What Heath Ledger’s Joker can Teach About Business Strategy
Hidden in the Joker’s famous line, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free”, is a lesson in business strategy.
How do you know what your organization is good at? Start with your culture. When and where do people eat lunch? Are meetings starting and ending on time? What kind of product development process is used? How does the product roadmap get made? The accumulation of these quirks, the expression of the history and values of a company, are the culture of the company. Any work that aligns with the culture will naturally be a little easier, turn out a little better, then work at odds with your organizational tendencies. Put another way, the culture of your company represents what you’re innately good at. Great companies turn their natural strengths into value.
Jeff Bezos famously built a culture where communication was shunned and teams had to feed themselves with two pizzas at a time. In fact, Bezos went as far as to mandate that teams should only communicate via API, no informal communication, no shared repositories of information, just API. This essentially turned the teams within Amazon directly into microservices. In turn this has allowed Amazon to externally monetize every major service that is developed within the company without much additional effort. If it works at internal Amazon scale, it’s likely to work at external Amazon scale. Fifteen years later everyone is talking about how two pizzas led to massive successes like AWS and Amazon Marketplace.
Steve Jobs is another CEO famous for having a massive impact on company culture. In Jobs’ case, he is famous for going over every detail, demanding excellence, and crucially putting the customer first. In 1997, Jobs’ said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology…” This wasn’t just rhetoric — his outbursts led a lot of very smart people over the years to work hard to solve these central mandates. This spirit continues today; in one story, Bob Messerschmidt had to come up with an entirely new heart rate sensor technology so that consumers could stay “on trend”. Obsessively putting the consumer first has allowed Apple to build the most valuable company in the world with a startlingly small array of products.
The takeaway from these famous success stories isn’t, “turn your teams into microservices”, or “empower a central group or figure to demand excellence on behalf of customers”. You can’t build a successful company by backfitting the unique things other companies do into recipes for success. One of my favorite business books, The Halo Effect, lays out this idea in detail. What you can do, is understand what unique aspects of your culture influence the way you do business, and align your business strategy to them. Like the Joker, find what you’re good at, and turn it into value.
At Urbint, one of our core values is being dialectic. I’ve had long, serious discussions about whether we should refer to parts of our graph as vertices (obviously) or nodes. The core of our product has always been in trying to distill the true facts about a city from all the myriad data sources available. The business really found traction when we aligned with a business problem, making predictions via machine learning, where the truthfulness of data dictates the quality of results. We’re aligned to a space where our cultural tendency to pursue the truth leads directly to business value.
