

The culture myth - bootload
http://brandonhays.com/blog/2012/07/02/the-culture-myth/

======
potatolicious
"Corporate culture engineering" has always struck me as a cargo cult. Large,
immobile, boring companies try to reinvent themselves as small, nimble,
exciting... by copying the _symptoms_ of a great corporate culture, not the
causes.

Free food is not corporate culture. Scooters is not corporate culture.
Beanbags is not corporate culture. They are the natural expressions of an
already-working culture, and will not lead themselves to one just because
you've decided to build airplanes out of straw and bamboo.

Shortly before I left Amazon I was given a plastic (code) ninja action figure,
which was, supposedly, some kind of new corporate mascot. We were all
encouraged to take pictures with this ninja in interesting places, as some
kind of "fun" thing. But of course, you can't _order_ fun into existence, and
the whole thing smelled very obviously of stuffy suits failing to get it. A
fun, exciting company _invents_ traditions like this, not vice versa.

~~~
riffraff
I have a bit of confusion about your situation so pardon me asking:

If you work in a team of four and your manager hands you a toy ninja and says
"let's take pictures with it!", that is cool IFF there is no higher
management?

Or, is it cool only if a peer thinks of it?

Or, the issue is that the idea came from more people at a distance more than
X?

Or the issue is that they told you that you must take pics with it, rather
than saying "you know what would be cool" ?

Or is it just a general "this doesn't feel right".

Because it would seem to me that your company _invented_ a tradition like
that, it's just that you didn't like that it wasn't invented from the guy
sitting next to you.

I understand and have experienced the feeling of looking at BigCo and thinking
"boy, they are trying too hard to seem fun", but I am wondering how much of
the judgement is the _existing_ notion that they are a boring corporate.

~~~
potatolicious
It is very much contextual.

At my current job, if my manager hands me the toy ninja, I would happily try
to take pictures with it. Because my manager is very much knee-deep in the
trenches with the rest of the devs, designers, and QA folk day in day out. He
has, without fail, and repeatedly, shown that he understands the situation "on
the ground" and has always treated our concerns with the respect and gravity
demanded.

At Amazon there was not a chance - my manager was the guy barking orders from
up high, funneling the whims of even higher management down with little to no
filtering or defense for our ability to get it done. He was a straight pass-
through, and it sucked. Him handing me the ninja would have been a damned
insult (and it was).

The question is not job titles, it's entirely about the working relationship,
and this is also why "inventing culture" fails. When you have an incredibly
segmented workforce, where management is entirely separated from the grunts,
and neither side have any respect for the other, any such "culture" is
naturally a decree enforced from the top, rather than a genuine expression of
what employees already feel.

------
nwienert
While the article is a well written summary on what corporate culture can be
based on, I fail to see where the "myth" is. Is it that just having culture is
all thats needed? I don't think that was ever a misconception. In fact,
Delivering Happiness covers most of his points already (re: hiring for
culture, openness & feedback).

I think a better and less link-baity title would have been "What culture
should and shouldnt be". He didn't really disprove any specific "myth" and
only really stated an opinion on how to implement culture. His two unsupported
illustrations of bad culture ("Nerf guns and toy helicopters" leading to it
being "hollow") were IMO not really myths at all just a setup for the rest of
the article.

~~~
tehviking
To my shame, sometimes I write the headline of a draft of a post weeks before
actually finish it. I'd actually planned to change it, but basically spaced it
during my furious 2AM writing session. Please note I didn't submit it to HN or
anything, and I typically bristle at linkbait headlines.

But if there's any meat to the "myth" moniker, it's in the growing notion that
culture _can_ be cargo-culted by bringing in no-track vacation policies or
nerf guns.

------
einhverfr
Interesting thoughts. However for my business plan I have been looking at a
bunch of other things and come to some other conclusions.

The first thing is, you can't build culture from the top-down and if you try
hard enough you will look like Kim Jong Il. That there is a corporate culture
is automatic though and it arises from the everyday way people interact in a
business.

In the first days of a business, the founders tend to be very flexible,
willing to take on eachothers' roles as needed to some degree. There aren't
turf wars. Just everyone working together to make the company great.

Then you hire more people and a problem develops. People feel a need to
quantify and control everything. And so management develops. What management
really is there fore is to be a political filter which exists in between the
employee and the executives and ensures that nobody takes proper risks.

My approach is going to be somewhat different. First we are going with a
relatively flat model inspired by WL Gore, Valve and Github, and where we have
to add management and escalation, we make these as non-management-like as
possible.

Our key values are likely to be openness, collaboration, collegiality, and
entrepreneurship.

We will hire quality employees and get out of their way.

Executives will work side-by-side with employees on projects deemed to be of
critical importance. Leadership --- and followership --- will be distributed
throughout the organization.

This all sounds great until one comes back to the culture issue. Is it even
possible to manage corporate culture as one climbs the logistic sigmoid? Or
does maturity bring habits? In other words, is it true you can't teach an old
dog new tricks?

~~~
gaius
_People feel a need to quantify and control everything_

People don't feel this at all, inherently. Organizations say, we will evaluate
you by these criteria, and upon that evaluation will depend your
promotion/bonus/opportunity to work on projects of your choosing/whatever.

As soon as you do that, people make damn sure that what they do is counted,
and that is a perfectly rational response. And unless everyone knows everyone
(and their work) personally and in detail, there's no other way to structure
or scale an organization that wants to attract ambitious people.

~~~
einhverfr
I think most people do reflexively seek to control whenever they aren't
feeling secure about everything. When you primarily see risks, you want to
make sure you don't go there. The harder thing is to make sure you know where
you are going, instead of where you aren't. And there management gets in the
way.

I am not saying that quantification isn't important. It is even necessary.
What I am saying is I am not so sure that top-down structures don't get in the
way more than they help.

------
stevvooe
The manager I least appreciated had banners hung about with the slogan "Is it
good for the company?", from office space. Working for him was depressing and,
in my opinion, an incredible setback to my career. If anecodotal evidence is
ever accepted as proof that shallow attempts at fostering corporate culture is
detrimental, I shall more than ablige in providing my input.

~~~
Domenic_S
Were the signs hung with any irony?

~~~
stevvooe
Too many levels of irony to sort out at this point.

------
vosper
'If an organization has a strong vision, high trust in its people, and tight
feedback loops, it would be very difficult for it to have a “bad culture”.'

Of these three, only "trust in its people" is relevant to the development of
culture, in so far as culture means "a productive and fun environment that
I/others would want to work at".

Organisational vision is important as it pertains to preventing myopia; tight
feedback loops keep people on track - but a great culture is best achieved by
hiring highly skilled people with a good sense of humour, tolerance towards
the views of others, strong interpersonal skills, and perhaps a little bit of
wackiness - and letting them do their jobs, whilst trusting that when they're
goofing around having a laugh it will be positive for the energy of the
company and not come at too great a cost to their work.

Edit: Removed emphasis on culture solely for attracting employees

~~~
enjo
I think that's a shallow view of what makes a company enjoyable to work for in
the first place, however.

Tight feedback loops not only keep people on track, they provide amazing
feedback about what you are doing. That security in knowing that what you are
working on matters and that you are doing the job well creates security.
Nothing is more important to the morale of employees, in my experience, than
feeling appreciated and secure in their work.

The same thing applies to vision. I've met very few people in my life who are
ok with picking up a pay-check while working on projects that are failing for
companies that are adrift. A company that lacks vision, no matter how amazing
the team behind it, will inevitably be a terrible place to work.

At least in my experience. After all, it's not enough for me to really like
everyone I work with. I need the satisfaction of knowing that I'm doing a good
job (feedback) contributing to something of real importance (vision).

------
ethank
The division I co-run at my company was created partially to ship product to
market, and partially to ship culture as its other primary product.

We treat our culture as something akin to a shippable technology product,
complete with user stories, implementation, measurement, learning,
reiterating, etc.

Anyhow: [http://www.blackrimglasses.com/2012/02/16/culture-is-a-
produ...](http://www.blackrimglasses.com/2012/02/16/culture-is-a-product/)

------
InclinedPlane
The problem with mobs is that within a mob a lot of subtlety is lost. So when
weighing the relative advantages of one thing which has diffuse, gradual,
hard-to-define benefits versus another thing which has concrete, blatant, and
immediate benefits the mob will almost invariably pick the second one. And
this is a big problem for companies because as a company gets larger and
larger it stops being a single group of friends or acquaintances and becomes,
essentially, a mob.

Elements of healthy corporate culture such as trust are easily traded off by
the mob for the seemingly superior "accountability" of micro-management, for
example.

And you see the same patterns in everything at a big company. Ever notice how
internal tools in a big company are typically of very shoddy quality? That's
because the pain of poor tooling is diffuse and spread out over time while the
effort required to create better tools would be immediate and concrete
(representing some opportunity cost to develop some shipped feature or such-
like). And the same calculus applies to refactoring and re-engineering
efforts.

The same dynamics play out in society as large as well. It can be difficult to
stand up and fight for individual rights such as freedom of speech or the
right to own firearms in the face of strong, highly focused criticism. And if
such rights hadn't been enshrined in the US constitution they would be that
much harder to retain. Drug use being a perfect example. It can be a serious
uphill battle to argue for the right to, say, use heroin and that such a right
will lead to a better society. The same thing applies to, say, "letting"
employees come into work at noon and work a 4 hour day sometimes.

------
dreamdu5t
I would leave immediately if my boss handed me a plastic toy and told me to
take pictures with it to prove I'm having "fun." That is controlling,
manipulative, and degrading.

