Nimble, Focused, Feisty. Sara Roberts
Читать онлайн книгу.
before their own ceremonial IPO. This is despite sniffs of disdain and outright pushback from the establishment. One commentator in 2012, for example, noted that Zuckerberg in his letter used the word “people” forty-one times in eighty-three sentences and the word “business” only seven times, then proclaimed that reality would soon overcome such idealism. “Whether thrust defiantly into the faces of would-be shareholders or proffered delicately as a corporate heirloom of inestimable value, such epistles are doomed to enter into a slow, painful strangulation as market forces have their way.”1
Why would a company’s founders—on the verge of becoming incredibly rich through the good faith of the investment community—bother to articulate and share thoughts and beliefs that go well beyond—or even contradict—the traditional concerns of business?
For the most part, a prospectus is a dry and technical document, heavy on whatever numbers and calculations support a firm’s approach to a particular way of doing business. The prospectus is written in this way because that is what investors look for when they are trying to assess the firm’s capacity to generate profit, gain market share, execute strategy, and earn shareholder returns. The founders of Google, Groupon, and Facebook, on the other hand, feel that something else—something beyond the numbers—has made them successful to this point and will help them continue to be great destinations for investment capital long into the future.
Note that those founders are not describing their vision or culture but something even deeper and more intrinsic to their purpose. I call this nebulous thing their mindset.
PART CANNON SHOT, PART WEDDING VOW
What is a mindset? The simplest explanation is that a mindset guides the way an organization acts and operates, but that’s almost a throwaway description that does not fully capture the power of the concept. In my view, an organizational mindset is the most intangible and yet critical belief to define because it is intrinsic to the organization’s culture, vision, purpose, values, strategy, and way of acting in the world.
Typically, you can see mindset most clearly in action. Yet, in many organizations mindset can be very confusing because it is not concretely articulated. Indeed, mindset can be particularly difficult to divine in organizations run by traditional CEOs who are not very open about what they actually think and feel. Holding a mindset “close to the vest” may protect a CEO from getting “caught out” whenever the realities of the market trump an ideal or view. If the company is forced to act in a way that’s contradictory to its mindset in a particular circumstance, then no one can call it out on that hypocrisy if the mindset is not clear. Yet, this ambiguity also forces the people in the organization to make guesses about the mindset, which leads to inconsistencies in decision-making and approach. On one day, in one division, the organization may be innovative and willing to bend over backwards for the customer. On another day, and under the purview of a different manager, the organization might be risk-averse or inclined to do as little for the customer as possible to avoid hurting the bottom line. What does the organization really think? Who honestly knows? But chances are you’d better be right when you make a decision or choose a path, or you will be in trouble, even though what is right can be different depending on the situation.
Fortunately for employees, customers, and investors alike, this kind of emotional hostage-taking is becoming less common. Founders like Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Andrew Mason, and Mark Zuckerberg are leading in a very different way by being incredibly clear, upfront, and open about the mindset they value, follow, and wish to instill or drive within their organizations.
I think the impulse to do so formally through a founders’ letter comes from a worry that what made their organization special so far is suddenly vulnerable to outside forces. An IPO, after all, is a transformative event. Other than a merger, I can think of no bigger “natural” threat to the values and culture of an organization. As we saw with Apple in Chapter 1, things can change dramatically when new decision-makers—read “shareholders”—become a de facto part of the leadership of the company. Indeed, those shareholders traditionally have very different priorities and desires that can be at odds with or even hostile to the most cherished aims or cold-blooded strategies of the founders or the management of an organization.
Articulating a mindset in such a public and definitive way is part cannon shot, part personally written wedding vow. It says “Back off!” to those who would challenge the core beliefs of the organization or try to change them. And it says “Let’s go!” to those eager to jump on board.
And while a founders’ letter is written to prospective investors, that cannon shot/wedding vow is aimed as much at people inside the company as outside. In fact, founders like Page and Brin intended the message to hit home not only with the 800 or so employees of Google in 2004, or the 53,000 in 2015, but also the employees of Google who are not even born yet. Page and Brin articulated the Google mindset in such a formal and provocative way because it showed their commitment to those principles forever.
A clearly articulated mindset is characteristic of organizations that understand the critical importance of culture. They do this because, as Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and senior executive Jonathan Rosenberg put it, “culture and success go hand in hand.”2
But the genesis of a culture is the mindset that the founders and leaders bring to the organization. The culture is built, in other words, around the way the organization intends to act and operate, which in turn shapes the organization’s strategy, operating model, and business practices, and drives the decisions that get made.
Nimble, focused, and feisty companies like Google don’t become that way by chance. In this chapter, we’re going to focus on the three mindsets that NFF companies have in common. Specifically, they believe that:
1. Fast is better than big,
2. Possibility is more important than profitability, and
3. Being hungry and “outrospective” is critical.
MINDSET #1: FAST IS BETTER THAN BIG
Companies that are nimble are strikingly different from traditional companies. They believe that being agile, flexible, and flat is essential for success in today’s dynamic world.
In contrast, most organizations in operation today retain the mindset that size, efficiency, and momentum are the formula for long-term competitive advantage. Chances are you work for or lead such an organization. We looked at this archaic belief a bit in chapter one with the Blockbuster story, but there are a thousand more lumbering Blockbusters for every nimble rival—although that’s changing as more dinosaurs find themselves stuck in tar pits.
Companies that believe big is better than fast have organized themselves to maximize efficiency and scale to deliver standardized products and processes to mass markets. This formula for success has largely shaped the world we grew up in. I remember seeing McDonald’s signs change over the years. In the early ’70s, they proudly announced that 5 million people had been served. Today, it’s billions upon billions. And each of those customers has eaten the same food across restaurants that look identical, all over the world. Henry Ford, the father of mass industrialization, was incredibly innovative in so many ways, but his defining difference came from grasping the power of being big in a world of millions of consumers longing for the same product. He built his factories to produce that product cheaply and efficiently—and was so focused on that mindset that he refused to alter his design or even the color of his automobile to meet variations in taste.
How do companies like McDonald’s, Ford, and Blockbuster deliver their products to a mass market effectively? First of all, they learn how to break down the work of the organization into the smallest specific tasks that are so simple that errors and variations have been almost eliminated, then they give individuals those tasks, which they call jobs, and get them to do their jobs in the same fashion, over and over again. They also need a hierarchy in place to assure those tasks are being done correctly. Supervisors oversee workers doing the same task. Silos form around tasks that are similar. Managers oversee workers who are collectively doing a variety of tasks.