Culture Shock

When I was interviewing last spring, I met a lot of people at a lot of companies.  The people and the companies varied widely in talent, competence, vision, and mission, but there were constants throughout.  One of the things that kept cropping up, especially at larger organizations, was that people spoke in buzzwordy catch-phrases that had very obviously been created somewhere at the top of the company and then forced upon the underlings as “culture” and “team branding.”    People were moving fast and breaking things, demanding excellence, working with stunning colleagues, and just generally guzzling that delicious cherry Kool-Aid (TM).

When you hear that kind of cultish lingo, it can be off-putting; I know it was for me.  There I was, talking to some of the brightest engineers, project managers, and MBAs in the country, and they seemed completely incapable of thinking for themselves, just parroting back meaningless phrases.  I mean, wake up, sheeple!  You’re playing right into the hands of the your corporate masters!  When I was weighing the pros and cons of the offers I got, I actually listed LinkedIn’s well-defined culture and values as a con.  I mean, it just seemed so phony to even make that list in the first place.  What company would ever be like, “We have a strong culture of settling for mediocrity!” or, “We willfully abuse our customers, because we enjoy it, and it makes us feel good.”

But in my time at the company, I have come to view the rigorous cultural definition as a huge positive.  Not because I think the values themselves are so revolutionary; they’re obviously great things to value or whatever, but again, pretty commonsense.  What I’ve found most useful is actually what originally turned me off in the first place — specifically, that they are so well-defined and brand-y.¹

What I didn’t realize about a well-defined corporate culture is that it provides a shared framework for communication, a sort of internal language you can use that everybody understands.  This is especially important in a large organization, where you’re likely to work with people you’ve never met before; it acts as a sort of common-ground handshake, like how people from the same school or city can find common ground over a shared sports team. “Members first!” becomes the new “how ’bout them Falcons?”

This shared language is also critical to the day-to-day running of the business, because it facilitates communication and provides a framework for business decisions.  When someone comes to me with a ball of code that’s held together with spit, duct-tape, and band-aids and copied to a floppy disk — and not one of those hard floppy disks from the ’90s but one of those actually floppy floppy disks from the ’80s — I don’t have to try to figure out how to tactfully but forcefully chastise this extremely hypothetical person that I’m extremely hypothetically managing.  I just tell him that I’m going to “demand excellence” on this project — in this case, excellence is cleaned up, well-tested, and preferably not floppy.  Likewise, when someone proposes a project publishing everyone’s private messages, you can pretty easily shut that down as a quick “members first” violation.

Those are obviously super contrived examples, but you’d be surprised how often the core values come up in conversation at work and how effective they are for framing the decision making process.  The core values’ success in this regard betrays an interesting quality about them — namely, that they were designed.²  This is probably one of those things that seems super easy on the outside, but there’s like a secret hidden world of best practices and domain knowledge and consultants who charge hourly rates in the thousands, like compliance with the Affordable Care Act, or celebrity Twitter account management.

Not knowing any of the insider knowledge, I attribute their success to the fact that they’re pithy, they’re bulletized, they’re imperative, and they’re ubiquitous.  They’re short and easy to remember, which makes them easy to sprinkle into conversation, and they come in a single short list; the company may value other things, but these are the core values, the ones we’re going to talk about and use as a framework for internal communication.  The fact that they tell us what to do and how to do it also makes them more tangible; they are a call to action rather than a list of ethereal concepts.³   They have also been visibly adopted from the top down; they get used by execs in meetings and speeches and are displayed prominently in internal communications like emails and posters, and because of the first three factors there’s not a lot of variation in phrasing that might confuse the issue.  They are, in effect, well-managed as a brand, which has been critical to their success.

I bring this up because, as I mentioned earlier, in my interviewing I encountered a lot of different perspectives.  One of the most interesting and, frankly, valuable perspectives I got was from the CEO of a pretty successful startup, who told me that as CEO he had two jobs: Setting corporate culture and identifying talent.  After that, he just gets out of the way. Since I still dream of starting my own (actually successful) business, it’s interesting to think about how I could apply what I’ve learned about corporate culture to my own business one day.  Of course, since that business is still extremely hypothetical, I guess I’ll just blog about it.