your culture to withstand pivots, economic storms and the winds of change.
• Scalable – To grow as the company grows requires a deep understanding of the values that are cultural bedrock vs. trim and accessories.
• Sustainable – Although originally stemming from the CEO, at some point the culture must become the property of the employees if they’re going to support it.

None of this predicts what the culture will actually be, that’s a function of the CEO’s values and MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy)™.

The important point here is to hire with your eyes wide open, so you don’t end up with a round peg trashing your square hole.

Washing dishes for Jeff was grueling, greasy work. But then again, making a pizza, or driving a truck, or baking a cake, or any of countless other jobs are not always enjoyable in themselves, either. Out of all the lessons I learned from that guy in the Pizza Hut tie, maybe the biggest is that any job can be the best job if you have the right boss. — Danial Adkison

People work for people, not companies.

People quit people, not companies.

They accept positions because of the culture and leave when it changes.

Bosses interpret company culture; they improve or pervert it; they add/subtract/polish/tarnish it.

What bosses don’t do is pass it on intact and untouched.

Flickr image credit: Susanne Nilsson

Do you need to code to manage software developers?

Do you need to know circuit design to manage hardware engineers?

If you answered ‘yes’ then you’ve bought into one of the most common myths of management.

It exists because people are commonly promoted within the department in which they were originally hired.

But not always.

Neha Sampat is not only a woman, but also CEO of cloud software firm Raw Engineering, where, among other things, she runs a team of web developers.

She is not technical and certainly doesn’t code.

She attribute her success to the culture she’s built and her attitude towards her people.

“If you have the right people and the right personalities on a team, it’s magic. The smartest thing I have done in my career has been to surround myself with people who are experts in areas I know nothing about.”

Of course, that requires being secure enough in your own skills and hiring choices that you don’t need to be the smartest person on the team.

The same applies to KG Charles-Harris Charles-Harris (who, as his time permits, contributes here). He is a serial entrepreneur and founder/CEO of Quarrio, which just won the 2014 Overall Winner & Most Disruptive awards given by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) in the “NextGen” Big Data category.

KG puts enormous time and effort into hiring the right people, then gets out of their way and trusts them to get the job done.

Or as Sampat says,

“I am very deliberate about expressing how much I value people’s knowledge and their presence on my team.” (…) “My job is to be an enabler and to give my people the resources they need to make things happen.”

Good management and communication skills are as crucial to success as good coding—perhaps even more so in the long run.

Flickr image credit: Juhan Sonin

It’s likely you’ve seen this video already, but I’m posting it anyway because it says what I’ve been saying forever.

Its focus is living mindfully, although none of the commenters I scanned through seemed aware of the concept.

Some agreed, while some thought it was “self-righteous” bullsh*t,” but if that’s true then the teachings of Confucius, Aristotle, Plato, Buddha, Jesus and all the saints, prophets and rabbis also qualify as self-righteous BS. (I found it amusing how many of the nay-sayers fell back on four-letter words to express themselves—probably the extent of their vocabularies.)

Mindfulness is a conscious way to live life and applies extremely well when building company culture.

YouTube credit: Gary Turk