In the world of business, when the company is about to gain such a massive and unprecedented growth, the business world tends to scratch its head and analyze the product roadmap of the company, its marketing budget or its proprietary technology. We imagine their secret of success is something in a spreadsheet or a wonderful algorithm.
Inside, however, a fact is different for the most successful founders and CEOs. Your company can be the most disruptive, but if your inner environment is a poisonous one, you will eventually implode.
Quotenestify is an organization where we study invisible architecture. A company is not a company because it provides free snacks in the break room or a ping pong table in the lobby. Culture is being psychologically safe to make a mistake, the shared values that influence tough decisions and team resilience.
So, here are four iconic quotes that will illustrate all the reasons why fostering a strong internal culture is the best competitive edge possible in business.
1. Peter Drucker, the ultimate corporate axiom.
Culture trumps strategy, for breakfast.
— Peter Drucker
The Context:
Peter Drucker may not have actually stated it in his books but it’s widely recognized and cited as his most famous maxim in modern management. Drucker was a life-long consultant to the world’s largest companies, seeing all too many great ideas go awry at the implementation level.
The Philosophy in Practice:
This doesn’t imply that strategy is worthless, it’s just that strategy relies completely on the humans that are executing it. Millions of dollars can be invested in having consultants create the perfect five-year plan. However, if the culture is based on “fear,” employees will conceal any issues with that plan. No departments will share to reach the goals of the plan if your culture is really siloed. Culture is the engine and strategy is the steering wheel. When the engine fails, you’re no matter where you’re going to be steering the car.
2. Ed Catmull: The Supremacy of the Team
If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.
— Ed Catmull
The Context:
Ed Catmull is a co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios. He writes about the long and hectic process of creating beloved movies such as “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo” in his book, Creativity, Inc. These films got a lot worse back then. They were saved by the Pixar “Braintrust,” a system of radical, ego-free feedback.
In the context of ‘The Philosophy in Practice:’
The “Eureka!” moment is something we idolize in business. Ideas are treated like fragile diamonds. The answer is Catmull and his entire story is turned upside down. Actually ideas are cheap and very malleable. The intellectual property of a company is not what counts, what counts is the mental state of the group. Rather than the idea becoming the star of the show, a vibrant culture is the one that carries the team. You don’t need to give them a blueprint to follow when you’ve created a team of high trust and collaboration; you can expect them to handle the rough-and-tumble of editing an okay idea into a great one.
3. Reed Hastings: The Reality of Values
Real values, not nice-sounding values, are revealed by who gets rewarded, promoted or let go in a company.
— Reed Hastings
The Context:
In 2009, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings released a 127 slide presentation online that illustrated the Netflix culture. It spread like wildfire, and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg has hailed it as “the most important document ever to come out of Silicon Valley. It eliminated the corporate verbiage and adopted a no-nonsense policy.
How to learn philosophy is an excellent book.How to learn philosophy is a wonderful book.
Nearly all businesses have a plaque on the lobby wall with the following wording: Respect, Innovation, Integrity. “But leaders’ actions are completely ineffective if their values are not written down,” cautions Hastings. If you talk about the importance of “teamwork” while you encourage the superstar jerk that is constantly disparaging their colleagues, your real culture is poisoned. Culture is not something that you put into a handbook; it is something that you put up with. To build a thriving ecosystem one of the things that you have to do is to have guts to fire someone that doesn’t fit in your core values.
4. Ben Horowitz: The Invisible Compass
Your culture is the decision-making process of your company when you’re not there.
— Ben Horowitz
The Context:
What You Do Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz, a former CEO and venture capitalist, is a book about how culture is key to success in high-stakes environments. He has learned about the varying cultures and groups of people including ancient samurai and prison gangs to gain insights into the formation and perpetuation of norms in behavior.
The Philosophy in Practice:
Culture is easy to keep when a startup is only three people in an office, and the founders are part of every conversation. So what if the company expands to a workforce of 3,000 in five time zones? The CEO cannot attend ALL of the product meetings and be on all of the customer service calls. Culture is the invisible compass that guides employees in the dark, as Horowitz puts it. It is the “gut feeling” of an employee that he/she uses when there is no manager present and he/she finds a dilemma situation. When there’s a strong culture, the employee’s decision matches the founder’s vision to a tee.
Establishing a good culture is the most challenging thing a leader will ever have to do; it’s a thing that has to be maintained, it has to be conscious of yourself and it has to be a matter of making hard decisions. However, when a community trusts, respects, and is united by a common vision, the possibilities are endless.
