Shaping culture

In my previous post, I defined what culture is, as described by Ben Horowitz in his book “What you do is who you are”.  In this post, I continue to explore the author's views by looking at the first steps one can take to shape a team’s culture. With every team member bringing their unique character and personal culture to a group, creating a unified culture can be an enormous challenge.

So why bother?

Well, according to Horowitz, a culture will develop whether you like it or not. If it is left to grow alone, we leave the door open to the possibility of a toxic culture forming that may damage a team’s productivity and image. On the other hand, having the right culture can give a team an edge over competitors and even influence an entire industry.

To illustrate his point, he describes how Robert Noyce, founder of Intel, created an empowering culture for his teams that elevated engineers and their innovative ideas above all things. He removed the layers of management often seen at large companies and put everyone in a big room rather than separate offices. Engineers even became owners of the company through stock options. His egalitarian ideas improved how the business performed and led to the establishment of a Silicon Valley culture. That culture has in turn helped create companies that today, rule the business world.

Warning: a great culture alone does not make a great company. If your product is inferior or does not solve any problem for the market, your culture will not save you.

Great, where do I start?

The author advises to first determine what are we trying to achieve. These are the ideals that our culture should continuously strive towards. Although we can be inspired by other companies, we must remember that these values will create a unique culture that is specific to our team. Copying another company’s culture will not necessarily produce the same effect.

Horowitz uses the example of Apple and Amazon to highlight successful cultures that seemingly support opposing values. Apple's aim is to sell beautiful and innovative products, so they built a design culture that spares no cost to support that goal. That message was reinforced with the construction of their billion-dollar spaceship-like headquarters.

Amazon on the other hand, simply wants to sell cheap products. Jeff Bezos built a frugal culture around the idea of accomplishing more with less. He underlined that objective with ideas like getting employees to build their own desks using 10-dollar doors. Both cultures attain their goals: Apple designs nicer products than Amazon, but Amazon's products cost considerably less.

Remember to monitor

It is not enough to write down values, frame them on the wall and forget about them. Culture is forever evolving, and it takes constant monitoring to keep culture in line with our values. Any actions that are off-culture should not be tolerated as it sends a message that the team now accepts lower standards and in doing so, a new culture is established.

Adapt to change

On the other hand, a constantly changing business environment may require adjustments to adapt to new situations. Facebooks original motto came from an early desire to stay ahead of competitors through fast innovation: 

Move fast and break things

This helped get their products to customers as quickly as possible. However, this virtue later caused technical difficulties for external developers when Facebook became an application platform. To promote an image of efficiency and dependency to its partners, Zuckerberg replaced the mantra with one more suited to the new circumstances:

Move fast with stable infrastructure

To recap

Culture is a strong force that when combined with a great product, gives teams an advantage, even over bigger competitors. Though it’s compliance level will never be perfect, it must be seen as a target which teams pursue daily. In this post, I’ve looked at why it is important to build a culture and how to get started. Next time, I’m going to share one of the historical case studies from Horowitz in which he delves into the different tactics one can use to build a great culture.