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Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s
how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.
Likewise, long days are standard in the startup world—you’re in a race against time. But at Slack, CEO Stewart Butterfield is convinced that
if you actually work hard when you are at work, you can efficiently get a lot done. He punches out early and encourages his employees to do the same.
There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture—if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture.
“Coaching, and not direction, is the first quality of leadership now. Get the barriers out of the way to let people do the things they do well.” This created a new culture, a culture of empowerment: everyone was in charge and Noyce was there to help.
This atmosphere allowed ideas to prosper; if Silicon Valley is about anything, it’s about the primacy of the idea. Breakthrough ideas have traditionally been difficult to manage for two reasons: 1) innovative ideas fail far more than they succeed, and 2) innovative ideas are always controversial before they succeed. If everyone could instantly
Hierarchies are good at weeding out obviously bad ideas. By the time an idea makes it all the way up the chain, it will have been compared to all the other ideas in the system, with the obviously good ideas ranked at the top. This seems like common sense. The problem is that obviously good ideas
are not truly innovative, and truly innovative ideas often look like very bad ideas when they’re introduced. Western Union famously
Culture only works if the leader visibly participates in and vocally champions it.
If a great culture won’t ensure success, why bother? In the end, the people who work for you won’t remember the press releases or the awards. They’ll lose track of the quarterly ups and downs. They may even grow hazy
about the products. But they will never forget how it felt to work there, or the kind of people they became as a result. The company’s character and ethos will be the one thing they carry with them. It will be the glue that holds them together when things go wrong. It will be their guide to the tiny, daily decisions they make that add up to a sense of genuine purpose.
Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say at an all-hands. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. It’s what you do. What you do is who you are. This book aims to help you do the things you need to do so you can be who you want to be.
In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust. If I trust you completely, then I require no explanation or communication of your actions at all, because I know that whatever you are doing
is in my best interests. On the other hand, if I don’t trust you in the slightest, then no amount of talking, explaining, or reasoning will have any effect on me, because I will never believe you are telling me the truth and acting in my best interests.
No culture can flourish without the enthusiastic participation of its leader. No matter how well designed, carefully programmed, and insistently enforced your cultural elements are, inconsistent or hypocritical behavior by the person in charge will blow the whole thing up.
It was of course no easier to measure an exact 49/51 split than a 50/50 “win-win,” but Greene’s employees understood her underlying point: “If you’re negotiating something on the margin, it’s okay to give it to
our partner.” VMware went on to create a stunning set of partnerships with Intel, Dell, HP, and IBM that propelled the company to a market capitalization of more than $60 billion.
One value, frugality, is defined as Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency,
sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for growing head count, budget size, or fixed expenses. That’s a nice definition, but how do you drive home that you mean it? Here’s how: desks at Amazon were built by buying cheap doors from Home Depot and nailing legs to them. These door desks weren’t great ergonomically, but when a shocked new employee asked why she had to work at a makeshift desk, the answer pinged back with illuminating consistency: “We look for every opportunity to
save money so we can deliver the best products for the lowest cost.” (Amazon no longer gives everyone a door desk, as the culture has now been se...
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Louverture knew that telling people that agriculture was a priority wouldn’t make it so. He had to do something
dramatic to demonstrate that it was the highest priority—something everyone would remember. He forgave the slave owners and let them keep their land. Nothing could be clearer. Likewise, Hastings couldn’t just say that streaming was a priority; he had to demonstrate it.
the point is that when you are a leader, even your accidental actions set the culture. Walking the talk may be the most difficult skill to get right. Nobody ever does it 100 percent.
That’s the nature of culture. It’s not a single decision—it’s a code that manifests itself as a vast set of actions taken over time.
Bushido looks like a set of principles, but it’s a set of practices. The samurai defined culture as a code of action, a system not of values but of virtues. A value is merely a belief, but a virtue is a belief that you actively pursue or embody.
