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The industry’s other article of faith was that companies needed to maximize market share by having a presence in every link of the computer chain,
But Jobs immediately killed the majority of Apple’s products, including most of its PC models, as well as all of its servers and printers and its Newton handheld computer.
he asked, “Okay, tell me what’s wrong with this place?” He answered his own question: “It’s the products!” He went on to inquire, “So what’s wrong with the products?” and to answer himself again: “The products suck!”
He would need to transform its culture to make that happen, but it would only happen if he built upon Apple’s strengths, not Microsoft’s.
Apple did integration better than anyone else. Part of the magic was its ability to control the entire product, from the user interface to the precise color of the hardware. Jobs went out of his way to keep the employees who understood this, user-experience perfectionists like him. Jobs said about one such employee, the great designer Jony Ive, “He understands what we do at our core better than anyone.” The company’s famous Think Different advertising campaign, which launched in 1997, featured creative geniuses such as Gandhi, John Lennon, and Albert Einstein. Jobs explained: “We at Apple had
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Here are the rules for writing a rule so powerful it sets the culture for many years: It must be memorable. If people forget the rule, they forget the culture. It must raise the question “Why?” Your rule should be so bizarre and shocking that everybody who hears it is compelled to ask, “Are you serious?” Its cultural impact must be straightforward. The answer to the “Why?” must clearly explain the cultural concept. People must encounter the rule almost daily. If your incredibly memorable rule applies only to situations people face once a year, it’s irrelevant.
“Players ought to be there on time, period,” he said. “If they’re on time, they’re on time. Meetings start five minutes early.” Was the rule memorable? Check. Did it beg the question “Why?” He had players asking everyone from the league to the New York Times “Why?” so, check. Did they encounter it daily? Yep, they ran into it every time they had to be somewhere. But what was he trying to achieve?
Coughlin Time is more of a mindset, kind of a way for players to discipline themselves, making sure they’re on time, making sure they’re attentive and making sure they’re ready to work when it’s time to start meetings. It’s actually kind of nice because once you get out in the real world, you’re five minutes early to everything.
she was entering a field that had witnessed the biggest win-lose partnership ever—Microsoft winning total dominance by “partnering” with IBM on the desktop operating system. VMware’s potential partners would be extremely skeptical of any independent-operating-system company proposing a similar “win-win.” So Greene came up with a shocking rule: Partnerships should be 49/51, with VMware getting the 49. Did she just tell her team to lose? That definitely begs the question “Why?” Greene said, “I had to give our business development people permission to be good to the partners, because one-sided
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“If you’re negotiating something on the margin, it’s okay to give it to our partner.”
One value, frugality, is defined as Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for growing head count, budget size, or fixed expenses.
Some of Amazon’s values are fairly abstract. Dive deep, for instance, encourages leaders to operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and investigate more thoroughly when metrics and anecdotal evidence disagree.
The shocking rule that helps is No PowerPoint presentations in meetings.
To convene a meeting at Amazon, you must prepare a short written document explaining the issues to be discussed and your position on them. When the meeting begins everyone silently reads the document. Then the discussion starts, with everyone up to speed on a shared set of background information.
Speed was the number one virtue he needed, so he created a shocking rule: Move fast and break things. Imagine you are an engineer hearing that for the first time: Break things? I thought the point was to make things. Why is Mark telling us to break things? Well, he’s telling you so that when you come up with an innovative product and you are not sure whether it’s worth potentially destabilizing the code base to push the product along, you already have your answer. Moving fast is the virtue; breaking things is the acceptable by-product.
At that point, the move fast virtue became more liability than asset. When outside developers tried to build applications on Facebook, the underlying platform kept breaking, which jeopardized the businesses of Facebook’s partners. So in 2014 Zuckerberg replaced his by-now-famous rule with the boring but stage-appropriate motto Move fast with stable infrastructure.
Nobody is allowed to work from home. But this was the technology industry—the industry that had invented the tools that enabled people to work from home! As the world exploded in anger, Mayer calmly explained her position. She had examined the virtual private networking logs of employees who were working from home; they had to use the VPN to securely access their work files. The logs showed that most people “working from home” had in fact not been working at all.
When Mary Barra took over as the CEO of General Motors in 2014, she wanted to dismantle the company’s powerful bureaucracy. It stifled employees and disempowered managers: rather than communicating with employees and giving them guidance, the managers relied on the extensive system of rules to do the job for them. The ten-page dress code was the worst example. To shock the system and change the culture, Barra reduced ten pages to two words: dress appropriately.
The new code empowered—and required—managers to manage.
When Michael Ovitz ran Creative Artists Agency, Hollywood’s leading talent agency, he, too, had no explicit dress code. But he absolutely had an implicit one. “In the mid-seventies, we lived in a world coming off sixties culture, where everyone wore jeans and T-shirts,” Ovitz recalled. “That’s what I needed to counter-program.” The dress code he landed on came from the culture of authority he sought: “If you walk into the room wearing an elegant dark suit, you pick up unbelievable positioning power. If you want respect, carry yourself in a way that commands it.” Ovitz wore elegant dark suits
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I went up to one agent and said, ‘Nice outfit. Are you wor...
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How you dress, the most visible thing you do, can be the most important invisible force driving your organization’s behavior. Ovitz sums it up: “Cultures are shaped more by the invisible than the visible. They are willed.”
we would have to become a culture distinguished by urgency, competitiveness, and precision. I needed to bring in a leader with those attributes. The person I hired as our head of sales, Mark Cranney, was not a cultural fit with the rest of us.
I knew why I hired Mark: when I interviewed him, I could tell he had the urgency, the know-how, and the discipline we needed. But I did not understand why he took the job. He knew we were losing and, given our granola-eating demographics, that we were probably losers. So what made him take the risk? I recently asked him, and his reason surprised me: I had risen as far as I could at an east-coast-based company called PTC; they had nepotistic politics at the top level. I must have looked at forty sales jobs in Boston and there was nothing good. The Opsware recruiter called several times and I
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He instilled in our eight-person sales team the crucial four C’s. To sell, you had have 1) the competence—expert knowledge of the product you were selling and the process to demonstrate it (qualifying the buyer by validating their need and budget; helping define what their buying criteria are while setting traps for the competition; getting sign-off from the technical and the economic buyer at the customer, and so forth) so that you could have 2) the confidence to state your point of view, which would give you 3) the courage to have 4) the conviction not to be sold by the customer on why she
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He was fond of saying that most reps had a Wizard of Oz problem: they lacked either the courage, the brain, or the heart to be successful by themselves.
We had an egalitarian culture borrowed from the early days of Intel: all employees, including me, sat in cubes.
Equality was less important than the cultural virtues we needed to survive.
The challenge was getting into a new business with the intention of making it the business. Almost no companies did that.
Hastings made a hard decision to demonstrate his priorities. He kicked all the executives who ran the DVD business out of his weekly management meeting. “That was one of the most painful moments in building the company,” he said later. “Because we loved them, we’d grown up with them, and they’re running everything that’s important. But they weren’t adding value in terms of the streaming discussion.” Hastings had long kept looking over his shoulder for a pure-streaming company that would run right by Netflix. He knew that that competitor wouldn’t have any DVD execs in its meetings. So why
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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.
Podesta wasn’t hacked because he used a bad password. His email was breached because hackers sent a spear phishing email pretending to be Google asking for his credentials because, according to the fake email, he had already been hacked. It’s a common tactic of hackers to create emotional urgency during an attack. Ironic as it is, pretending you’ve already been hacked is a common tactic because it can push people to quickly click malicious links without thinking through or checking the consequences.
Not once did Hillary Clinton tell John Podesta, “Don’t take email security seriously.” Not once would she ever have told him that. But Clinton’s actions overrode her intentions. It did not matter that the campaign had taken all the steps necessary to prevent the attack, because John Podesta imitated what Hillary Clinton did, not what she said. The talk said, “Secure your email”; the walk said, “Personal convenience is more important.” The walk almost always wins.
Nobody ever does it 100 percent. Even Louverture came up short. To convince slaves to join the revolution, he told them he was working on behalf of Louis XVI. He wasn’t. But without that lie the revolution might never have happened. Should he have risked the revolution to preserve his culture?
When the truth ultimately emerged, as I sold LoudCloud and repurposed the remainder of the company into Opsware, our culture took a real hit. People trusted me a whole lot less. But I had to hurt the culture—to stop walking my own talk, for a time—to save the company.
Resuscitating our culture afterward wasn’t easy. My approach was to admit all the sins of the past and reset us with a new level of transparency in the most memorable setting I could afford, which wasn’t much. I scheduled an all-company off-site in Santa Cruz, California, and rented rooms in the Dream Inn, a motel. The catered meals were ham-salad sandwiches with drink coupons. I made everyone double up in the rooms, ostensibly to save even more money. The real reason was that sharing rooms was almost unheard-of for Silicon Valley technology companies and I wanted them to remember everything
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The next day, I opened the meeting by saying, “Okay, I am the one who drove the last business into a ditch, so why should you trust me this time?”
Proud Uber employees circulated them widely: Uber Mission Celebrate Cities Meritocracy and Toe-Stepping Principled Confrontation Winning: Champion’s Mindset Let Builders Build Always Be Hustlin’ Customer Obsession Make Big, Bold Bets Make Magic Be an Owner, not a Renter Be Yourself Optimistic Leadership The Best Idea Wins Kalanick also defined eight qualities he sought in his employees: Vision Quality Obsession Innovation Fierceness Execution Scale Communication Super Pumpedness
elevated one value above all: competitiveness. Kalanick was one of the most competitive people in the world and he drove that ethos into his company in every way possible. And it worked: by 2016, the company was valued at $66 billion.
The underlying message was clear: if the choice is integrity or winning, at Uber we do whatever we have to do to win.
To counter Uber, Didi employed very aggressive techniques including hacking Uber’s app to send it fake riders. The Chinese law on the tactic wasn’t entirely clear. The Chinese branch of Uber countered by hacking Didi right back. Uber then brought those techniques home to the United States by hacking Lyft with a program known as Hell, which inserted fake riders into Lyft’s system while simultaneously funneling Uber the information it needed to recruit Lyft drivers.
Did Kalanick instruct his subordinates to employ these measures, which were at best anticompetitive and at worst arguably illegal? It’s difficult to say, but the point is that he didn’t have to—he had already programmed the culture that engendered those measures.
There is zero chance that Kalanick thought it was a good idea not to investigate an HR complaint from a promising engineer. That was not the culture he’d intended to construct. Nowhere in his set of values did it say that it was okay for managers to sexually harass their employees. Nowhere was it implied. In fact, by all accounts Kalanick was furious about the incident, which he saw as a woman being judged on issues other than performance. That, of course, was the opposite of “Best Idea Wins.”
Huawei, China’s telecom-equipment giant, had a similarly meteoric rise fueled by a powerful but buggy “wolf culture.” These transgressions led to lawsuits, charges of international bribery, and recently the arrest of its CFO for bank fraud.
When it comes to ethics, you have to explain the “why.”
Why can’t you pillage? Because pillaging would corrupt the real goal, which isn’t winning, but liberty.
Khosrowshahi immediately replaced the offending cultural values with the following new ones: We build globally, we live locally. We are customer obsessed. We celebrate differences. We act like owners. We persevere. We value ideas over hierarchy. We make big bold bets. We do the right thing. Period.
What, exactly, does “Do the right thing” mean? And how does “Period” clarify that?
Louverture spelled out what “Do the right thing” meant: don’t pillage, don’t cheat on your wife, take responsibility for yourself, personal industry, social morality, public education, religious toleration, free trade, civic pride, racial equality, and on and on.
It’s also critical that leaders emphasize the “why” behind their values every chance they get, because the “why” is what gets remembered. The “what” is just another item in a giant stack of things you are supposed to do.
