Review: eShares 101
Imprinting Done Right
The Gist
Every new employee at eShares is on boarded with a full-day introduction course led by CEO Henry Ward. In this post, Henry explains the thinking behind the key slides in his deck.
The Gem
This bit from Tony comes from the very end:
I know how strange it sounds for me to say this, but I hope you will stay at eShares for a decade or more. I hope eShares will be a significant, if not majority, part of your career. My fantasy is not that eShares will be a great company. My fantasy is that when you eventually decide to leave eShares, you will go on to do even better things. The greatest thing Paypal gave us was not online payments. It was Peter, Elon, Reid, Jeremy, Max, and many others. The greatest thing eShares will produce is you.
Why I Chose this
The greatest piece of the advice that I was given in college was to find a great company to get imprinted at. “Getting imprinted” is being molded by a company’s culture to think about the world in a certain way. Over time, through practice, employees embody this worldview so that acting from it becomes second nature.
Of course, all other companies (not just the great one) are imprinting too. They just don’t realize they are. Unless a company takes great pains to design the patterns they want to reward and punish, they get the default settings of group dynamics.
This is the first rule of imprinting: you are always being imprinted upon — consciously or unconsciously.
It is so rare that a company thinks so deeply about how it works that its believes its core organizing function is to transfer this thinking to each employee. It’s even rarer when a company thinks so deeply about how it does this transfer that it seeks to help others do it too.
Chapeau Mr. Ward.
