The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth

by Eric Ries

Another sign of true cultural embrace of these principles is evident when they extend to employees who aren’t necessarily involved in Startup Way processes. The hypergrowth tech startup Asana is built on the notions of mindfulness and intentionality. “Most companies end up with a culture as an emergent phenomenon,” says co-founder Justin Rosenstein. “We decided to treat culture as a product.”17 Co-founder Dustin Moskovitz (who was also a co-founder of Facebook) adds, “From the beginning we were intentional about wanting to be intentional. A lot of companies have that conversation several years into their existence. We’d already had it in the first couple of weeks. Then we went about trying to manifest it and keep it extensive.” Asana works to regularly reassess and redesign its core values, and when the company makes a change, it launches the new value throughout the organization in the same way it would launch any other kind of product. Then it goes through the process of feedback and iteration on the road to resolution. Asana calls these problems “cultural bugs” and works to eradicate them the same way it would a problematic piece of software. When some junior employees came to management saying they felt “falsely empowered”—they had decision-making power, but their decisions were too frequently overridden by higher-ups—the company launched a process to restructure the way that power was allocated. Asana was started by some of the best founders in the world. This is what...