Decades ago, when I was a recruiter in Silicon Valley, I preferred working directly with managers, avoiding HR, so I worked primarily with startups and smaller companies as opposed to large corporations — unicorns didn’t exist back then.

Aside from disliking HR’s bureaucratic read tape, I found I could provide better matches by understanding the culture of the hiring manager, whether founder or not.

Yes, there is an overarching company culture, but the manager-specific cultures that exist in every company rarely duplicate it and may not even bare any similarity.

Culture is the direct result of values.

Culture is only ageist, misogynist, bigoted when that manager’s values are ageist, misogynist, bigoted.

To thrive in a culture, you don’t need to duplicate your boss’ values, but they must, at the least, be synergistic.

Accepting an offer from a boss whose values are incompatible, let alone diametrically opposed, to yours can mean setting yourself up for disappointment or worse.

Image credit: pmillerd

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.

I wrote this in 2015, but when it comes to company culture five years is a blink of the eye. The boss’ MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that drives the actions that create culture, whether the result is good or bad, has been developing since they were born, although it’s not set in concrete and can change — but only if they choose to.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Steve Blank wrote a great post about changing culture in larger organizations. It’s a must-read for anyone in business, government or non-profit who is looking to juice innovation in their organization.

Blank agrees that there are four components to culture.

Two McKinsey consultants, Terry Deal and Arthur Kennedy wrote a book called Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life.  In it they pointed that every company has a culture – and that culture was shorthand for “the way we do things at our company.” Company culture has four essential ingredients:

• • Values/beliefs – set the philosophy for everything a company does, essentially what it stands for
  • Stories/myths – stories are about how founders/employees get over obstacles, win new orders…
  • Heroes – what gets rewarded and celebrated, how do you become a hero in the organization?
  • Rituals – what and how does a company celebrate?

He goes on to explain what needs to be done for “innovation to happen by design not by exception.”

While I agree with everything he says, I believe he left out a most critical component.

In reality it should be a subset of values/beliefs, but it is rarely thought about by bosses — they either do it or do the opposite automatically.

It can be summed up in four words, don’t kill the messenger—Pete Carroll, coach of the Seattle Seahawks, is a master of this mindset.

To be truly innovative means trying new stuff and a part of trying new stuff is accepting that it won’t always work.

Corporate culture in general and many bosses individually can’t seem to wrap their minds around the idea that some things will fail — it’s the dark side of the ‘but me mindset’ at work.

What they, and anybody setting out to change culture and encourage innovation, need to understand is that it only takes killing the messenger, i.e., responding negatively to the person who brings bad news, once to negate whatever progress had been made and put the effort back to square one.

Flickr image credit: Eirik Newth

Poking through 13+ 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.

80 years ago Dave Packard commented that good management was “marked by personal involvement, good listening skills and the recognition that “everyone in an organization wants to do a good job.” That belief developed into a management technique called MWBA and it’s just as powerful now as it was then — if not more so. 13 years ago I wrote a four-part series about it. The second post talks about why to do it, the third about uncovering problems and the fourth about using MWBA to crosscheck what you hear.

And yes, you do have time.

Author John le Carré, of Bond fame, said it best.

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Remember Management By Walking Around (MWBA)? It’s an oldie, but a goodie.

Great managers work to spend at least 25% (or more) of their time wandering around chatting and building trust with their people.

Don’t have time? Maybe that’s because you never really thought abut the benefits. Getting to know your people this way helps you to

• • spot high-potential workers;
  • raise your trust quotient with employees;
  • improve retention;
  • attract talent;
  • discover molehills before they’re mountains, and, most importantly, it’s the best, if not only, way to
  • know what’s really going on.

To work it must be the norm—that means it needs to be done constantly, not just when there’s a problem.

Consistent, casual visits make people feel comfortable and encourages them to chat—saying what they are thinking without editing it. To pass on information, rumors, and the like without wondering or worrying that it will boomerang and hurt them.

While wandering, you’ll hear enough to validate or repudiate what you heard from somewhere else. It lets you protect your sources—which means they’ll continue to pass on information—and it helps you avoid acting on erroneous information.

The higher you rise in the organization the more important this intelligence becomes. One of the greatest dangers for any manager is getting isolated and hearing only a sanitized or slanted version of what’s going on within the group, department or company. This is especially true for the CEO and senior staff.

Bottom-line—get off your duff, out of your office, wander around, say hi, listen, be a sponge and soak it all up.

Invest the time—that’s what managers do—and it will pay off handsomely!

Does it still work? Absolutely. Read about how it went from strictly a management tool to also offering personal growth and stress reduction.

A note for managers in love with tech. MBWA can’t be done digitally; it’s an in-person, face-to-face technique that works.

It takes far less time than recruiting new people.

And it’s free.

Image credit: LYCS Architecture on Unsplash

When you’ve written a blog for 12 years (plus a second one simultaneously for two of years) you’ve said a lot of what you want to say. Beyond that, you’ve often said it better that first time than when you are posting on the same subject years later, which is why I started Golden Oldies.

Yesterday’s GO led me to two others and between them they say pretty much everything I was thinking about for follow-up.

I “preached” culture long before it was legitimized; back in those days it was often considered consultant’s smoke and mirrors.

My thoughts on corporate culture haven’t changed much, although the world certainly has.

Definitions of corporate culture come, go and are constantly being refined, but I think my decade old take is still valid.

There are as many definitions and explanations of corporate culture as there are academics, consultants, coaches and every person who works now, has worked in the past or plans to work in the future.

But what about the ‘corporate’ in corporate culture?

What is it other than a piece of paper showing that the government recognizes its existence and it owes taxes?

Is it the office buildings that house it? The manuals that explain it? The stock that represents its value?

Actually, a corporation isn’t an entity at all. It’s a group of people, with shared values, all moving in the same direction, united in a shared vision and their efforts to reach a common goal.

That means that the ‘culture’ in corporate culture is about those people and their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

Image credit: Gavriella Fabbri

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over nearly 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. Read other Golden Oldies here

I’m no happier about the AIG and other bonuses paid to screwed up Wall Street banks, but I’m not sure why any of us are surprised.

“In the largest 25 corporate bankruptcies between 1999 and 2002, while hundreds of billions of dollars of investor wealth and over 100,000 jobs disappeared, the Financial Times found the “barons of bankruptcy” made off with $3.3 billion.”

Giant compensation packages, guaranteed bonuses and platinum parachutes are excused by Boards and executives as necessary to attract the “best and brightest,” but here’s what’s really going on.

The ‘name’ demands outsize compensation/stock options/guaranteed bonus/etc. in order to validate their ‘brand’.

Those responsible for hiring not only meet the demands, but even exceed them in an effort to attain or sustain the company’s reputation as a better home for ‘stars’—the more stars you have the greater the bragging rights— mine’s bigger than yours in high school locker room talk.

Now let’s consider the folly of this attitude.

Those hiring often seek a name brand in the mistaken belief that the brand comes with a warranty that guarantees good results.

But no matter who you hire you’re actually paying for their past performance, which is always influenced by

• circumstances—boss and company positioning in its market and industry
• environment—culture and colleagues;

and let us not forget that minor factor

• the economy.

The hiring mindset is that everything the brand accomplished was done in a total vacuum and dependent only on the brand’s own actions, therefore changing every single surrounding factor will have no impact on performance.

Put like that it sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it.

This is one of the prime reasons that so many CEOs bring their ‘own team’ over when they move, as do managers all the way down the food chain—they know they didn’t do it alone.

CEOs aren’t like movie and rock stars whose very names draw consumers into spending money—nobody ever bought a product from GE because Jack Welch was CEO, nor do they carry Jobs’ iPods—so why pay them that way?

Moreover, assuming that performance occurring during an expansion is a valid yardstick for performance in general, let alone a downturn, is sheer idiocy.

You have only to remember the difficulties faced by people whose management skills were honed between 1991 and 2000, the longest expansion in our history. When the recession hit in March of 2001 they had no experience whatsoever of how to drive revenue or manage in a down economy.

That recession and the previous one in 1990 lasted only 8 months each. The longest recession we’ve had was 2 years, January-July 1980 and July 1981-November 1982, and that one had a 12 month break in it. This means there are a very small number of managers with any actual experience managing in anything even close to what’s happening now.

The current recession officially started in December 2007, so it’s already 15 months old and the end isn’t in sight.

What experience makes these folks the ‘best and brightest’ for today’s world?

Just what the hell are companies still guaranteeing oversized compensation and exorbitant exit packages when now is definitely the time to pay for future performance—no guarantees.

Sad, isn’t it. Seven years and nothing’s changed, in fact, it’s gotten much worse.  

The wealth of the richest 62 people grew by more than half a trillion dollars in that last half-decade, while the wealth of the poorest 50 percent of people globally decreased by more than $1 trillion during the same period.

Image credit: flickr

Steve Blank wrote a great post about changing culture in larger organizations. It’s a must-read for anyone in business, government or non-profit who is looking to juice innovation in their organization.

Blank agrees that there are four components to culture.

Two McKinsey consultants, Terry Deal and Arthur Kennedy wrote a book called Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life.  In it they pointed that every company has a culture – and that culture was shorthand for “the way we do things at our company.” Company culture has four essential ingredients:

• Values/beliefs – set the philosophy for everything a company does, essentially what it stands for
• Stories/myths – stories are about how founders/employees get over obstacles, win new orders…
• Heroes – what gets rewarded and celebrated, how do you become a hero in the organization?
• Rituals – what and how does a company celebrate?

He goes on to explain what needs to be done for “innovation to happen by design not by exception.”

While I agree with everything he says, I believe he left out a most critical component.

In reality it should be a subset of values/beliefs, but it is rarely thought about by bosses — they either do it or do the opposite automatically.

It can be summed up in four words, don’t kill the messenger—Pete Carroll, coach of the Seattle Seahawks, is a master of this mindset.

To be truly innovative means trying new stuff and a part of trying new stuff is accepting that it won’t always work.

Corporate culture in general and many bosses individually can’t seem to wrap their minds around the idea that some things will fail — it’s the dark side of the ‘but me mindset’ at work.

What they, and anybody setting out to change culture and encourage innovation, need to understand is that it only takes killing the messenger, i.e., responding negatively to the person who brings bad news, once to negate whatever progress had been made and put the effort back to square one.

Flickr image credit: Eirik Newth

Stanford management professor Robert Sutton has a new book out called Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More without Settling for Less.

In it Sutton says, “Scale means the spreading of excellence from the few to the many”.

As usual, Sutton is right on and TechCrunch columnist Andrew Keen is way off.

So is Bob Sutton right? Is everything in Silicon Valley really about people? And are the most successful companies those that are best able to scale their organization?

I say that because anywhere, not just in Silicon Valley, but in every town, city and country, it’s about people.
It’s about people because there is no such entity as a company.

What is a company other than a piece of paper showing that the government recognizes its existence and that it owes taxes?

Is it the office buildings that house it? The manuals that explain it? The stock that represents its value?

No.

A company isn’t an entity at all. It’s a group of people all moving in the same direction, united in a shared vision and their efforts to reach a common goal.

And that group attitude is best summed up as culture, which is a living/growing/changing depiction of those people and their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

Google, 3M and P&G are examples of a number of people who are all eager, or at least willing, to move in the same direction.

Whereas at Yahoo people move in multiple directions or refuse to move at all. In part that reflects the differences of people hired over the years through multiple cultures that were not all that synergistic.

Yes, it’s the people. It has always been the people all the way back to our hunter ancestors.

And it will always be the people.

Flickr image credit: Kitty Schweizer

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

If you were asked what skills are in shortest supply in the workforce you would probably think first about computer and related skills.

While that is correct, some simple soft skills are just as difficult.

This year’s pair of April surveys confirmed that, as in previous years, employers are having trouble finding people with advanced computer and interpersonal skills, punctuality, and reliability.

Think about it.

Problems finding people who understand that they need to

• consistently show up at the agreed upon time; and
• always do what they say they will do.

Not exactly rocket science, but a substantial problem.

The first shows that 36% of businesses in the manufacturing sector that responded to the survey are having moderate difficulty finding workers who are punctual and reliable, while 11% report great difficulty in finding workers with those traits. In the services sector, it’s not as bad — 22% of respondents report moderate difficulty finding punctual, reliable workers, whereas only 3% report great difficulty.

The interpersonal skills are a far more significant concern.

In an age when face-to-face communications is giving way to texting, IMing and email, the ability to work in close proximity with people and not only get along, but bond to create high performing teams, is becoming more and more difficult.

Hard skills, from learning new programming languages or moving from technical work on a financial program to developing mobile apps are learnable, as are all hard skills.

Changing and redirecting the character traits that lead to being punctual and reliable or teaching interpersonal skills to a (probably) uninterested party are most often exercises in frustration.

These are the core reasons why attitude and aptitude are more important than current skills when hiring and a subject we’ll look at in more depth this week.

Image credit: Denise Krebs

Generational splits are nothing new; throughout time those under X have clashed with those over X.

While the typical under/over split is alive and well, there is a new dimension in the world of technology and it’s clearly on view in Silicon Valley.

In pursuing the latest and the coolest, young engineers ignore opportunities in less-sexy areas of tech like semiconductors, data storage and networking, the products that form the foundation on which all of Web 2.0 rests.

This is far more serious than differences in fashion and music; this split has serious implications for the economic future of our country. (Read the article; it’s important)

Building the latest, greatest app might make the creator rich, but even a few Google’s and Facebook’s aren’t going to do much to rebuild the middle class.

Doing that takes thousands of jobs at a multitude of skills and levels

The kind of jobs created by breakthrough technologies that create entire new industries as did semiconductors.

But that kind of innovation requires focus and time—not just a few months to a fast cash out and bragging rights.

So what’s the answer?

Somehow we need to find a way to make that kind of work cool.

Flickr image credit: opensourceway