The Kommerce Culture Keys
An explainer to how Kommerce chooses to work with people.
At Kommerce, we want to work with people we deeply like and respect and whom with we can do great things with together.
That’s the PC version — if I’m slogging my guts out, I want to be slogging my guts out next to really smart, nice people who want to change the world.
These culture keys explain the Kommerce and what we look for in the people whom we work with, as well as in our internal and external partners and stakeholders. These filters make it easy to look forward to going to work with each other everyday, knowing we’re going to be doing important things and executing on big ideas that change the world for the better, together.
- Ethical Compass : You have a line in the sand about what is right, wrong and in-between.
Aim: create a high trust, high performance environment where people mean well and can swing for the fences without having to look over shoulder, watch your back and wonder if they are going to get screwed for shits and giggles and other cheap stuff.
2. Communications Fidelity: mean what you say, say what you mean, leave the politics outside. Focus on the facts and ideas.
Ideas always benefit from having the shit kicked out of them. If they’re good, they’ll come out swinging. Don’t get tied to the idea — but tied to the process of having the strongest idea that has been comprehensively thought through.
It’s also always a really good idea to surface problems early and try to fix them. It means that if you stuff up, you can have a good conversation with the team about how to fix it so it doesn’t happen again (in the same way).
Aim: People exist on a continuum of communication styles, from passive aggressive, to conciliatory, to comfortable with conflict — to those that go looking for a fight.
We try to leave the bookend conflict styles at the door — both passive aggressive and the ones that go looking for a fight because it’s impossible to communicate clearly. It also costs a lot in terms of overhead to have to deal with real threats (conflict people) or perceived, imaginary threats (passive-aggressive people)
We work mainly in the goldilocks zone: conciliatory.
3. Impact: do you rescue dogs in your spare time, serve at church, do civil society work. — in short, do you give value before you take value
This means you’re engaged in the broader world, you have a perspective — and give a shit and you try to make a difference in your personal time. That’s what we’re trying to do at Kommerce — we each have unique and specific gifts and we want to leave the place better than when we came here.
Aim: People have a spectrum of generosity — there are givers, transactional people (who switch strategies) and takers. We try to keep the givers and leave everyone else outside. It makes it easier for everyone on the team to give freely. One taker can really muck everyone up — and make it so that no one gives — this video is instructional — Nicky Case
Adam Grant’s Give and Take has been amazing in formalizing why being giving is important. As well as how keeping score just adds more transaction costs.
If you’ve ever had friends that stiff you on the bill, you know how exhausting it is to hang out with them — and keeping tabs.
4. Self Awareness/Executive function: You mostly stop yourself from being an unreasonable asshole
You should also be able to pull yourself off the tilt (the poker term that describes when you’re off your peak game — when you’re not emotionally stable, are too vested — the list goes on).
Aim: This keeps the megalomaniac functions in check, and also creates the spur to do better, be better, behave better. It also keeps the conflict down because people have the ability to apologise to the people that they’ve stuffed up — and it keep things on an even keel. It also keeps assholes at the door. This means people aren’t their own worst enemies.
It also lowers the rest of the team’s transaction costs in dealing with people — so we can focus on our own work.
5. Swiss Army Knife — excellence at 2 or more areas of competence, speak/understand at least 2 or 3 languages
This demonstrates that you have an intellectual curiosity where you do things for the sheer fun of it, and a drive for mastery and excellence independent of remuneration.
Aim: As a group, this quality makes it possible for us to move fast and break things without going outside of the team at the ideas stage — and sift through ideas fast to find what is worth working on. It also means that there are deep pools of excellence that allow us to think, execute and pivot.
Also lowers our transaction costs — we don’t have to hire immediately — or if we do, there’s a subject matter expert to conduct the interview.
6. Humility and security
Given the swiss army knife tendencies we hire for, you are unlikely to the be the smartest person in the room on any given topic on any given day. You need to be OK with it, otherwise it will break you and that poisons and undermines the entire group.
On the flip side, if you have these qualities, it is a foundation to learn just about anything from just about anyone in the group.
The culture keys give us a strong base and a long horizon to dream big dreams — and most importantly, actualise them. It allows us to build for scale because we save to much on each transaction — it’s also allowed us to keep our team together in the past 18 months — and only add what is necessary.
Geek post script
Our culture keys are there because they make us more efficient on a couple of metrics: game theory and transaction cost economics.
In game theory parlance, the conditions for co-operative ITPD (iterated prisoners dilemma) are created — multi-agent, co-operative, complete information REPEATED game in our dealings mean that we harness the pareto optimum so it becomes a pareto equilibirum.
In transaction cost economics terms, working with people long term allows us to cut down all the other transaction cost economics — search cost, co-ordination costs, cost of state verification cost, transaction costs and enforcement costs. All of these cut into profit by costing us time — and yes, opportunity costs.
We play long games with great people.
Picture credits:
Piano Photo by Lorenzo Spoleti on Unsplash
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