I am now about three months into a new role and have concluded about four times as many chats with colleagues in order to get my head round the place: why people are here, what we’re all doing together, how work gets done — and more importantly, where I fit into this picture.

Whilst these things are crucial to know on a personal level once you’ve landed a role, they have also become questions I now regularly have to answer as part of my role as a strategist: what do successful organisations look like these days? What do we all need to do or change in order to respond to the world, do better work and still bring money in?

In the small world of strategy I’m not the only one interested in these questions and thought I’d share some totally unscientific thoughts from a series of interesting email exchanges; the theory is fine, but often it takes a while for it to catch up with some things.

What do successful organisations look like these days?

The easiest way to answer this was to think selfishly and subjectively: what does my idea of a successful organisation look like? Where would I like to work or what’s the company I’d strive to run? In this sense, ideal doesn’t mean ‘perfect’, but aspiring to successfully juggle a few ambitions, of which having:

1. A solid business model and a management team with a clear sense of direction and priorities
2. At least one person to charm the pants off everyone
3. A culture of doing things first, asking questions later
4. A place that trusts people, eliminates worries and reduces friction

Now what do I mean by that?

§1. A solid business model and a management team with a clear sense of direction and priorities

It seems like an obvious point that people might roll their eyes at because they know or have internalised all this, but try a place with over a hundred people and it looks more like Chinese whispers. If senior management themselves don’t know this then it’s probably time to have a painful sit down and think about the answers till it hurts. With companies tending towards flat and autonomous (like with holacracy), this isn’t the place to be subtle or play wordsmith.

It shouldn’t be that hard to explain what you do — even banking is a simple business, undertaken by sophisticated people who choose to make it complicated.

Most people seem confused about the business model at this stage, i.e. another way of saying ‘how the company makes money’. Am I in a startup if we have 100 people? Am I in a business if there’s only 10 of us?

For the very basics, Udacity’s ‘How to build a startup’ lifts the fog: A startup is a temporary organisation designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. An established company already sells a product or service in exchange for revenue and profit. In other words, it already has a predictable way of making money and just has to repeat that.

Once you know how your place keeps itself alive (or tries to), actions should be there to sustain it. If they aren’t and the intentions don’t show either it should scream ‘warning’ from miles away. Employees sometimes don’t notice it (there are potentially lots of other things to get excited about, like people who seem nice) and even managers forget it (it’s easy to do the easy things, rather than the hard but necessary ones).

For me this is a crucial point because the business model also informs things like client relationships and new business priorities or hit-lists. These in turn become a big part of the reason to join a company: do they have (or strive to have) clients I like, admire and respect?

2. At least one person to charm the pants off everyone

There’s that famous research to back up the point that companies with beautiful people are more successful, but my point is a kind of distant cousin to it.

I’m talking about people whom you see or hear about long before you actually work with them, pulling you in like a sort of gravitational field. Funnily enough, Tatler of all places (a high society magazine) describes them better when talking about wedding seating arrangements:

Charming, chatty, well-informed and super-clever. They’re basically the people you want to eat supper with every night. When you see that you’re sitting next to them, you’ll gasp with delight. They’ll ask questions and they’ll actually listen and respond to your answers (an otherwise rare occurrence). And, yes, they’re usually women. They have the best stories — you’ll be repeating them for years.

They may well be women or men, but the point is clear — bring some personality into it! Let other people see that personality shine through a bit. Don’t force everyone on Twitter and pretend to be social, look at the people who are a magnet for it anyway and figure out how to get them in front of others. Then figure out how much power and reputation they get and make sure they don’t become synonymous with the whole place.

One day they will leave and take their friends with them, but until then enjoy the benefits; you’ll only realise what they are much later. On a personal level, I can think back to a time when I organised a training event for a bunch of industry juniors and asked a room of about thirty people how they’d heard about it. Nearly half of them said they were there because of one person who had mentored from a distance (or over email) throughout the years — a man called Russell Davies. Russell is interesting because he’s interested, and you’d have to be daft to be oblivious to that.

3. A culture of doing things first, asking questions later

Someone on Twitter said that in the olden days you had to create five brand messages a month, now some people do that in an hour (or something to that effect). The rest are waiting for approval to see if it fits the tone of voice.

While you’re thinking of how to formulate a response on how to do or say something, someone like Amazon has already shipped a product or done an A/B test and has some real-world feedback to go by. If you’re not doing something, anything, you’re probably behind.

If the business model, priorities and energy around the company are right (as per the points above), people might just gravitate towards the things that do make a contribution to the company. They’ll want their colleagues to recognise them as smart and valuable — and senior management should cherish this like a rare treasure and meet them halfway to turn cool ideas into reality.

If they are not so inclined, there may be a lot of virtue in trying to encourage people’s side projects from a distance: the things they do in their spare time just for themselves. I say from a distance because not everyone wants to surrender their ‘baby’ to a company no matter how much they like working there, and nor should they be expected to.

But is there a halfway house for times when people aren’t that proactive, nor do they have common interests? It might just be getting people together and asking them what they want to make as a group. It might take a while to agree, but some companies I know now have their own product lines now: Percolate started with granola and expanded, others brewed lager. This doesn’t mean that everyone should do granola or beer, but more places should get people together to figure out what they care about as a team and encourage them to do it, celebrate it, and put it in front of clients.

In other words, don’t tell people how to climb the mountain,
just tell them which mountain to climb.

Virtually every human being I know is more excited about the things you make for yourself, rather than the ideas you might present on a theoretical level because the brief asks you to. They’d much rather chat to you about something you launched into existence as an answer to a real problem. To paraphrase, “people buy why you do it as much as they buy what you do” if the circumstances are right.

4. A place that trusts people, eliminates worries and reduces friction

More than a decade ago when Bill Gates was musing on his role as CEO in ‘Business at the Speed of Thought’ he said that he’d much rather hear about the bad news than the good news — too much good news makes you wonder what bad news you don’t hear about. Question is, how do you tell people they can talk to you about anything, even if it might be their fault?

You don’t get to that level easily, but you can take small steps to that show you trust them number of levels: to meet their duties in whatever way they see fit (like Twitter with no set working hours or advertising agencies that leave wiggle room in the morning and evening as long as there’s overlap mid-day), to make decisions on new hires (Amazon’s ‘bar raisers’ come to mind), and provide them free access to resources that make it easy for them to do their jobs.

By the latter I mean the right perks, yes—a hot topic in some areas of the world where retention is insanely difficult but people throw money at ridiculous novelties. It says something about both the companies who offer them and the sort of people who fall for them: neither has enough self awareness when it comes to motivation.

The best perks are the ones that
let you focus on just doing your job while you’re at work.

They are uninterrupted work time days (“No meeting Wednesdays”), things that encourage routine (always providing lunch at the same hour is one example), things that help people make fewer decisions each day (Barack Obama’s secret weapon is wearing only black or navy suits so he doesn’t deplete his brainpower sweating the small stuff), and things that help them worry less about their life outside work (bring your dog to work days if you can, help with bringing up babies, finding a cleaner for at home and so on).

In short, if you’re not doing all you can to ensure people find it easy to do the very thing they were hired for (and you pay them to), don’t be surprised if there are more pressing issues to attend than reports or emails.