Nimble, Focused, Feisty. Sara Roberts
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the fabric of how the organization operates, culture serves as the glue that binds everyone together around norms, expectations, mindsets, and behaviors. In the best organizations, this sense of cohesion and direction is aligned with programs, practices, and processes that reinforce a sense of rightness and shared passion in directing energies toward common goals.
When culture provides the kind of clarity and intentionality that support its “why” or purpose and the characteristics of its “how,” it helps people see and understand where they need to go.
Chatman describes companies that are highly adaptable, innovative, and values-driven as characterized by “risk-taking, willingness to experiment, initiative-taking, along with the ability to be fast-moving and quick to take advantage of opportunities.”
NIMBLE, FOCUSED, AND FEISTY
When I consider Chatman’s research through the lens of my own and add my experience working directly with organizations that thrive or struggle, I see the types of companies she’s talking about as ones that have a very particular type of culture: one that is “nimble, focused, and feisty.” These are the companies that win in the twenty-first century.
Let’s look at each of these traits in turn.
Nimble
Companies that are nimble have structures and processes to guide them, but they encourage and foster adaptability, innovation, and risk-taking rather than impede it. This flexibility allows them to respond quickly to new developments, market shifts, opportunities, learnings, or customer demands.
Focused
Companies that are focused are not free-for-alls without limits. Instead, they work hard to build consensus and alignment around the culture as a way of binding employees together in the pursuit of common goals and mutual passions. That shared mission is reinforced by how the members of the culture communicate, work together, make decisions, and plan, among other activities. The unified sense of purpose that results helps people focus like a laser on the customer and understand how their individual contributions make a difference.
Feisty
And companies that are feisty have leaders and team members who are oriented toward making a major difference in the world and are eager to act bold and play big. They hire, promote, and reward accordingly, and they reject people who are not exceptional, creative, or driven enough to meet those expectations or who do not fit the culture and play well with others.
Throughout the chapters of part one of the book, I will share how these companies bring these characteristics to life through each of these three lenses.
SHARING PASSION
Brian Chesky, the CEO and co-founder of Airbnb, published a famous memo in 2013 that he sent to all the employees of his firm as a reminder to keep culture front and center. The memo was titled “Don’t Fuck Up the Culture” and it was based on advice given to the senior team by noted venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Thiel had just given Airbnb $150 million in additional funding, and Chesky asked him for his single most important piece of advice for their continued success. Chesky was surprised that Thiel would emphasize culture, but Thiel knew that culture had been critical in Airbnb’s success so far and would continue to be in the future so long as that culture did not become stale, bureaucratic, and stifling. Airbnb, after all, had a nifty idea and a good approach, but it owned no tangible assets, just like Uber, Facebook, and Alibaba, some of the biggest companies in the world today. What Airbnb did have that would be more difficult to replicate or compete against was its culture or its how.
Chesky did a nice job summing up why that was important. “Culture,” he wrote, “is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.” Airbnb has very deliberately established a particular culture—one that supports creativity, individual decision-making, problem-solving, customer closeness, collaboration across fluid teams, and fun.15 The danger, according to Thiel, is that as Airbnb continues to grow and reaches a certain size, the need to develop processes that “control the chaos” and help achieve short-term outcomes that meet growth expectations (as Netflix also noted) will begin to overwhelm what matters to the people in the business. Chesky knew that if Airbnb’s culture stayed strong, there would be less need for corporate processes, more trust and engagement, and more of the autonomy and freedom needed to surface and pursue entrepreneurial ideas. He acknowledged that Airbnb would probably not always be in the same business, but would need to grow and change with new opportunities and market demands. A strong culture—not a brilliant strategy, more market share, or a better website—would make that possible. And he believed that such a culture could be “defended” and reinforced through how Airbnb hired and how its employees went about their work and related to one another.
In contrast, Myspace is an example of a company that did not defend its culture well. Once upon a time, Myspace was a dominant social-networking platform. In 2005, it was acquired by News Corp for $580 million. While it is understandable that the Myspace founders, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, took Rupert Murdoch’s money, and they clearly cared enough about the company to stay on, this new development did little to keep the Myspace culture strong. DeWolfe talks about how the added bureaucracy of a big company was particularly a shock to Myspace. “There are more meetings during the day with a big company,” DeWolfe said. “There are three different levels of finance that you need to go through . . . you end up taking your eye off the ball.”16 And new priorities came into play that overwhelmed the user experience, engineering quality, innovation, and sense of fun that had typified the Myspace culture. There was extreme pressure to monetize the site and drive revenue at the cost of the user experience, the quality of the engineering, the level of innovation, and the fun for all involved.17 Though the money started rolling in and the number of users continued to rise, News Corp persisted in driving changes that not only impeded future growth but also frustrated or turned off customers, employees, and partners who had very different cultural expectations for Myspace.
Myspace reached its peak of popularity three years later in December 2008, when it attracted 75.9 million unique visitors per month. But by April 2009, Myspace had started losing about a million US users each month and its ad revenue was dropping as a result. DeWolfe and Anderson were kicked to the curb. Within two years, News Corp began looking for a buyer to take Myspace off its hands. By May 2011, the user number had dropped to half its peak at about 34.8 million. In June 2011, it was purchased for $35 million, more than half a billion less than when it first sold in 2005.
The companies that are thriving in this new era, the ones we think of as category makers or market leaders, have founders or leaders who are very deliberate, purposeful, and even tactical about developing an organizational culture they believe will be a Difference Maker in their success. They recognize that culture was a winning formula for companies in the past and is today too. But instead of waiting for culture to form slowly over many years, these companies have learned how to accelerate that development by architecting it deliberately, and they see safeguarding it with a vengeance as one of their primary responsibilities.
Think back on the Netflix vs. Blockbuster story at the beginning of this chapter. By 2001, Netflix was on the ropes competitively with Blockbuster, but it was also starting to grow dramatically. It needed to add a tremendous number of employees to keep up with that growth, and it knew that it needed the right people to do so. So Netflix focused on reaching highly talented people who fit the culture.
Reed Hastings and Patty McCord, Netflix’s talent manager, sat down and wrote out all the things that mattered to Netflix from a culture, process, and people perspective, and put it in a 124-slide PowerPoint deck called “Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibilities.” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, and the author of Lean In, said, “It may well be the most important document ever to come out of the Valley.”18
In it, Hastings and McCord laid out a definition of the Netflix culture, why it mattered, and why it actually needed to be a lived set of values, not just a bunch of meaningless words. It defined the characteristics that led to success at Netflix, and what the environment of Netflix needed to be to foster and leverage those characteristics. And it talked about the