The Culture Code

When I started working as a software programmer I had neither any clue what culture meant nor I had any inclination to understand what it is. I mean I was just happy coding my way to glory. Little did I understand how culture leads to the demise of empires and companies if not taken seriously. In my experience as a techie as part of the software utopia; companies are entities that behave differently from each other riddled with the cultural DNA of the founders. I have been part of companies which were quite conservative in its approach and liberalism as an ideology was punishable if not by beheading then by pink slips. I have been part of companies which thrive on being in denial ,way away from the real world. I have been part of companies which foster a culture of innovation and openness. Culture does form an inevitable part of OB classes in a typical MBA course which students hate like anything. I mean from their stand point its obvious behaviour since they are here to bag creamier jobs and get rich. However what they don't understand is they would be spending the next four decades of their lives working and be subjected to the forces of culture that would shape their careers.

But people would say why am I hell bent on talking about culture. I mean who cares. Aren't I here to do my stuff in a killer way, get famous and maybe get rich. If that is the sole aim of life why on Earth would I give two shits about something like culture? This is what is the general perception when it comes to the younger diaspora with their Adidas Shoes and Apple watches. I wouldn't deny I thought exactly like that many years back save the Adidas Shoes part which I couldn't afford back then and Apple watch was yet to release.

Now let us talk a little bit about culture. When 2 founders get together to form a company they decide to bring about a culture or in other words create a culture code that would pass on to every employee who would be part of the company in the years to come. When Larry Page and Sergei Brin started Google they decided to foster a culture of innovation and openness. They told everyone to speak their minds out in open houses because they felt that sometimes the best ideas spring from the stupidest statements.Peter Thiel spoke about the same when he showed this Venn diagram

Google founders understood that quite early and look at what they have been able to achieve. Laszlo Bock talks about the same in his bestseller Work Rules .

Let us talk about another company HP Computers. Very early on Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard had decided they would create a culture around making HP an employee centric company. They believed that unless the employee is happy he will not be productive and unless that happens the customers will not be happy. Dave Packard mentioned the same in his book 'The HP Way'. Their underlying philosophy was a company is like a family and everyone needs to be looked after. They felt a leader is like the father of the family and needs to take care of the family in happiness or mire. HP has been that way all this while and the board has never taken kindly to leaders who downsized people. Carly Fiorina was one of those aggressive CEOs HP had who acquired Compaq and laid off 30000 people who she felt did not ahve any place in HP. The move wasn't appreciated by the Hewlett and Packard families and Carly had to leave HP. So HP was built around a culture of compassion, kindness, benevolence inspite of being an economic entity.

The question is how many founders actually think about culture as something that holds paramount importance in the larger scheme of things. I bet zilch. The startup culture has never had the time to think about the culture code till recently. After the Enron scandal, the phone hacking scandal that gulped Rupert Murdoch and most recently the scandal that revolved around Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, management thinkers around the world started thinking about culture as an essential part of organisational design. This amazing article describes how Harvard Business School never instilled moral leadership in their classes around leadership . Leadership taught by HBS merely talked about shareholder value, customer value and becoming rich which explains why Sheryl Sandberg or Jeff Skilling did not feel the need to inform the general public about their moves so long as shareholders were happy with the rising stock prices. The 'Wolf Of Wallstreet' showed how Jordan Belfort and his entourage felt it was alright to go against the law if it meant making money and having fun. That was the culture they created and Belfort knew quite well he'd be impounded and he was. Another series 'The Loudest Voice' shows how former Fox CEO Roger Ailes who was a pro republican and a staunch conservative believed in patriarchy. He felt it was alright asking sexual favours from women employees using his position and lot of women were tortured under his regime. He felt white supremacy is what the world needed and extended his support to white candidates who thought like him. If today Donald Trump an abomination is the President of the United States of America it is because people like Roger Ailes believed a person like him could bring back the Ku Klux Clan and look what happened. AOC or Roger Mueller or Comey can vouch for this statement

Why I am stressing on culture and penning down lines on an unusual topic like it is because in the last 10 years that I have been associated with startups in some way or the other I have seen some of the most rotten cultures inculcated by the founding team. I would cite a few instances that would add some flesh to my exoskeleton of a theory. There is a certain startup started by a smart woman founder who I was talking to for a senior management position with them. As part of their interview process I had to meet several individuals. By happenstance I met with one of the senior guys in their marketing team who thought I was here for a junior position. He ended up asking all the weirdest questions one can imagine and I was gobsmacked by the foolery that followed. Anyway when I expressed this to the founder she apologised and told me had actually met with the wrong person. Then when she asked me to come over again I met with a young chap who did not have any relevant question to ask other than commenting on my physical looks which was a reality check for me to get back to the gym to shed some extra kilos but I'd term the entire rendezvous as not decent. Discussions are meant to see figure out if a candidate is a right fitment for a company or otherwise. I passed on the same message to the founder who said she wanted to meet me twice but on both the occasions she bailed out citing some reason or the other. Then after this ballad happened for like 3 months she said she isn't able to understand why this is happening and again apologised. She said she would want to connect with me and then she disappeared like Freddie Price Junior disappeared from Hollywood. If you see the use case it shows that interviews are taken casually by the said company. They don't attach any importance to who is being interviewed and who would meet with the person if the position is for a senior guy. They don't feel the need to streamline their process by fixing the existing loopholes since the culture they have built around the company tends to take the interview process as another mundane thing that isn't as important as MRR or perhaps an IPO. What is far more bad than a bad culture is not to have the slightest realisation that the culture is bad.

I'd cite another shining example from the book 'Team of Rivals' by Doris Kearns Goodwin. The book talks about Lincoln's four contenders(Edward Bates, Salmon Chase and William Seward) for the Republican nomination before he became the President of the United States who did not like Lincoln. Lincoln knew that and as an astute political genius he also understood the men were the most competent lot he could find to execute his policies and build a culture of equality. So he made them part of his cabinet and together they built a culture of equality for America so the future generations can breathe in peace. Some of the decisions they took back then like the abolition of slavery(the whole nine yards around it that led to the American Civil War) and fostering an environment of equality is what made America a superpower 100 plus years later. The culture leaders in America have built over the years have made America the land of opportunities although Trump is trying hard to reverse that. Jeff Daniels killed it with this monologue in 'The Newsroom'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMqcLUqYqrs

Now that we do have a fair understanding how important it is to have a culture code in your organisation the next question would be how do I build a culture code for my company? Well the answer isn't as simple as it seems. The founders need to spend a lot of time brainstorming over this piece of puzzle which will shape the culture code of their company for posterity. A business is about fulfilling a consumer need through a product or a service. But culture is the process that ensures people who share this common dream come together to realise that. The other day I was reading 'Predictably Irrational' by Dan Ariely and there is an interesting piece in one of the chapters that spoke about how companies are confused about slanting on either the social norm side of the swing or the commercial norm side. Let me explain what that means. Every company in today's world talks about themselves as a big family and employees as members of their family but when things are not good they do not think twice when it comes to laying off people. They contradict all the things they stood for and slant from the social norm side to the commercial norm side to run business as usual without thinking twice about the devastation it brings to the life of an individual who gets laid off. To sum it up companies need to be extremely clear whether they wish to be on the social norm side or the commercial norm side. Billy Walsh as the manager of the 49ers was quite clear from the beginning he wanted to be an empathetic leader but a tough manager and thus the culture he built at 49ers had empathy for the team mate. It's the perfect example of slanting on the social norm side. On the other end of the spectrum we have several firms who fire employees as and when required and they don't maintain a social connection with them keeping things as professional as possible. Both the cases seem like an alright culture as long as you don't fall between the two.

What is even more preposterous is the fact that we are in the 21st century and we barely have a Chief Culture Officer portfolio in senior management. we have product heads, tech heads, business heads, HR heads, marketing heads, sales heads even strategy heads but when it comes to culture-nada. I saw this important lecture in the startup school website that talked about building a good culture and I would advise people to see it if they can. It talks about how one can build a great culture inside a startup and ensure it is followed by everyone in the company. Culture defines how a company if we figuratively view it as an organism is supposed to behave. The collective behaviour of all the connected nodes within the organism defines the relationship the company has with the external world and whether it would stand the test of times or perish as Dave Gray talks about in 'The Connected Company'. Incidentally even Game Theory's best outcome in 'The prisoner's dilemma' problem is one where everyone wins because of a culture of trust. Author V.Raghunathan beautifully explains it in his bestseller 'Games Indians Play' using Game Theory.

Now that we have established how important it is to define a culture in your company it must be taken as seriously as we take the balance sheet. It churns out bread and butter for your company and helps you steer through troubled waters. A culture of mediocrity as I see in a lot of 3 decade old Indian firms is because the founders never felt the need to inculcate a culture of excellence. What founders do not realise is that if culture code is not taken seriously then it passes on to the lowest common multiple of the company who believes it is alright to do anything since the company culture has nothing major against any form of action otherwise immoral or illegal. That is the purest example of how culture or rather a lack of it can denigrate a company's achievements into tatters. We can extend that example by saying that a culture of mediocrity in our education system or in our workforce is because the quintessential Indian dream was never about excellence. Four decades of Nehruvian socialism cut down our risk appetite and the quest for conceptual knowledge. The education system fuelled it further by suppressing any chance Creativity or Innovation had. We can't escape from the fact that all of us have built a culture around mediocrity post Independence in some way or the other. The reason why our students lack the fundamental understanding and the sheer ability to solve a problem is a by product of that culture we have fostered over the last 71 years. The Roman empire fell because they built the first democracy without building a culture that was reflective of the same. Similarly unless an organisation decides early on about the culture and designs the culture and ensures it is followed by every living member of the company it would face ample amount of difficulties in the scaling up phase. Nike has always focused on creating a culture of innovation as Phil Knight talks about in 'The Shoe Dog' and today if Nike is innovating continuously for the last 3 decades it is because of the culture it built around innovation. Same holds true for Ritz Carlton which has built a culture around Customer Service and doing what it takes to make the customer experience as awesome as possible.

After spending solid 16 years in the tech industry as a programmer , a product manager and most recently an entrepreneur I somehow feel our new age startups are completely devoid of culture. There is a lot of talk around tech, product, leadership, marketing, sales management, strategy but there is barely any music around setting up a culture code. I loved reading Kuna Behl's recent blog on how Snapdeal learnt from its setbacks and built a culture around consistent execution, clear communication and above all laser sharp focus keeping in mind real metrics like profitability. Here was this founder who screwed up pretty badly only to bounce back and create a formidable culture. I do not see that happening in most of the companies. I mean I have met 70 plus odd founders and each time I have asked them about their culture code I am either given grins or smiles or sheepish answers like,"Our culture is to become a Unicorn". It ridicules me to even hear such frivolous statements and shows the apathy founders have when it comes to culture code. Its time to take culture seriously and unless startups realise that in the nick of time we would not have a sustainable company around.