For someone who has desperately wanted to see corporate culture thrust into the hot spotlight of mainstream business debate, this month has felt like Christmas come early.
The CEO’s of Basecamp and Coinbase opened a Pandora’s Box of debate and discourse by releasing internal memo’s banning office conversations around social topics (like politics, diversity, gun rights) citing them as distracting and potentially divisive. The fallout was sharp and sudden with a third of Basecamp’s employees opting to take a generous severance and leaving the company rather than abide by these rules. Casey Newton’s take is perhaps the most insightful I’ve read.
WeWork’s CEO Sandeep Mathrani opined in the Wall Street Journal that an organization’s most engaged employees were the ones most keen to return to an office environment and the least engaged were those who wanted to remain working remotely. That a CEO of a highly leveraged organization that rents physical office space might suggest that all companies should push for a return to, errrr, the kind of spaces they rent might just be the most ironic and self-serving culture commentary ever. That is if Hulu hadn’t already released a documentary about how Looney Tunes the WeWork culture was historically. As my dear friend Aga Bajer has said frequently “A crisis doesn’t build character, it reveals it.” – here’s another sublime example.
Then, in the saga of resurrected and resurfaced internal memos, Shopify CEO Tobias (Tobi) Lutke sent a strongly worded message that employees should rid themselves of the “preposterous” notion that organizations are like a family. He went on to say “You are born into a family. You never choose it, and they can't un-family you...The dangers of "family thinking" are that it becomes incredibly hard to let poor performers go.” In many ways Tobi is echoing the same sentiment of another highly respected CEO, Reed Hastings of Netflix who has frequently made the “sports team not family” distinction, even codifying it as a bedrock culture principle at Netflix. As a business person it’s impossible to not admire both Shopify and Netflix for stellar business performance (Netflix +40,119% since going public and Shopify showing an impressive +3,601% post-IPO) and, on the culture front, I’ve personally written about Netflix with unabashed admiration.
So as gleeful as I am for all these topical examples – and the voluminous pile-on by the outrage orchestra on Clubhouse and LinkedIn – they reinforce a larger issue with the entire culture conversation and the difficulty with making any real momentum to genuinely tackle it.
Culture is not some binary, black-or-white, pithy tweet concept.
Culture is a highly nuanced, often-messy, ability to drive real commitment from your people and real business results for your organization.
While we all laughed at 21st Century philosopher Forrest Gump’s insightful existential observations about life – and dashed out to buy the accompanying merchandise – there’s no way you’d tell your family member (or your team-mate for that matter) that life could be explained by “Shit Happens”
Culture is the same.
The godfather of organizational culture Edgar Schein said it best when he quipped that there’s no such thing as a good or bad culture. Culture just is. Your organization has a culture whether you like it or not. And labelling it “good” or “bad” is a limiting and nebulous pursuit. To quote another one of my culture icons Stan Slap, culture is what happens when any group of humans gather together and try to determine the collective rules for individual safety and economic prosperity.
Inherent in those observations – and sadly lost in the clickbait, tweet synthesis of media coverage on this topic – are two critical points.
What do you need from your culture?
What is the surest and most sustainable way to ensure you get it?
For me, as a die-hard marketer always seeking some kind of competitive advantage, culture is the rocket fuel of your organization. It is the difference, and often gaping chasm, between a great strategy and a great strategy well executed. It’s something that can be mimicked (Tobi & Reed perhaps?) but can’t be copied. It is either working for you, or if you believe pithy Drucker memes, it’s eating you for lunch. And, while I’m at it, can we stop using the engagement word as a bell-weather for our culture success? The most eloquent yardstick I’ve ever heard for culture is determining how committed your culture is. (That’s another Stan Slap truth bomb)
Committed.
Roll that around on your tongue for a moment. Let that take root in your mind Mr CEO. How committed is your culture? Committed to giving you the full extent of their creativity, their ingenuity, their collaboration and cohesion? How much Share of Shower – a glorious analogy that the Head of Innovation at 3M once used – will your people give? Or, behind door number 2, how much are they just mailing it in because it’s just too hard, too unpredictable and too unsafe to care that much?
The how do you get it is a topic that deserves an entire post – and I promise to write that shortly. At the risk of a spoiler, it naturally goes back to understanding the culture(s) you presently have and an objective evaluation of Culture inside your organization. What I’m sure few will dispute is that the view from the Executive Boardroom is often very different from the view at the point of contact with your customers. And the rosy exhortations of Corporate Values posters do deserve the disdain and derision of our employees for being nothing more than feel-good corporate fantasy.
What we shouldn’t dispute, and what I believe Netflix, Basecamp, Shopify and Coinbase are all trying to say in their own words and way, is that culture is not a feel-good Kumbaya, foosball tables and vegan muffins exercise.
It’s about harnessing the intellect, ingenuity and inspiration of the humans in your care.
It’s about nurturing the creativity, collaboration and unbridled commitment of your entire organization.
And ultimately, it’s entirely about business focus, business performance and business results.
That’s all any Leader should be focused on.
** - for the record, when your countrymen are the reigning Rugby World Champions – Go Bokke Go – it’s very easy to be glib about the power, resilience and sheer awesomeness of a team firing on full passion – and full commitment!!