Over the years, I’ve noticed that there are a certain set of odd … practices that various highly effective business executives seem to do in their companies. Some of my friends call these practices ‘myth-creation’ or ‘culture-setting’ — the practices tend to be highly social in nature, targeted specifically for employee ‘wetware’: that is, the emotions and beliefs of the humans that make up the core of an organisation. I didn’t have a name for these practices. But I think you’ll start to notice these things, if you spend enough time studying businesses.
Thank you for this post, @cedric ! I’ve brought it up to two colleagues now. It is the clarity that makes it so useful.
Any middle manager who’s listening, and who’s honest, recognizes that an organization is actually a lot of smaller organisms, each having survival as the primary goal. The question is then what to do about it. That is, if you truly want a group to change something*, how does that happen.
The radical actions of ripping out TVs, etc, aren’t available to all of us — but they raise the question of how we can demonstrate equally clearly what we really value.
And I love the kind of “do no harm” approach signified by not publishing values but instead trying to live them. And the connected activity of guessing what the values would be if published.
This post is one to come back to. I feel I’ve only started to grasp the mindset. I’ll probably get the book itself too.
*About wanting to change: there is always some confusion generated when one or more leaders say they want to change, but really don’t. Pfeffer and Sutton had lots to say about that in “The Knowing-Doing Gap”. Luckily, employees are very good at recognizing when leaders don’t truly want to change, and responding appropriately — that is, with no real action.
I’m only now getting around to reading the book summary, and I have so much to say, I feel compelled to start taking notes and I’m only halfway through. This guy gets it. I may not even need to read the book because I have an intuitive sense of all of this from what I’ve lived through in various companies, but he does articulate it well.
Some examples:
"That’s right. You don’t hear it anymore. It’s all gone underground to the employee culture, where management can’t hear it anymore. Meanwhile, the culture has activated its guerrilla networks and is blowing up bridges …” I have described myself as an organizational terrorist when I’m disgruntled and unhappy with leadership, so this was delightfully on the nose. At one startup, I knew everything. I had called the CEO an idiot at an all-hands, and after that, everybody at the company (including a couple VPs) started feeding me information. I knew more about the company than the leadership team, and I used it to undermine everything they were doing while calling them out in the process. In response, they tried calling me and my buddies the “Corner of Negativity” but the employees knew who to believe.
“Apathy, on the other hand, is the dangerous thing. A sign of that is total, sustained silence”. At the same company, a wiser and older engineer told me that all of our complaining was a good thing. I asked him why. He said “Complaining means that people still care. When people stop complaining, they’ve given up.” A similar message was delivered by Randy Pausch in his Last Lecture where his football coach told him “when you’re screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, they’ve given up on you.” As an aside, that same holds true for culture - people are watching management when somebody is screwing up; if nobody does anything, then they know there are no consequences. “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.”
I loved the description of how to create a legend. It’s not enough to be memorable, but it has to communicate something dramatic about the culture. Ben Horowitz called such legends “shocking” rules where culture is set by doing something that is dramatically against “common sense” because “that’s how we do things here”. I experienced this once myself in something as mundane as a training about how to approve purchase orders (POs) at Google. They said one of the rules was to always get competitive quotes, and everybody was like “yeah, uh huh”, and then the presenter said “We have a music teacher at the Google day care that is beloved. We sent in a PO for $2,000 to renew his contract, and it was rejected by the CFO for not having gone out for bid. He means it when he says “always get a competitive quote”.” I still remember that rule to this day because of that story, because it was shocking to me that the CFO of a company making $100B a year was still paying attention to $2,000 POs.
On compensation and culture, I love thinking about “what money can’t buy”. Google did this great in the early days (and terribly recently) with things like 20% time, the cafeterias that had legitimately good food, outrageous bonuses for successful projects, and even memorable traditions like giving out $1,000 in cash to every single employee at Christmas (this ended in 2009 just after I started - that year, people got the first Android phone instead as a Christmas gift, and people were angry).
“Probe values, don’t declare them”. Love this. Jon Katzenbach suggests something similar in his book The Critical Few (@cedric if you’re not familiar with Katzenbach, check him out - he’s one of the operators I respect in this space, in part because I know several people that worked at his eponymous consulting firm). I never wrote up Critical Few, but here’s my summary of his book The Wisdom of Teams which I loved for making actionable observations about how great teams formed.
Anyway, I am still wrapping my head around the central insight of the book of the culture as a singular self-protective organism but the conclusions drawn line up so well with my experience that I expect I’ll get there. Consistent tradeoffs, legible and transparent decisions, understandable consequences, explanations of how strategy aligns with values-driven goals - these all are best practices that I’ve seen in creating aligned cultures.
And now that I think about it, Google’s study about what makes effective teams aligns very well with this idea of culture. The key characteristics they found were not about who was on the team, but about the characteristics of the team: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact. Which all tie back to the employee culture protecting itself (first three) and understanding why they should do the work (meaning and impact). Okay, I’m sold.
Thanks for sharing the summary, Cedric! I would say I will read Slap’s books but my reading time is currently non-existent, so I’ll make do with the summary and the podcast for now.
Amusingly, we moved into a new building after this (fun fact, they blew $15M of their $40M raise on that move, assuming they could raise more whenever they wanted. Unfortunately, this was 2001 and the dot-com era had crashed). In the previous move, they had let us choose our own seats, but after the “Corner of Negativity”, they assigned seating in the next move and split the four of us ringleaders as far apart as they could. Of course, that just meant we recruited more people into our guerrilla movement and the whole thing devolved from there.
Besides the stories, my main remnant of that time is that I learned to play pool quite well. The new building was in downtown SF, with a view of the Bay Bridge, and the pool table was a sunny place with a view in the afternoons. Once it was clear the company was doomed, I started playing an hour or two of pool a day for the year before it finally ran out of money
Jeez Eric, that’s some balls you’ve got (excuse my language, but it seems like the right expression). I wonder if that turned out well for you? Because in my experience it’s often a losing battle. It’s also a pathway to perhaps a separate thread on how to navigate political landscapes where putting up a fight against the executives often drains you out or they’d come up with some kinda plays to manage you out.
I was young and cocky and thought I was invincible. I did have the security that I had written about 90% of the code actually being used at the company so they needed me. I wouldn’t say it worked out well; the company did go bankrupt and if I’d been more skillful, I could have used my knowledge to potentially change that outcome. That being said, when the technology was bought after the bankruptcy, I was one of the engineers rehired by the acquirer to keep developing it into a commercial product.
Mostly, though, it was a great experience to have early in my career to understand how culture, influence and politics mattered far more to effectiveness than technical knowledge. As a result, I pivoted my career, first to business and now to leadership coaching, to focus on those levers of change. I call that startup experience my origin story of becoming an executive coach.
And to generalize a lesson here, when dealing with a culture as an executive, look for the people that can move the culture, the people that other employees listen to.
If you get them on your side, they can be your greatest advocates.
If you don’t honor and respect their influence, they can undermine your authority completely.
And, yes, I’ve done both - I was a force multiplier of culture in most of my jobs, either advocating for management, or leading the resistance
