Tim Leberecht the author of the book “The Business Romantic” argues for designing organizations and workplaces that celebrate authenticity instead of efficiency and questions instead of answers. In this talk he proposes four (admittedly subjective) principles for building beautiful organizations and leading with beauty.
This article talks about the reasons why a strong culture—whether it’s depressing and gloomy or happy and uplifting—is better than no culture at all and why hard-driving management with high expectations can be better for a growing business than a loosely defined set of values.
Gary Vaynerchuck, founder and CEO of VaynerMedia, believes that the continuity of a great team trumps everything. Just like in sports—a team that has been playing together for a long time usually beats a group of superstars that came together for just a season. And that’s what he aspires to build at his company, a team that’s built to win for decades based on the continuity they have with one another.
The dominant, but tacit, influencer that has the capacity to both limit and liberate a business: are the shared organisational beliefs. They are a silent power within every organisation that’s quietly moulding the patterns of behaviour that will determine the culture and organizational performance.
Today, we live in a time of rapid change, when products and services often become obsolete overnight, and competition includes startups and companies in adjacent industries – the traditional leadership archetypes of a singular vision and strong command need not apply. To accommodate and achieve effectiveness in highly dynamic environments an entirely new value system is beginning to emerge for the leaders of the future, one that will continue to grow with the rise of new tools like artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation.
When an organization is brand new, very little is assumed about how everyone interacts or works together. It’s in this period when you have the greatest control to set the tone for the culture. The team of Median, a New York based organizational design consultancy, put together a checklist of steps to take to help founders and execs to build the culture they desire, from Day 1.
John Doerr, chair of the venture capital firm KPCB, has been a board member of Google (now Alphabet) and mentor to Google’s founders since the company’s beginning. Doerr sat down with Prasad Setty, Google’s VP of People Analytics & Compensation, to discuss the importance of People Operations and why companies should try to get clear on what the company’s culture is, because, Doerr says, “culture will allow your team, your people, yourself to make the right decisions more often and faster.”
A growing number of companies are starting to recognize, if you don’t get people and culture right, your efforts in every other area will ultimately result to nought. But building a Culture First organization is not about perks, or about being perfect, a perfect culture isn’t a culture, it’s a cult. Putting culture first means focussing first on employees, as the driver of company performance instead of concentrating first on the end result (profits to shareholders).
Building culture begins with the behavior of the leaders in organizations. To say that another way, if you are interested in changing the culture of your organization, your first step should be to look in the mirror and make sure you are setting the kind of behavioral examples you want everyone else to follow.
Like many startups, HubSpot in the early days turned its nose up at human resources. Compared to business priorities like product-market fit, it just wasn’t that important. HR is often viewed as the very bureaucracy that growing companies are trying so hard to resist. In time, the team at HubSpot changed their minds. Over the years, HubSpot has steadily increased its investment in people and culture. And as Katie Burke, Chief People Officer at HubSpot, watched other companies do the same, she has started to observe some common milestones on the path to making people a priority.
