My current thesis is that culture is the company. All the other things we use to define a company (products, technology, customers, business model, etc.) are thus secondary to culture. The success of a company comes from its culture.
I traveled to the San Francisco Bay area, visiting friends and businesses, trying to understand what culture means for a company and how a company creates culture (usually, it seems, by accident). These are my impressions of those visits.
The immersive nature of the visits was very different than could have been achieved through the phone. Often, the most interesting ideas are the ones that occurred as sidelines and off-topics; a story or observation here, a chance meeting there.
The immersive nature of the visits was very different than could have been achieved through the phone. Often, the most interesting ideas are the ones that occurred as sidelines and off-topics; a story or observation here, a chance meeting there.
What is Culture?
An odd bit of synchronicity: a friend loaned me a copy of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, which I have read twice before. This reading seemed almost completely different and I absorbed much more. One thing jumped out at me that I had never seen before, because I was not ready to see it: This book is fundamentally about culture.My (current) definition of culture is simply how we do things. Culture may actually be the way the boundaries of a group are established -- you are within or without the group depending on whether you conform to that group's cultural norms. Then there's all the meta-stuff about how the norms are created, transferred, and enforced. If you read The Diamond Age with these ideas in mind, it's a different experience.
Biotech Startup
This is a company of 30-40 people working on genetic analysis systems; as it isn't clear to me what their public situation is I'll leave them anonymous.
I spoke to the CEO for 45 minutes. He was personable and enthusiastic and we shared a surprising number of common ideas; for example he had independently come up with something similar to my idea of fractal profit-sharing (although his idea is also unimplemented).
He also felt that culture was fundamental to a company. His approach to implementing culture is very basic, and consists of keeping a list of issues as they arise. He was comfortable with the fact that this list would simply grow over time.
He invited me back to visit again in a year. If I can do that, perhaps we'll be able to discuss some deeper issues we weren't able to cover in the time we had.
Zendesk
In the early days of object-oriented programming, I did a number of world speaking tours sponsored by Borland. Zack Urlocker, then the product manager for Object Pascal (and later Delphi) was also on these trips and we've been friends ever since. Zack was a VP with MySQL before it was acquired by Oracle, and he is now COO at Zendesk.
We were only able to meet for lunch so I didn't get too much depth about the company. We spent a little time discussion just what a Chief Operations Officer is -- the answer seems to be, "It depends on the company."
Zendesk is located in San Francisco's "Tenderloin" district, which tends to have a lot of ... character. Zack lives 1.5 miles away, rides his bike to the office, and has seen a few startling things on the way into work.
Zendesk is a great idea, because too many companies focus on their product and give customer service short shrift, so if Zendesk can somehow make that happen in a better way, they add a lot of value. Also, it's a business-to-business transaction and (I guess, from what I hear) those are somehow easier/better.
Zendesk tries to be predominantly customer-focused. They have a large team of "Customer advocates" who provide service and support to customers, and act as customer champions. Zendesk doesn't try to offshore this function or treat it as a cost-center, but consider it to be a core value. Many employees come from a customer service background.
My take on the place from seeing it for 3 minutes was open layout, lots of young programmers who want to live in San Francisco, but I didn't have enough time to discern any intentional culture.
Zendesk is located in San Francisco's "Tenderloin" district, which tends to have a lot of ... character. Zack lives 1.5 miles away, rides his bike to the office, and has seen a few startling things on the way into work.
Zendesk is a great idea, because too many companies focus on their product and give customer service short shrift, so if Zendesk can somehow make that happen in a better way, they add a lot of value. Also, it's a business-to-business transaction and (I guess, from what I hear) those are somehow easier/better.
Zendesk tries to be predominantly customer-focused. They have a large team of "Customer advocates" who provide service and support to customers, and act as customer champions. Zendesk doesn't try to offshore this function or treat it as a cost-center, but consider it to be a core value. Many employees come from a customer service background.
My take on the place from seeing it for 3 minutes was open layout, lots of young programmers who want to live in San Francisco, but I didn't have enough time to discern any intentional culture.
Tesla
Joe Nuxoll (whom I also know from Borland days) works at Tesla. He says this is his dream job because he gets to race the cars, photograph the cars, and design user interfaces for the cars. The main factory had already been moved to Fremont, so the Palo Alto plant was down to 1/5 of its normal activity but it still looked like there was plenty going on.
Joe Tells me that the character of Tony Stark from the Iron Man movie is based on Elon Musk. I'm skeptical, but it appears there is a lot of support for this. Joe shows me the motors and drive train and battery packs and we sit in a partially-finished model of one of the cars. It all does have a very Iron Man feel to it.
People generally seem very excited to work there. The new model, which is all built by Tesla for the first time (the previous model was Tesla power trains put into someone else's chassis) starts coming out in the next month or two, and you get the sense that it's an important milestone, and might even be their inflection point. Tesla seems to be doing a lot of R&D into both electric motors and power supplies, so I expect to see more greatness from them.
Things seem fairly open, at least in the programming arena. I don't, however, get any sense of a planned culture.
We meet a guy who is leaving the company the next day. He is briefly reluctant to tell us, but then the whole story comes out -- the place he is going sounds like a perfect fit for both his talents and hobbies. It's quite a small startup that has funding to create prototype tethered kite-wings that contain generators. So the wing (which seems to have a lot of electronic smarts and high-tech stuff) flies and sends down electricity. The guy seemed very bright and mentioned that he felt his ambitions were more stifled at Tesla than he had hoped. Ironically he made me think of Musk himself, and is thus a double loss to the company.
I'm not talking about Tesla in particular here -- I find it amazing that virtually all companies I've been aware of don't seem to take employee departures seriously. This is like doing experiments and ignoring all the failures, even though the bulk of your information comes from the failures. If people really are a company's "most valuable resource," then it seems to me that extracting as much information from departing resources would be an essential part of HR. Nothing says "you're screwing up" quite so clearly as the departure of one of your most valuable resources.
Google Mountain View (Main Campus)
It's not important that "Don't be evil" isn't the company motto. The people who work there know it isn't. The important thing is that they have spontaneously adopted it as their raison d'etre, and as a result I think decisions are starting to be made, even at the highest levels, with the idea that the company needs to follow its unofficial maxim.
Google's corporate culture might be summarized as "better than college." It seems to be oriented towards the academic mindset. If it had been around when I was in grad school, it might have been a very inviting possibility.
A notable part of Google life is the free lunch, which is very tasty. The goal of the free lunch is to keep people on campus, together, sharing ideas. This seems to work remarkably well -- it's hard to find a reason to go elsewhere for lunch.
There may be some downsides to the "continuation of college" approach. Certain aspects of Google life already seem to have an entrenched "because-we-do-it-that-way" feel. The interviews appear to be based on the premise that you are just coming out of college, and test what you've learned from books. There's a period that most new hires go through, working on adwords. Working from home is virtually unheard of. These practices might have worked well at the beginning, but rigidly enforcing them at this point might be detrimental to Google now that others are beginning to compete more in the quality-of-life arena (Facebook, for example).
A big problem with unintended consequences is that they are usually invisible to the decision-makers, at least at first. Google doesn't know who isn't applying to work there, or why -- they only see those who walk through the door.
I also wonder about the effect of the free lunch. This depends on the rest of the culture, of course, but if there's already an idea that more time == more productivity, then the free lunch reinforces that. Once you create a culture that rewards hours logged, it's hard to change it later.
Google's corporate culture might be summarized as "better than college." It seems to be oriented towards the academic mindset. If it had been around when I was in grad school, it might have been a very inviting possibility.
A notable part of Google life is the free lunch, which is very tasty. The goal of the free lunch is to keep people on campus, together, sharing ideas. This seems to work remarkably well -- it's hard to find a reason to go elsewhere for lunch.
There may be some downsides to the "continuation of college" approach. Certain aspects of Google life already seem to have an entrenched "because-we-do-it-that-way" feel. The interviews appear to be based on the premise that you are just coming out of college, and test what you've learned from books. There's a period that most new hires go through, working on adwords. Working from home is virtually unheard of. These practices might have worked well at the beginning, but rigidly enforcing them at this point might be detrimental to Google now that others are beginning to compete more in the quality-of-life arena (Facebook, for example).
A big problem with unintended consequences is that they are usually invisible to the decision-makers, at least at first. Google doesn't know who isn't applying to work there, or why -- they only see those who walk through the door.
I also wonder about the effect of the free lunch. This depends on the rest of the culture, of course, but if there's already an idea that more time == more productivity, then the free lunch reinforces that. Once you create a culture that rewards hours logged, it's hard to change it later.
Heroku
Heroku's goal is to enable other people by making them more productive. In fact, Heroku doesn't succeed financially until the customer succeeds. The more barriers that Heroku can lower or eliminate, the easier and cheaper it is for the customer to experiment, and the faster the customer can succeed.
Aligning the company's goals with the customer's success orients the company, affecting the culture strongly. (A similar example is Costco, whose profit comes from annual membership fees, thus focusing everyone completely on customer delight).
Although it was acquired by SalesForce, Heroku still has the feel of a startup. Lots of energy and enthusiasm -- many discussions centered around trying to preserve that, and they spontaneously asked for my "Reinventing Business" presentation. I think the fact that so many of the engineers were interested in ideas around company culture gives hope that Heroku can have some control over theirs.
Google San Francisco
I visited Guido Van Rossum in his office located at Google San Francisco. This was a very pleasant part of town, on the waterfront with a view of the bay bridge. Guido said that it's a longer commute for him (he takes the train and walks) but is better for his team. If I still lived in Emeryville (just the other side of the bridge) this would have been a near-perfect location.
This is great for everyone in the Python community because Google is very committed to Python and supports it directly -- Guido can spend significantly more than 20% of his time working on Python and everyone wins. His team also uses Python, creating developer tools for Google App Engine, so the result is that Guido can focus on Python all the time. I think we've seen significant improvements in the language since he's been at Google, not because he does everything himself -- not by a long shot; he tries to help and guide others rather than shouldering it all, and that's one of the great strengths of the Python community. Guido knows that although he helps, the community can do just fine without him, and that is his greatest accomplishment.
The most interesting part of this conversation came when Guido asked me about sales people, pointing out that they have an extremely different culture than the meritocracy preferred by techies. What he did not say, but occurred to me later, is that these are often the same people that beat up nerds in high school. There are no doubt other cultural divides within companies (senior management, certainly, and HR -- I don't know of any company where people really like HR, except perhaps Zappos and Netflix). These divides are amplified and supported by any organizational system that emphasizes status, hierarchy and distinctions, which is to say most organizations today. This is another challenge for my to-do list: how does the new organizational structure prevent these kinds of divisions and fiefdoms from taking hold?
Netflix
Netflix treats culture as fundamental, and practices a kind of cultural engineering to implement it. One of the better things I saw was the mini-musical performance that all new hires are involved in. I also liked the way people seemed to be able to create their own workspaces and in general control their environment, at least to some degree.
I primarily interacted with Carl Quinn's group and there were four people from the Java Posse Roundup including Carl in that group, so I already knew some folks and was thus more comfortable. Carl's group creates developer tools to serve other groups. They took me around to most of the other spaces in the company and I met numerous people and they all seemed pretty upbeat. At lunch beforehand people actually volunteered about the atmosphere of fear that can sometimes happen but stated that this happened only temporarily and by accident. (To prevent this I think it needs to be clear why someone is removed from the company, otherwise learning opportunities are lost and people can get afraid). I did not personally detect any fear, but I don't think I got the full picture so it could easily have been out of sight for me, or I might simply have been distracted.
Netflix seems to try to control culture primarily by "planting, seeing how things grow, and weeding" (my words). But I was surprised to hear that (according to Carl and Joe, anyway), more weeding tended to happen in the management ranks than elsewhere -- which actually makes sense to me if they are as serious about culture as they seem to be, because a bad manager can probably do more damage than most other positions.
The official cultural line is "Freedom & Responsibility." I regularly heard this phrase offered up spontaneously during conversation -- people here really do believe it and act accordingly. The cultural engineering that they do appears to be oriented towards finding people who thrive in such an environment. It's especially impressive that the company appears to have started out with culture as its foundation.
Although I felt energized after this visit, I probably wouldn't fit in as an employee at Netflix (I'd want to run a few test cases by them, such as: "Based on reading Jonah Lehrer's 'Imagine', I'd like to recreate sky above my desk with monitors or a projector -- what would it take to do that?" and see what the reaction is). But at least I felt much more of a sense of possibility where culture is concerned.
How do MBA programs get away with NOT doing some kind of company visits? I'm sure they justify it by looking at costs (MBA programs are big profit centers at universities) but the experience of actually seeing the inside of a company seems fundamental -- it's where the MBA is actually going to be, after all, and the more early exposure, the more time there is for the ideas to sink in. I feel like I'm getting a far better education in business by doing things my way than I ever would in an MBA program. Plus, it allows me to focus, and focus early, on the aspects that seem to be important to me (organizational dynamics -- do MBA programs even have specializations, and if so are they useful or more fossils?).
I primarily interacted with Carl Quinn's group and there were four people from the Java Posse Roundup including Carl in that group, so I already knew some folks and was thus more comfortable. Carl's group creates developer tools to serve other groups. They took me around to most of the other spaces in the company and I met numerous people and they all seemed pretty upbeat. At lunch beforehand people actually volunteered about the atmosphere of fear that can sometimes happen but stated that this happened only temporarily and by accident. (To prevent this I think it needs to be clear why someone is removed from the company, otherwise learning opportunities are lost and people can get afraid). I did not personally detect any fear, but I don't think I got the full picture so it could easily have been out of sight for me, or I might simply have been distracted.
Netflix seems to try to control culture primarily by "planting, seeing how things grow, and weeding" (my words). But I was surprised to hear that (according to Carl and Joe, anyway), more weeding tended to happen in the management ranks than elsewhere -- which actually makes sense to me if they are as serious about culture as they seem to be, because a bad manager can probably do more damage than most other positions.
The official cultural line is "Freedom & Responsibility." I regularly heard this phrase offered up spontaneously during conversation -- people here really do believe it and act accordingly. The cultural engineering that they do appears to be oriented towards finding people who thrive in such an environment. It's especially impressive that the company appears to have started out with culture as its foundation.
Although I felt energized after this visit, I probably wouldn't fit in as an employee at Netflix (I'd want to run a few test cases by them, such as: "Based on reading Jonah Lehrer's 'Imagine', I'd like to recreate sky above my desk with monitors or a projector -- what would it take to do that?" and see what the reaction is). But at least I felt much more of a sense of possibility where culture is concerned.
How do MBA programs get away with NOT doing some kind of company visits? I'm sure they justify it by looking at costs (MBA programs are big profit centers at universities) but the experience of actually seeing the inside of a company seems fundamental -- it's where the MBA is actually going to be, after all, and the more early exposure, the more time there is for the ideas to sink in. I feel like I'm getting a far better education in business by doing things my way than I ever would in an MBA program. Plus, it allows me to focus, and focus early, on the aspects that seem to be important to me (organizational dynamics -- do MBA programs even have specializations, and if so are they useful or more fossils?).
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