nate's musings @riseofthemachines-blog - Tumblr Blog

“for Intel to succeed, Intel needed Noyce, Moore and Andrew Grove. And it needed them in that order. " Arthur Rock

Andy Grove, “High Output Management”. My Review, including the Manager’s Scorecard, Nathan Greenlee, Chief Culture Officer & Team & Culture

#startups

John Wooden's 9 Promises That Can Bring Happiness. Teamwork, culture matters, leadership.

Culture Is Key To Building A Great Company

I have been starting companies since I was 20 years old, about 20 years ago. There have been some seminal aha! moments along this journey.

One of these moments was when I learned about the SouthWest Airlines business culture. Hire for attitude, train for skill. The customer isn’t king, your employees are. Treat your employees well, and they will take care of the customer. “Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.” Stephen Covey

Yet another aha! moment occurred at a prior company, where I was a principal, I was deeply stung when senior engineering talent began leaving our company, giving up equity and working elsewhere for less money and fewer benefits. I realized something was terribly wrong with the culture. LEADERSHIT (a poignant typo describing the absence of leadership) was the problem. Poor management = poor culture = crash and burn! After this, I began my love affair and obsession with the best practices of culture.

In an email exchange I had with a fellow entrepreneur, I discovered an interesting point about culture and why it IS important. Here is what he wrote; “I think the valley, and we as tech entrepreneurs, put too much emphasis on culture. There are lots of successful companies that don’t pay any attention to culture. For example, the equipment rental company down the street, I don’t think the owner of the equipment rental company cares much if his employees are being engaged or not! Yet he has a perfectly viable company.”

I responded to my friend with this; “When I’m talking about culture for a company I’m talking about having founders and early employees aligned with the same vision and values. With the right mission and culture you will attract the ‘right’ people for your organization, whether it be an equipment rental company or a software company. Case in point, John Wooden didn’t recruit at UCLA. He built the organization and culture and the ‘right’ players found their way to him. Kareem and Walton actually recruited UCLA. The wrong fits, if they made it through, were quickly identified by the team members or the organization that Wooden built, not necessarily John Wooden himself.”

This is the only way to scale a company and stay true to the mission. Put a stake in the ground and be disciplined about what you stand for and especially what you don’t stand for. This can be very difficult when you have immediate hiring needs. I’ve settled in the past, for a hire that was just “good enough” and I’ve deeply regretted doing so every time. If you do it enough, you will quickly discover what Guy Kawasaki describes as a “bozo explosion”, or Marc Andreesen’s “Law Of Crappy People”. This is a propagation of unfit employees that trickles down from a few, or even one bad hire.

Great companies hire and fire based on values. Remember Peter Thiel’s Law: “A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed”. Having kegerators, food and video games all mean nothing if management are a bunch of assholes and the culture is a me-first rat-ship where nobody wants to work. Again, founders and early employees must be in alignment and drink the culture Kool-Aid; this is paramount. Experience has taught me that fringe benefits do not a culture make. Neither does money. Neither does fun.

The good news is, being a good person and creating a great workplace don’t cost money. This is something that startups and small companies HAVE to do to be able to attract and retain talent. We, as entrepreneurs and SMB owners, will never be able to win an arms race with Facebook, Google et al. But we can get the requisite talent if we create our own unique culture that attracts the right people to our cause, mission and company.

P.S. In 3 minutes, John Doerr describes what to look for when joining a company and differing cultures. – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg4uqUtPFvY

Benefits, Money and Fun are NOT Culture; Sorry Bro

The keg, the lotto pool and other tokens of fun are simply the artifacts of your culture. So, what is culture?

I’ve thought long and hard about what culture means to me and our firm. Brian Chesky of AirBnB has a good definition of both what culture is, and why it is important in his seminal “Don’t Fuck Up The Culture” blog entry. Here is an excerpt from that piece:

“By upholding our core values in everything we do. Culture is a thousand things, a thousand times. It’s living the core values when you hire; when you write an email; when you are working on a project; when you are walking in the hall. We have the power, by living the values, to build the culture. We also have the power, by breaking the values, to fuck up the culture. Each one of us has this opportunity, this burden.

Why is culture so important to a business? Here is a simple way to frame it. The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing. People can be independent and autonomous. They can be entrepreneurial. And if we have a company that is entrepreneurial in spirit, we will be able to take our next “(wo)man on the moon” leap. Ever notice how families or tribes don’t require much process? That is because there is such a strong trust and culture that it supersedes any process. In organizations (or even in a society) where culture is weak, you need an abundance of heavy, precise rules and processes.”

This quote has stuck with us at our company and has star-power here. Chesky talks about trust and the culture of families, this is particularly poignant if you think about the opposite scenario. Think about the child who is given no love, no support and no trust; this child will likely act out, display apathy and probably leave. How is it any different for your team? Culture is not something that magically appears, it is the sum total of leadership, support, team and most of all love. You have to LOVE your company, LOVE your team and LOVE what you work on everyday.

#culture #culture matters #Small business #smb #startup #startups

mercenaries vs missionaries

Taleb’s Rules via Global Guerrillas

Nassim Taleb's Rules

Link to source here:

What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest.

No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks. Odds are he would cut every corner on safety to show “profits” while claiming to be “conservative”. Bonuses do not accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.

Counter-balance complexity with simplicity. Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. The complex economy is already a form of leverage: the leverage of efficiency. Such systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy; adding debt produces wild and dangerous gyrations and leaves no room for error. Capitalism cannot avoid fads and bubbles: equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious.

Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning . Complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it. Citizens must be protected from themselves, from bankers selling them “hedging” products, and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists.

Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence”. Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.

Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains. Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.

Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement. Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).

Make an omelette with the broken eggs. Finally, this crisis cannot be fixed with makeshift repairs, no more than a boat with a rotten hull can be fixed with ad-hoc patches. We need to rebuild the hull with new (stronger) materials; we will have to remake the system before it does so itself. Let us move voluntarily into Capitalism 2.0 by helping what needs to be broken break on its own, converting debt into equity, marginalising the economics and business school establishments, shutting down the “Nobel” in economics, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here, and teaching people to navigate a world with fewer certainties. Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage.

A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news. In other words, a place more resistant to black swans.

At Greylock, my partners and I are driven by one guiding mission: always help entrepreneurs. It doesn’t matter whether an entrepreneur is in our portfolio, whether we’re considering an investment, or whether we’re casually meeting for the first time.

Fat Tails and (Anti-fragility) @nntaleb

The Strangest Secret

i have contacted billionaires with a 100% success rate. I have contacted officers of public companies with a high success rate. I am in contact with many entrepreneurs who have less than zero extra time. What is the strangest secret?

If I hear back from very busy and *productive* people, why don't vendors and people who I am trying to hire (I am trying to give them my money) not get back to me? Ineptitude is the answer. Plain and simple. What is the secret? "If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. The more things you do, the more you can do." Lucille Ball

Rant over.

Tesla Pitching Silicon

startupquote-blog

Markets come and go. Good business don’t.

- Fred Wilson

If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. The more things you do, the more you can do. - Lucille Ball.

"Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else." Peter Drucker

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

nate's musings