I typically avoid books on Business Management / Leadership…. but this one grabbed me from the start. The initial genesis for the interest was this podcast from Tim Ferriss:
A lot of what i read rang very true, so I took (a lot) of notes, which are set out below.
I’ve organised the notes into categories with key quotes as set out below.
Trust
In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.
Entering new markets
I often see companies that plan to go into new areas, but don’t want to shift their culture accordingly. Many consumer companies want to penetrate the enterprise market—that is, selling to big companies—but resist having employees who walk around in fancy suits. They believe that their original culture should suffice. But their results prove otherwise.
Building a great culture means adapting it to circumstances. And that often means bringing in outside leadership from the culture you need to penetrate or master.
Reinforcing cultural priorities
Make Decisions That Demonstrate Cultural Priorities: The more counterintuitive the leader’s decision, the stronger the impact on the culture.
Integrity, honesty, and decency are long-term cultural investments.
Figuring out required cultural changes
The best techniques for changing a culture—constant contact.
By requiring his team to eat together, work out together, and study together, he made them constantly aware of the cultural changes he was making. Nothing signals the importance of an issue like daily meetings about it.
Values v Virtues
A value is merely a belief, but a virtue is a belief that you actively pursue or embody.
Sales culture
…He instilled in our eight-person sales team the crucial four C’s. To sell, you had have
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
the confidence to state your point of view, which would give you
the courage to have
the conviction not to be sold by the customer on why she wasn’t going to buy your product.
First impressions
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?
People’s receptivity when they join, and the lasting impact of first impressions, is why the new-employee process is the most important one to get right.
Feedback
When I was CEO, 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,
Collaboration
At Slack, “collaborative” means taking leadership from everywhere. Collaborative people know that their success is limited by uncollaborative people, so they are either going to help those people raise their game or they are going to get rid of them.
Equality / Metriocracy / Inclusion
As a society, we often ask, “Why do we have so few African-American CEOs of Fortune 500 companies?” And we get answers like “Racism, Jim Crow, slavery, and structural inequality.” Perhaps we should be asking, “How in the world did a black kid from the notorious Chicago housing project Cabrini-Green Gardens become the only African-American CEO of McDonald’s?” If we want to figure out why inclusion hasn’t worked, we ask the former. As we want to figure out how to make inclusion work, we should ask the latter.
I didn’t even look at it, because I believe that work gets done through the go-to people. They may not have titles and positions, but they’re the ones who get the work done.”
These were Genghis Khan’s approach to inclusion:
He was deeply involved in the strategy and implementation, down to having his own mother adopt children from a conquered tribe to symbolize the integration process
He started with the job description he needed to fill, be it cavalry, doctors, scholars or engineers, and then went after the talent to fill it. He did not assume that every person with a particular background could do the job that people with similar backgrounds had done—that all Chinese officials would make great administrators.
Not only did he make sure that conquered people were treated equally, but through adoption and intermarriage, he made them kin. They weren’t brought into the empire under some seperate but supposedly equal side. As a result, they felt truly equal – and became more loyal to him and the Mongols than to their original clans
Compare this to modern companies where:
CEOs delegate inclusion programs to “heads of diversity.”
These heads of diversity are tasked with achieving diverse representation rather than with the whole company’s success. So they often focus on achieving specific race and gender targets rather than on finding talent from diverse pools.
Companies often outsource integration to hired diversity consultants who have no understanding of the company’s businesss objectives…. As a result, while hiring numbers show progress, the real story lies in employee satisfaction numbers and the attrition rate of new hires. The first will be low, the second high.
If the key to inclusion means seeing someone for who they are even if they come in a color or gender that you’re not used to, then it follows that hiring people on the basis of color or gender will actually defeat your inclusion program. You won’t see the person, you will just see the package.
Knowing when you have an issue
So how do you know when you’re off track? Here are a few signs:
The wrong people are quitting too often: If your business is going well, yet people are leaving at a higher-than-industry-expected rate, you have a culture problem. If they’re precisely the people you want to keep, that’s an even worse sign.
You’re failing at your top priorities
An employee does something that truly shocks you
Designing your culture and hiring
One way to think about designing your culture is to conceive it as a way to specify the kinds of employees you want. What virtues do you value most in employees?
Virtues must be based on actions rather than beliefs.
Making your hiring profile a big part of how you define your culture makes enormous sense—because who you hire determines your culture more than anything else. Patrick Collison, cofounder and CEO of Stripe, told me: Honestly, most of what ultimately defined us happened in the hiring of the first twenty people.
The most important element of any corporate culture is that people care. They care about the quality of their work, they care about the mission, they care about being good citizens, they care about the company winning.
Every time an employee works hard to make a change or to propose a new idea only to be met with bureaucracy, indecision, or apathy, the culture suffers.
Personalities – Dealing with Culture breakers
When smart people are bad employees
The Heretic:
Every company needs lots of smart, super-engaged employees who can identify its particular weaknesses and help it improve them. But some employees look for faults not so they can fix them, but so they can build a case. Specifically, a case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons.
He will convince engaged, productive employees to become disengaged and to rally others to do the same. They will question every management decision, break trust, and cause your culture to disintegrate
Why would a smart person try to destroy the company he works for?
He is disempowered: He feels he can’t access the people in charge, so complaining is his only way to get the truth out
He is fundamentally a rebel: Sometimes these people actually make better CEOs than employees
His is immature and naive: He cannot comprehend that the people running the company do not know every minute detail of its operations. He therefore believes they are complicit in everything that’s broken
The Flake:
Some brilliant people can be totally unreliable
The Jerk
This smart-bad-employee type can crop up anywhere in the organisation, but is particularly destructive at the executive level….If a company grows, its biggest challenge becomes communication. If a member of your staff is a raging jerk communcication can become nearly impossible, because people just stop talking in his vicinity.
The Prophet of Rage
Sometimes you run into an edge case emong your employees who you want t consider trying to reform. One special category of the Jerk is the type i call the Prophet of Rage… Prophets are incredibly productive and they have indomitable will.
No obstacle is too great, no problem too hard, and they do not care whom they piss off to get the job done. People refer to them as glass breakers, cowboys, and arseholes… Really they’re just jerks but often you don’t want to get rid of them, because who else is going to do so much high quality work?
When you manage a POR, you have to keep in mind that they often dish it out much better than they take it.
Here are three keys to managing PORs:
Don’t give feedback on the behaviours, give feedback on their behaviours’ counterproductive effect
Recognise you can’t fix a POR
Focus your coaching on what the POR can do
The culture of decisions / CEO behaviours
There are essentially three high-level decision making styles
My way or the highway
Everyone has a say
Everyone has input, then i decide
My way or the highway disempowers everyone beneath the CEO and creates severe bottlenecks at the top.
Ironically, Everyone has a say drives everyone completely nuts – employees dislike it even more than my way or the highway
CEOs are judged on the efficiency of their process and the acuity of their decisions, and Everyone has input, then I decide tends to balance informed decision making with speed. It also acknowledges that not everyone in the organization has enough information to make a given decision, so someone has to be in charge of becoming knowledgeable and then deciding how to proceed.
So it’s critical to a healthy culture that whatever your decision-making process, you insist on a strict rule of disagree and commit. If you are a manager, at any level, you have a fundamental responsibility to support every decision that gets made. You can disagree in the meeting, but afterward you must not only support the final decision, you must be able to compellingly articulate the reasons the decision was made.
As CEO, I wasn’t zero-tolerance about much, but I was definitely zero-tolerance on managers who undermined decisions, because that led to cultural chaos.
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.
In the speed-versus-accuracy calibration, the cultural question of empowerment plays an important role. How far down the org chart can a decision get made? Do you trust lower-level employees to decide important matters, and do they have enough information to do so with accuracy?
Critical values
Trust
Loyalty
We obviously can’t offer lifetime employment. I hope what we can deliver is that in fifteen years, when people look back, they will think that they were able to do the most meaningful work of their careers here. In exchange, I expect two things: first, ethical integrity. Second, that they optimize for the company rather than for themselves. If they satisfy those two expectations, then they have our appreciation, respect, and loyalty.
Your cultural checklist
With these thoughts on virtues that belong in almost any culture, we’ve reached the point where you’re ready to go make your own. Here’s a checklist of points to keep in mind:
Cultural design. Make sure your culture aligns with both your personality and your strategy. Anticipate how it might be weaponized and define it in a way that’s unambiguous.
Cultural orientation. An employee’s first day at work may not be as indelible as Shaka Senghor’s first day out of quarantine, but it always makes a lasting impression. People learn more about what it takes to succeed in your organization on that day than on any other. Don’t let that first impression be wrong or accidental.
Shocking rules. Any rule so surprising it makes people ask “Why do we have this rule?” will reinforce key cultural elements. Think about how you can shock your organization into cultural compliance.
Incorporate outside leadership. Sometimes the culture you need is so far away from the culture you have that you need to get outside help. Rather than trying to move your company to a culture that you don’t know well, bring in an old pro from the culture you aspire to have.
Object lessons. What you say means far less than what you do. If you really want to cement a lesson, use an object lesson. It need not be a Sun Tzu–style beheading, but it must be dramatic.
Make ethics explicit. One of the most common and devastating mistakes leaders make is to assume people will “Do the right thing” even when it conflicts with other objectives. Don’t leave ethical principles unsaid.
Give cultural tenets deep meaning. Make them stand out from the norm, from the expected. If the ancient samurai had defined politeness the way we define it today, it would have had zero impact on the culture. Because they defined it as the best way to express love and respect, it still shapes Japanese culture today. What do your virtues really mean?
Walk the talk. “Do as I say, not as I do” never works. So refrain from choosing cultural virtues that you don’t practice yourself.
Make decisions that demonstrate priorities. It was not enough for Louverture to say his culture was not about revenge. He had to demonstrate it by forgiving the slave owners.
These techniques will help you shape the culture you want, but remember that a perfect culture is totally unattainable. Your goal is to have the best possible culture for your company, so it stays aimed at its target.
