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Yet the culture persevered for so astonishingly long because it provided a framework for handling every situation or ethical dilemma you might come across.
Bushido’s dictates were crisp, coherent, and comprehensive.
The samurai’s meticulous approach to building a 360-degree culture is extraordinarily applicable today.
Lol a bit of a meme here Horowitz
“corporate values” are basically worthless is that they emphasize beliefs instead of actions.
Even the samurai oath is oriented toward action: I will never fall behind others in pursuing the way of the warrior. I will always be ready to serve my lord. I will honor my parents. I will serve compassionately for the benefit of others.
It began with death. The most famous line in Hagakure is “The way of the warrior is to be found in dying.”
If you realize that the life that is here today is not certain on the morrow, then when you take your orders from your employer, and when you look in on your parents, you will have the sense that this may be the last time—so you cannot fail to become truly attentive to your employer and your parents.
The idea is to take care of your public and private duties day and night, and then whenever you have free time when your mind is unoccupied, you think of death, bringing it to mind attentively.
If you’ve already accepted the worst possible outcome, you have nothing to lose.
Bill Campbell, used to say, “We are doing it for each other. How much do you care about the people you’re working with? Do you want to let them down?”
The samurai code rested on eight virtues: Rectitude or justice, courage, honor, loyalty, benevolence, politeness, self-control, and veracity or sincerity.
There are three ways of doing right. Suppose you are going somewhere with an acquaintance who has a hundred ounces of gold and wants to leave it at your house until returning, instead of taking the trouble to carry it with him. Suppose you take the gold and put it away where no one can find it. Now suppose your companion dies during the trip, perhaps from food poisoning or stroke. No one else knows he left gold at your house, and no else knows you have it. Under these circumstances, if you have no thought but of sorrow for the tragedy, and you report the gold to the relatives of the deceased,
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As soon as the fire had been put out, Lord Soma instructed his men, “Find his body. It is such a shame!” They searched through the burnt ruins and finally located his charred remains in the garden area next to the residence. Blood gushed from his stomach as they turned his prostrated body over. Evidently he had slit open his belly and inserted the document inside, protecting it from the flames. Henceforth, it became known as the Chi-keizu or “Blood Genealogy.”
Telling this story was a nearly perfect way to embed loyalty. The retainer was a mediocre person leading a mediocre life, but with one heroic act, he became immortal.
Morgridge walked the talk by staying at the Red Roof Inn, but even his example didn’t prove truly contagious. So he came up with a pithy axiom: “If you cannot see your car from your hotel room, then you are paying too much.”
We have three rules here at Netscape. The first rule is if you see a snake, don’t call committees, don’t call your buddies, don’t form a team, don’t get a meeting together, just kill the snake. The second rule is don’t go back and play with dead snakes. Too many people waste too much time on decisions that have already been made. And the third rule of snakes is: all opportunities start out looking like snakes.
“The first thing you need to know is that you cannot work off a list of questions, because if you do you won’t listen and you will miss the most important question: the follow-up question.”
Well, before I interview anyone I start by asking what their intentions are and I say, “I will help you get those intentions, but you have to trust me.”
scary. I asked him what his intentions were and he said, “It’s my intention to let people know that you shouldn’t be defined by the very worst thing that you have ever done in your life. People can be redeemed.” I said, “I got it and will help you get it, but you have to trust me.”
Two, they were trying to figure out if you could be exploited. Every
tier had a Rock Boss or a crew that ran the tier. Outside your cell you walked into a little area called the Day Room, which had toilets, showers, and some community tables. Rock Bosses sat on the tables like lions looking for prey. A Rock Boss would be more chill than his second in command and his guys; if he was a lion, his guys were the hyenas.
the Melanics, you couldn’t run a straight coup and take over violently because part of our code was that you could never physically violate another member. So my takeover had to be psychological. I’d use the Socratic method at our meetings and ask the group questions such as “If a leader does not follow his own instructions, is he a leader?”
Senghor focused on the following principles: Never take advantage of members. Never physically accost them. And, in general, treat them the way you’d want to be treated.
Culture is weird like that. Because it’s a consequence of actions rather than beliefs, it almost never ends up exactly as you intend it. This is why it’s not a “set it and forget it” endeavor. You must constantly examine and reshape your culture or it won’t be your culture at all.
Once he realized he had to make significant changes, Senghor knew that he had to align his team more tightly. He used one of the best techniques for changing a culture—constant contact.
How do you get an organization to behave when you’re not around to supervise? How do you make sure the behaviors that you prescribe result in the culture that you want? How can you tell what’s actually going on? How can you know if you’ve succeeded?
Your own perspective on the culture is not that relevant.
You may be adopting an organizing principle you don’t understand. For example, Intel created a casual-dress standard to promote meritocracy. Its leaders believed the best idea should win, not the idea from the highest-ranking person in the fanciest suit. Many current Silicon Valley companies don’t know that history, and adopt the casual dress without adopting the meritocracy that underpinned it.
the predominant culture may not fit your business. Intel ran that way because the top engineers were as important in the decision-making process as the top executives.
The best way to understand your culture is not through what managers tell you, but through how new employees behave.
First impressions of a culture are difficult to reverse. This is why new-employee orientation is better thought of as new-employee cultural orientation. Cultural orientation is your chance to make clear the culture you want and how you intend to get it. What behaviors will be rewarded? Which ones will be discouraged or severely punished?
So trying to screen for “good people” or screen out “bad people” doesn’t necessarily get you a high-integrity culture. A person may come in with high integrity but have to compromise it to succeed in your environment.
I had a rule that everyone, including me, was held to: if you don’t complete all your written performance reviews, nobody who works for you will receive their raises, bonuses, or stock-option increases.
Senghor revealed their true motives by simply increasing the difficulty of the target—and the consequences of hitting it.
Slack’s core cultural values, empathy, ended up with a lot of unintended consequences. (As the samurai realized, virtues are superior to values, but until that understanding becomes widespread, a lot of companies will continue to have values.) The empathy value was primarily aimed at customers, but it was also meant to improve communication internally by helping you understand your fellow workers better. If you are an engineer and you really understand the struggles of a product manager and the process she went through to get the customer data she’s presenting, you’ll take it more seriously.
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“Yes, but we are proposing to tell the truth in such a way that what people hear is not true.” I thought: Oh no, he’s right.
Simply saying something you feel more or less comfortable terming “the truth” doesn’t build trust. What builds trust is the bona fide truth being heard.
Culture can feel abstract and secondary when you pit it against a concrete result that’s right in front of you. Culture is a strategic investment in the company doing things the right way when you are not looking.
It is delightful and felicitous for a man to subdue rebels and conquer and extirpate his enemies, to take all they possess, to cause their servants to cry out, to make tears run down their faces and noses, to ride their pleasant-paced geldings, to make the bellies and navels of their wives his bed and bedding, to use the bodies of his women as a nightshirt.
judging others primarily by their actions is also a revolutionary concept in many of today’s corporate cultures.
Genghis’s army consisted entirely of cavalry, so they were all equals and they all moved fast.
Each squad of ten men was part of a brigade of one thousand, a new “tribe” Genghis created to replace the Mongols’ hereditary ones.
Genghis created a remarkably stable culture by founding it on three principles: meritocracy, loyalty, and inclusion.
riches.” By converting his army from a genetic hierarchy to a true meritocracy, Genghis Khan rid himself of the idlers and mediocrities who rule in an aristocracy, raised the army’s talent level considerably, and inspired ambitious soldiers to dream that if they proved courageous and intelligent, they, too, could lead.
Anyone could have added enemy soldiers into his army—everyone from the Romans on had—but Genghis’s stroke of brilliance was treating those soldiers so well that they became
After having great success using Chinese scholars to administer the empire, every time he captured a city he would have its scholars brought in for interrogation—essentially interviewing them for open job postings. By incorporating foreign engineers, he captured the knowledge needed to build the most technically advanced fighting force ever assembled; in this way he adopted such weapons as the trebuchet and the catapult.
There are two ways to approach being the only black guy in the meeting. You can think, “Everyone is looking at me”—and start sliding down the slippery slope: “They don’t like me, they don’t like black people . . .” Or you can think, as I do, “Everyone is looking at me and they have no idea of the experience that is about to hit them in the face called Don Thompson.
My first night on campus, I am so excited to be at college and a convertible pulls up with three white guys in it and they shout, “Nigger!” I was stunned, but it was game on. Because there is no way in this world that you are going to deter me from what I am here for.
“What do you have to lose by coming in to talk?” It was a lesson for me. Now I say, “Don’t turn down anything except your collar.”
He said, “So you’re leaving because you didn’t get the award.” He cut right to the chase.
