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Integrity, honesty, and decency are long-term cultural investments. Their purpose is not to make the quarter, beat a competitor, or attract a new employee. Their purpose is to create a better place to work and to make the company a better one to do business with in the long run.
if you weren’t selling a customer on your product then the customer was selling you on why she wasn’t going to buy it.
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. That’s where the process and the team came into play.
When you inevitably take an action that’s inconsistent with your culture, the best fix is to admit it, then move to overcorrect the error.
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.
Spelling out what your organization must never do is the best way to inoculate yourself against bugs that cause ethical breaches.
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.
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.
That model, built on a foundation of payments and manipulation, led to a weak organization. Your team wasn’t battle-ready, because it lacked what you need when things get difficult: loyalty and commitment.
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.
a hypocritical leader becomes vulnerable to being replaced by another, more walk-the-talk leader.
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.
They both saw people not through the prism of their rank or color but for who they were and who they could become, if given the opportunity.
If you try to be someone else, not only will you be unable to lead, but you’ll be ashamed to have people emulate you.
Costolo himself is a grinder. After having dinner with his family every night, he’d go back to work and make himself available to anyone who was still there and who wanted to get something done that needed his help. Pretty soon, a lot of people were working longer hours and getting more done. If Costolo wasn’t the type of person who could focus and be effective for very long hours, his plan never would have worked.
If the expressed culture goes one way but you walk in the opposite direction, the company will follow you, not your so-called culture.
While every company needs core common cultural elements, trying to make all aspects of your culture identical across functions means weakening some functions in favor of others.
One thing he said really stuck with me. He said that when he was recruiting he looked for people who were smart, humble, hardworking, and collaborative.
The questions employees everywhere ask themselves all the time are “Will what I do make a difference? Will it matter? Will it move the company forward? Will anybody notice?” A huge part of management’s job is to make sure the answer to all those questions is “Yes!”
If your organization can’t make decisions, can’t approve initiatives quickly, or has voids where leadership should be, it doesn’t matter how many great people you hire or how much work you spend defining your culture. Your culture will be defined by indifference, because that’s what you’re rewarding. If I work hard and my neighbor does nothing and we both have the same impact at the company, then her behavior is obviously the way to go.
If somebody behaves in a way you can’t believe, remember that your culture somehow made that acceptable.
I’d argue that being dramatically impolite can improve clarity or emphasize an important lesson
As they have dedicated their entire life force to doing great work, any rejection of that work is a personal rejection of them.
In business, the third style tends to work best. My way or the highway disempowers everyone beneath the CEO and creates severe bottlenecks at the top.
This is absolutely toxic to the culture. Everyone on the team will feel marginalized because they work for someone who’s powerless.
disagree and commit.
The final vital component of the decision-making process is “Do you favor speed or accuracy and by how much?”
At a large company like Amazon or General Motors, with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees and thousands of decisions that must be made each day, speed is far more important than accuracy. In many cases, it will often be faster to make the wrong decision, discover that it’s wrong, and pivot to the right decision, than to spend the time a priori figuring out the right decision.
do they have enough information to do so with accuracy?
The truth about telling the truth is that it doesn’t come easy. It’s not natural. What’s natural is telling people what they want to hear.
To do this, you must accept that you can’t change reality, but you can assign it a new meaning.
If you manage a reasonably large organization, you can be absolutely sure of one thing: at any given moment, something somewhere has gone terribly wrong.
“I know, with great certainty, that there are things that are completely broken in our company and I want to know what they are. If you don’t know what they are, then you are of no use to me in this meeting.”
If you find a problem, do a root-cause analysis and figure out what caused it. You will almost always find that the underlying issue was communication or prioritization or some other soluble problem rather than a particularly lazy or idiotic employee.
