Monthly Archives: January 2014

The hidden costs of poor culture

“Advertising is a tax you pay on having an unremarkable culture” – Robert Stephens, Founder of Geek Squad

There’s a case that pretty much all sales and marketing is a wasted cost because with great products and great culture you don’t have to sell anything, your customers do all the selling for you.

I’ll leave getting to great products for another time and space (aside from the fact great culture makes great product development so much better), but I will go further and call a bunch of other things as taxes on unremarkable, poor cultures:

  • Management wasting time patching over people problems rather than system problems
  • Poor staff retention = high recruitment to replace costs both in time and cash
  • HR team overheads dealing with the fallout from people that are prisoners in their jobs
  • Poor customer service because people aren’t invested in the enterprise
  • Terrible reputation amongst consumers which means low or no repeat business
  • Lack of engagement, innovation and meaningful product development

All of which builds up to a state where you have to keep shouting over the noise with your adspend. For the more mercenary readers out there the sums are simple: care about culture and your costs will fall.

Paul Graham’s Rules for Love – Part 3

Paul Graham, serial entrepreneur and big cheese behind Y-Combinator (funded over 450 startups, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Reddit) has a fantastic collection of essays containing all sorts of wisdom garnered over his years working.

Here’s my final highlight from a great one on “How to Do What You Love”

3. Prestige is opinion of the world, fossilised inspiration.
If you do anything well, you’ll make it prestigious

I’ve come across this sentiment in other places and for me it’s got great roots in one of the key modern leadership attributes; humility. The lesson I take from this is when trying to build something that people will love and get engaged with, do it for reasons that aren’t primarily about how you will be seen or rewarded for doing it.

Don’t embark on a project to make money. Don’t be in it for the awards you might get from backslapping industry pundits, be in it for the difference it will make to everyone involved.

Freedom from Command and Control

There are several small forests worth of books on implementing Lean in a manufacturing context, but very few on implementing Lean in a service organisation. John Seddon’s Freedom from Command and Control: A Better Way to Make the Work Work is a stand out entry for me; part manifesto, part searing critique of traditional management techniques, it’s a brilliant approach to applying the underpinning philosophy of Lean to a service enterprise.

Seddon uses the term ‘Systems Thinking’ to capture the approach to developing highly functioning operations. As a vision for how to manage better it really gets to the heart of the idea that a manager’s primary role is to act on the system to make whatever work is required, work better. Your job is to make it easier for your people to deliver on their ambitions, to be able to exercise their heads to make their working lives easier and as a direct result – in fact almost as a side effect – create significantly more value for customers and massively reduced cost.

Paul Graham’s Rules for Love – Part 2

Paul Graham, serial entrepreneur and big cheese behind Y-Combinator (funded over 450 startups, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Reddit) has a fantastic collection of essays containing all sorts of wisdom garnered over his years working.

Here’s some more highlights from a great one on “How to Do What You Love”

2. Always Produce.
a. Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.

Put any high performing, engaged team in a room and explore what motivates them and chances are you’ll get back a bunch of words like ‘achievement’, ‘competence’ and ‘contribution’. These values all have roots in the drive to build something, deliver a service, produce a feeling. What I really like about Paul’s ‘always produce’ rule is it’s ability to be both chicken and egg: you can bring up energy and engagement by just doing and you can also reinforce energy and engagement by seeing the results of the doing.

If you’re stuck in a rut, turning in circles, just start taking steps, make things different – produce!

The Machine that Changed the World

If you’re going to read only one book about the Toyota Production System, this classic has to be on the shortlist. The Machine that Changed the World is a deep, fascinating history and analysis of the impact of implementing Lean thinking on an enterprise, focused on the cultural manufacturing practices and philosophy embedded in Toyota. The contrasts against other car manufacturers are illuminating and occasionally brutal illustration of how not to operate.

Lean thinking is commonly associated with a focus on eliminating waste and building maximum efficienices into supply chains and production lines. The element not so commonly referred to (but just as vital and given equal prominence/priority by Toyota) is respect for people – the idea that your people are an enormous asset and should be given the space to use their brains and tools to act on the systems they work in to make things better.