The Culture is Everything
I recently saw this post floating around on LinkedIn and want to share some thoughts.
I believe the two key parts to a company’s long term success are:
- Their company culture
- Their overall product direction
The company culture makes the overall product direction happen. Or as Brian Chesky, Airbnb CEO put it in his post Don’t Fuck Up The Culture –
“If you break the culture, you break the machine that creates your products.”
So what the heck is culture?
Through working in and out of startups and larger organisations, here’s an attempt at answering this.
Culture develops from how people behave. It emerges from the roles and responsibilities people develop and how they feel about them.
- The habits from the sales team.
- The levels of empathy in mangement.
- The available resources to support learning.
- The acceptability of risk taking and experimentation.
- And the internal and external feedback loops.
So the culture is everything.
The overall product direction can rapidly evolve over time. For startups it is part of their DNA iterating to get a strong product-market fit. It takes guts and strong leadership to make the decisions that impact the overall product direction. For larger companies with brand reputations and a portfolio of products the challenge is to make the product decisions work well within their culture. This is exceptionally hard when trying to innovate – old habits die hard.
Ultimately it is a question of: how do people learn to be better organisations which make the overall product direction work, continuously?
That’s a hard ask. I’ll leave it with you to consider.
