I worked in HR because I wanted to make people happy. But I realized I just made people miserable. — French law student
“What do you think about the People & Culture thing?”
Honestly? I think it’s bullshit. — San Francisco expatAll they do is fire people! —Software engineer, Vancouver
Big If True
- All problems are HR problems. The solution and cause to all your problems is people.
- Head of Culture ≠ Head of HR. The people in charge of Culture cannot have the power to fire.
- Bottom Up > Top Down. Culture is bottom-up, day-to-day, and ordinary. Not top-down. It is alive.
Habits > rules. Word of mouth > announcements. Culture > beer, coffee, and ping-pong tables. Face time > Slack. p.s Nothing gets done on Twitter. - Founders make the culture, HR is along for the ride. The true mark of a Culture person is changing a dysfunction company. Most take credit for the founders’ work.
- Community > Hero. Rosa Parks was not a pioneer.** It was the ties of her community — both strong and weak ties — that made the impossible, possible. Comrades and community are the only things that have changed the world.
- Onboarding = Mission Control. It’s not a checklist. You are responsible for these people.
- It’s a mentality that onboarding is more than a checklist. It is welcoming a traveler into a new country, a new culture, with its new smells and sounds; preparing a traveler for a journey; and being at mission control making sure they make it, to the stars and beyond. - It’s a mentality that: Platform >Job. In startups, service beats product but platform beats them all. It’s the same for talent: a great company that is a platform to meet, work, and learn from talented people; on a big challenge; and make lifelong friendships; this beats them all.
- Because they won’t be back. - Hellos vs. Goodbye. The ending is just as important as the beginning.
- What you do when no one is looking > What is done when HR is watching.
- Recruiting vs. HR. The former is proactive but still analogue and hasn’t changed in 50 years. The latter is reactive but gets all the money and tech.
- Recruiting is input, Revenue$ are output.
- Psychometrics > Resumes. You already know why interviews don’t work. Replace recruiters with psychometrics for entry-level jobs, and redeploy them to where they needed.
- Shooting first is murder, shooting back is self-defense. Companies started ghosting first, as well as that dastardly habit of ‘entry-level job’ — but you need 3 years experience.
- Buzzwords = Bullshit. Listening to HR today gives flashbacks of experts, reporters, and weapons of mass destruction years ago. It’s entirely self-serving.
- In San Francisco, a VC told me, “Sean, out of thousands of marketers I’ve met, I can say only a few were true marketers. The rest were all, ‘Give me the money, I’ll do the seo, trend, hype, etc.” Sounds just like HR.
- Peach vs. Coconut cultures: Culture is real and we must not deny it. Only one thing is universal.
Most cultural frictions can be solved with the Peach vs. Coconut framework. For the remaining nuances, add hot/cold, sea/land, big city/small town. Cantonese then are to Spaniards, as Finnish are strangely to Japanese, and dim sum is Chinese tapas. Italians share more in common with Turks and Tunisians than Americans. “The West” doesn’t exist.
**Rosa Parks wasn’t the first black passenger jailed for breaking Montgomery’s bus segregation laws. She wasn’t even the first that year.
Just months before Parks was taken to jail, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith were arrested in separate incidents for refusing to give their seats to white passengers.
So why, when Parks was arrested, did things change?
A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances. It grows because of the habits of a community, and the weak ties that hold neighbourhoods and clans together. And it endures because a movement’s leaders give participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership.
