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.
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.
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.
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.
Knowing, understanding and accepting yourself is critical to major decisions, such as choosing a spouse/life partner/job. Ignoring or distorting any of the first three practically guarantees blowing the last three. As does ignoring or distorting the info gathered from your due diligence on the last three.
There’s a very stupid myth that only the very talented are hired by startups and that the very talented only want to work for startups.
The corollary being that those who work for public companies, let alone large ones, probably aren’t all that talented and certainly not innovative/creative.
What a crock.
Another part of that myth is that working for a startup is the road to riches.
An even bigger crock.
The myth also says that the best place to work is a unicorn, such as or AirBnB, GitHub or Palantir,
And that is the biggest crock of all.
If you are looking for new opportunities and are dazzled by the idea of working at a unicorn I strongly suggest you read Scott Belsky’s post on Medium.
A company’s fate is ultimately determined by its people, so talent is everything. But this old adage bumps up against another one: cash is king (or runway is king, for a fast-growing private company). Without runway, talent takes off. So, it is no surprise that bold moves to extend runway (think late-stage financings at technically large valuations with some tricky liquidation preferences underneath) are done even if they could hurt the company (and its people) in the long run. This is especially true when these financings are ego-driven rather than strategic. The problem is, the employees at these companies don’t understand the implications.
This is a short write-up on things that I wish I’d known and considered before joining a private company (aka startup, aka unicorn in some cases). I’m not trying to make the case that you should never join a private company, but the power imbalance between founder and employee is extreme, and that potential candidates would do well to consider alternatives.
The right place for you to work is the one that satisfies what you want — whether that’s the opportunity to work on bleeding edge technology, build a network, upgrade your resume or even plain, old curiosity.
The wrong place is the one you join with an eye to getting rich quick or for bragging rights.
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.
Welch is still alive and must love today’s optimized millennials, who were raised to constantly strive and never stop working. Burnout would be no problem, since he could simply fire them.
In spite of that I doubt he could manage them; neither they, nor their elders, would take kindly to his style.
In fact, Welch’s approach is actually the fastest way to produce a bumper crop of weeds.
I’ve disagreed with Jack Welch many times going back to the start of this blog. In December 2006 I wrote Men Want A Life, Too in response to Welch’s comment.
“We do acknowledge that work-life balance is usually a much harder goal for women with children. For them, there is about a 15-year period in their careers in which the choices they make are not about what they want from life professionally and personally but about what is right for their kids. It can be a fraught time, since choices and consequences are more complex. That, however, is a topic for another column.”
It took two-and-a-half years, but he did return to that topic recently at the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference telling them that women need to choose between raising kids and running a company.
“There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.” (The article is from the Wall Street Journal and is the first link on this Google search page.)
Putting the comments together we have a high profile x-CEO who believes that the way to the top is for both men and women to make the tough choice and put their family second to their career.
Just let relatives, nannies (if you can afford them), daycare, schools, friends, gangs and the internet raise the next generation.
Why do comments like these come primarily from old, rich white guys?
What planet are they living on? More importantly have they bothered listening to today’s workers—and I don’t mean just Millennials.
As long as this is the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that runs companies that attitude will translate to corporate action and companies will face problems staffing. The recession won’t go on forever and demographically there’s a serious people shortage at every level and in every field.
If you really want to attract the best and brightest men and women then you need to recognize that their priorities have changed and if forced to choose the company will, in most cases, come in second.
And those candidates who do choose company over life may lack the empathy needed to innovate and market, let alone lead, the current workforce.
There are plenty of companies that already know this and have adjusted their culture accordingly, but most will be dragged kicking and screaming into the reality once the economy turns around, demographics rears its ugly head and they have no choice.
As you probably guessed, Jack Welch has been on my mind, mainly because I was stuck having lunch with a retired executive who went on and on about what a great role model Welch is.
When I disagreed, with specific examples, he informed me that he expected my reaction because I was a woman.
Huh?
Wow. I’m really glad this guy is retired, because he sure doesn’t relate to today’s workers no matter their age.
But nothing replaces high EQ, empathic, humane (not just human) bosses.
Not processes, not technology, not AI, and definitely not robots.
No matter what big and little tech want, believe or tell us, people are analog and always will be. For that matter, the real world is analog and always will be.
So, for the foreseeable future, the management and leadership skills needed to grow strong, creative, highly productive workers will be found in those who understand the limits of digital and can move freely and successfully in an analog world filled with analog people.
Oh joy. A new study of 25,000 employees, working in more than 1,000 different companies across 20 industries spread across Northern America, Europe, Asia, and Australia was done over the 12 months of 2018.
43% of employees said that they would be likely to leave their current companies if they were offered a 10% pay rise elsewhere. That number was up from 25% in their 2017 survey.
The report says that weak company cultures are to blame, while the author thinks the strong job market is also responsible.
I disagree, because if the majority of the stuff listed below is actually fixed it will take a lot more than a 10% raise to attract someone to a culture that probably has those same problems.
Here is the list.
Technical issues with software, and other tools
Interruptions and disruptions from Slack, emails and noisy office environments
Poor communication from management / lack of training and information
Disorganized and time-wasting systems and processes
Misguided decisions from management / bad leadership
Lack of flexibility / no opportunities to work from home
Overworked / under resourced team
Office politics / favoritism
Difficult customers
Too many meetings
The sheer size of the responding group means smart bosses will take note of these irritants; most are fixable without much impact on the budget.
Most require changes the boss can effect or, at least, influence. People aren’t stupid, they know their boss can’t change the whole company. But if they change what they can and keep working on the others, their people will stay and work with them.
What often matters most is that bosses recognize that they are part, if not all, of the problem and are honestly trying to change.
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 got MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™), I got MAP, all us humans got MAP. MAP reflects your values — whatever they may be — and culture is MAP in action.
What does the boss really contribute to their organization?
The culture; it’s the boss’ MAP that forms and shapes the culture for their organization.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a mom and pop operation, startup or global giant; whether the company has two, two thousand or twenty thousand employees; whether the boss is called owner, founder, president, or CEO.
Cultural ideas can’t percolate up from the ranks without a top boss who enables the bottom-up culture in the first place, as well as providing the fertilizer that allows ideas to bloom.
It’s not enough to announce the cultural attributes in which you believe, such as no politics, and then ignore political actions because you believe that your senior staff are adults and won’t engage in behavior that goes unrewarded.
Even those who manage culture by benign neglect must see to it that there are repercussions for actions that flaunt the corporate culture just as there are for actions that violate legal issues such as harassment.
And all this is just as true for the individual subcultures that establish themselves around every manager in the company all the way down through team leader.
Creating and caring for the culture should be written into every manager’s job description at every level.
If that seems a bit extreme, keep in mind that study after study has proven that culture affects productivity, engagement, innovation and retention.
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.
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.
The oldest Millennials are now well into their 30s, and they’re increasingly running companies. Inc. and our sister publication, Fast Company, partnered with career-development site the Muse to survey 155 Millennial bosses to see how they manage, what they value, and how they plan to shape the future of business. The top priorities they cited are humanist: creating positive work cultures, forging strong relationships (in person, not through apps), and caring for the whole person, not just the worker. And, unlike some Boomers and Gen-Xers, they’re optimistic about those who will replace them. As Elena Valentine, co-founder and CEO of video company Skill Scout, predicts, “I have a hunch Gen Z is going to make an even bigger impact.”
Of course, the survey focused on CEOs in tech; no one seems to bother doing similar surveys on lower level millennial managers working outside of tech.
So I thought I’d share my own experience over the last 15 years with millennial managers and their workers at my small, local bank branch.
Over those years there have been roughly seven managers, all but one were promoted and are still with the bank.
Unlike large, urban branches, small branches like mine function differently. Tellers remember your name and chat; managers often handle transactions normally done by bankers.
Because I handle the banking, wires, etc., for my Russian business partner I had a lot of interactions with the managers, as well as the staff, and got to know them on a more personal level than you might expect.
The managers all ranged from their late twenties to early thirties.
They managed much the same as the CEOs in the survey. Same concerns and efforts with their peoples’ growth and well-being.
Our conversations often focused on the culture they strove to create and, for a few years, what it took to protect their people from the toxic culture and destructive behavior of a district manager (she created enough stress to put one pregnant manager on doctor-ordered bed rest) who was finally fired.
None of the managers were perfect, although the current one is as close as any manager gets, but they created great micro-cultures, in which their teams thrived.
Impressive, especially when you consider that the bank is Wells Fargo.
I have found Halloween to be a bellwether of how a company culture truly is.
Is the company relaxed and open to folks coming into work in wacky costumes? Are there team themes that compete for top prize? Or perhaps the company asks that no one dress up at all.
I have found myself in all three and currently find myself in the last group.
At first I was a bit surprised, but now I realize not dressing up might be the best thing ever.
I am a bit reserved and I always found dressing up to be a major chore and distraction.
There is always the task of finding an outfit that is both unique and also work appropriate. Inevitably someone shows up wearing a costume that is deemed inappropriate.
This, of course, is followed by a mandatory HR meeting describing what is and is not appropriate attire in the office.
The big day arrives. Some participate while others sit it out.
You have a party that truly feels like mandatory fun time and then you go home.
Instead, my work day today was sans drama and hijinks.
We came to work and did what needed to be done. Then we left early because our company realizes we have a life outside the office.
I have to say this is probably the best culture fit I have had in quite some time.
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,
