The Role of Culture and Environment
Many companies are created with the best of intentions, but the hard statistics prove out that 9 of 10 new businesses never make it. Of the companies that grow and flourish, the very best come with the ingenious ideas that filter down through generations of new startups and become the icons of culture. One of the earliest examples in my career was Hewlett Packard. The HP Way was known by every engineering student as the culture of the future and was the company sought out by nearly every new graduate. David Packard’s ideals for the culture of HP were widely known and studied. Many companies tried to emulate the culture hoping to recruit and create similar success. David Packard’s ideals were wrapped around a fundamental concept that its employees and customers were the lifeblood of a company and all of their efforts were tied to those principles. David Packard stated that “A company has a responsibility beyond making a profit for stockholders; it has a responsibility to recognize the dignity of its employees as human beings, to the well-being of its customers, and to the community at large.” These ideals started a revolution of culture in the Silicon Valley era.
Apple would of course be on most everyone’s list of iconic cultures. Steve Jobs’ relentless pursuit of controlling his environment, whether the experience with the ultra cool hardware products, the simplicity and integration of their software or the physical environments that he created, is world renowned. On the cultural front, there are many quotes that capture small bits of Apple’s mystique, but one of my favorites, “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me….going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful….that’s what matters to me” — Steve Jobs.
You could obviously write volumes on culture and environment, but with this simplistic introduction to the topic, I can sincerely say that we have always taken these two elements very seriously when creating a business. The physical environment in which you work is incredibly important to how you feel each day and how you interact with one another. Yet it is only one of the components in a successful business culture. When you purposefully strategize, plan and fully execute on your physical environment, it creates a solid foundation for a company to operate and grow. When executed well, it can become a cultural example for how the company will operate in terms of planning and execution. Workflow, spontaneous communication, group communication and the overall energy felt in an office environment are all functions of your physical environment. Office environments with good energy seem to feed on themselves and create a positive momentum, where lack of energy creates just the opposite and leaves everyone with a sense of dread that is almost certainly self fulfilling. Ergonomics, the ability to be agile, and mobile are all important dynamics in your office set up and layout. As a company grows and natural team alignments shift, it is extremely important that team members embrace change and can easily mobilize and migrate to new teams and new challenges. The more acceptable your environment is to that type of change, the more successful you will be in staying agile. Setting up efficient meeting spaces and investing in the best technology for communications in those spaces, allows for creativity, efficient workflow, easy communication and a sense of bonding for remote users. As a small company of 25 employees, we are already working out of 8 states and have an approximately 50% remote workforce. The proper use of technology creates a bonding that is usually only seen in a physical office, but today can allow a company to hire the best and brightest anywhere in the world and build tightly bonded and emotionally connected teams. And lastly, a mention to the important and significant effort to properly brand a company with well thought out and meaningful names, logos, colors, style guides, etc and then use those elements within your physical space to create a cohesion and an energy that is inspiring and lends to positive momentum and team culture.
Environment is an important building block of corporate culture, but is only one of many blocks in the foundation. Successful cultures have many of the same elements propelling them. Great communication, the ability to plan and execute, inspiring leaders and team players that are empowered and motivated to perform at the highest levels. Additional elements not seen in every successful culture are honesty, transparency and a desire to share the wealth of the company with all team members. The vast majority of startups create equity that is largely targeted at the founding group and the remainder of the company takes a distant back seat in equity percentage. Stock option allocations for the founders, compared to the entire employee option pool are typically 5:1, or even more, in the startup world. We have taken the cultural philosophy to reverse that lopsided ratio and promote a we-all-win together mind set. This creates the ability to attract the best talent, to attract lots of talent deep within the company and a motivation to execute against our goals as a team. When you have talented people, working hard, you build value, and you build it up every single day. We feel it is important to meet frequently as a team and communicate openly and honestly about the most important and even sensitive issues within the company. This transparency not only arms each individual with the truth, but empowers them to own and act upon issues that are frequently hidden in other companies. This empowerment becomes a motivator and enabler, allowing for the group to communicate and to understand and work together through problems as well as thoroughly celebrate victories.
To build a successful startup requires many ingredients and each time you build a company, the ingredients aren’t always the same. But consistently, vision, planning, hard work, execution and luck all play an important role in success. You control a large degree of your own luck, you do that with your decisions and actions every single day.
I have merely scratched the surface on this topic, but hope to have left an impression on the significant importance we place on our culture and environment in this company. It is not something you talk about once and move on, but is incorporated into our surroundings and everyday actions. I sign off with one last cultural inspired quote from Steve Jobs, “The people that are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that do”.
