📣 Curious Quotes from the Author
“Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever. There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture—if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture.”
“There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard.”
“I began looking for these four:
Smart. It doesn’t mean high IQ (although that’s great), it means disposed toward learning. If there’s a best practice anywhere, adopt it. We want to turn as much as possible into a routine so we can focus on the few things that require human intelligence and creativity. A good interview question for this is: “Tell me about the last significant thing you learned about how to do your job better.” Or you might ask a candidate: “What’s something that you’ve automated? What’s a process you’ve had to tear down at a company?”
Humble. I don’t mean meek or unambitious, I mean being humble in the way that Steph Curry is humble. If you’re humble, people want you to succeed. If you’re selfish, they want you to fail. It also gives you the capacity for self-awareness, so you can actually learn and be smart. Humility is foundational like that. It is also essential for the kind of collaboration we want at Slack.
Hardworking. It does not mean long hours. You can go home and take care of your family, but when you’re here, you’re disciplined, professional, and focused. You should also be competitive, determined, resourceful, resilient, and gritty. Take this job as an opportunity to do the best work of your life.
Collaborative. It’s not submissive, not deferential—in fact it’s kind of the opposite. In our culture, being collaborative means providing leadership from everywhere. I’m taking responsibility for the health of this meeting. If there’s a lack of trust, I’m going to address that. If the goals are unclear, I’m going to deal with that. We’re all interested in getting better and everyone should take responsibility for that. If everyone’s collaborative in that sense, the responsibility for team performance is shared. Collaborative people know that success is limited by the worst performers, so they are either going to elevate them or have a serious conversation. This one is easy to corroborate with references, and in an interview you can ask, “Tell me about a situation in your last company where something was substandard and you helped to fix it.”
“Breakthrough ideas have traditionally been difficult to manage for two reasons: 1) innovative ideas fail far more than they succeed, and 2) innovative ideas are always controversial before they succeed. If everyone could instantly understand them, they wouldn’t be innovative.”
“Everybody wanted to show me the org chart, to make sure I understood the pecking order. I didn’t even look at it, because I believe that work gets done through the go-to people. They may not have titles and positions, but they’re the ones who get the work done.”
“Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.”
“Without trust, communication breaks. Here’s why: In any human interaction the required amount of community is inversely proportional to the level of trust.”
“Since tech became a consumer phenomenon, thousands of nontech people have come up with great ideas that use technology. But if their startups outsource their engineering, they almost always fail. Why? It turns out that it’s easy to build an app or a website that meets the specification of some initial idea, but far more difficult to build something that will scale, evolve, handle edge cases gracefully, etc. A great engineer will only invest the time and effort to do all those things, to build a product that will grow with the company, if she has ownership in the company—literally as well as figuratively. Bob Noyce understood that, created the culture to support it, and changed the world.”
“The extent of one’s courage or cowardice cannot be measured in ordinary times. All is revealed when something happens.”
“Culture can feel abstract and secondary when you pit it against a concrete result that’s right in front of you. Culture is a strategic investment in the company doing things the right way when you are not looking.”
📚 Cognition of the Book’s Big Idea:
Never underestimate the value of a company's culture. Examples from the past and present demonstrate that culture should be more than a list of values hung to the wall: it should be a collection of virtues that support everything your company does. That's because our actions, not our words or feelings, define who we are.
Define your company's culture.
Your culture should not be limited to the best aspects of your product or yourself. It should be the whole approach you and your workers take to work. To see if this is the case, write a list of the characteristics that distinguish your organization, and then ask yourself: are those characteristics abstract qualities that you strive to, or virtues that you can apply every time you make a decision? If your virtues aren't reflected in all you do, your culture may not be what you believe it is.
🛠️Fixing the Tech Industry
Culture is not a product or even about the individual, its about how the teams do what they do and how they make decision when face with a difficult choice.
Tech Culture is the same and different in every company. Dedication and hard work are always their, but also there’s a side to it that creates loneliness and division when we become too involved in our jobs that we can’t see above the rainy clouds. It’s becomes very easy at that point to put your head down and work through it, but the real solution is to get help and collaborate with other people who can help see that you shouldn’t be doing this on your own.
🤝Collaborate with others with this Social Media Prompt:
If you were to start a company, what kind of culture would you start it with?
My Software Stack: I use Skool for my Online Community Platform and ClickFunnels for my Landing Pages, Payments, and Email Sequencing. I use Substack for my Newsletter and Taskade for AI Note Taking/Second Brain/Project Management. I use my Personal Amazon Store for Tech and Book Recommendations.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Club 255 to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.