Why I created #Culturevist
I was hoping to gather 5-10 people. Over 50 turned up!
Organisational culture is one of my loves. I studied it during my Masters degree at University, helped large organisations understand it when I was an Advisor at PwC, and have been given a front row seat in a ride of a lifetime as part of the Yammer team.
In November 2011, I joined Yammer when it was start-up in the midst of hypergrowth. I was the 13th person in the European team.
We didn’t have a choice but to make sure we had an amazing culture. This is because, right at the beginning, I believe the biggest focus was on raising investment to grow the company. We did really well at that. So then the biggest thing holding us back was the number of people we had helping us achieve our mission. In addition to creating the conditions for people outside our organisation to help us deliver our mission, we needed to grow the people completely dedicated to helping us (also known as engaged employees) as rapidly as possible. We couldn’t hire talented people quickly enough. Well we could, but we wanted to prioritise long term success over short term wins.
It was fascinating to watch our culture evolve as we hired people and created processes and structures. I could see the specific small actions that had a significant effect on our culture. I found myself in such a unique and fortunate position.
But it could be, in a way, quite lonely. At times I could be seen as the crazy one, the lone nut, the maverick (all things that I was called). I thought to myself, I’d really like to meet other people like me. So I decided to try and gather a handful of people like me. To talk. To listen. To learn.
Here’s how the name came about:
I cared (and still care) about the Yammer culture *a lot*. In our of the first team meetings I attended, our CEO, David Sacks, inspired us with the phase that “everyone should be the CEO of something”. People called me the CEO of Culture. People started calling me the Chief Culture Office. I though back to this when I created the name. I thought of calling it “Chief Culture Officer”. But I wanted it to be more energetic. So I came up with “Chief Culture Activist”. And from that, it became… “Culturevist”.
So I created a really simple invite, and tweeted it. I was hoping for 5-10 people.
#Culturevist was born. We care so much about the culture of our organisation that we’re almost willing to lose our jobs for it. Our mission is to improve the culture of the world’s organisations so that they can be more responsive. We do this by sharing inspirational examples of success and failure amongst our growing network of energised Culturevists.
Join our movement at http://www.culturevist.com/.
