Nimble, Focused, Feisty. Sara Roberts
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as we grow, rather than limit it, to continue to attract and nourish innovative people, so we have better chance of sustained success.”19 The deck ended with, “We keep improving our culture as we grow.”
That’s a radically different approach to culture, people, and processes than most companies born and bred in the twentieth century. Such a deck wouldn’t get past an HR manager let alone legal at a twentieth-century company. But it’s the “most important document ever to come out of the Valley” to those who understand the value of nimble, focused, and feisty. And it’s a choice that’s being consciously and deliberately made by the most vital companies and most successful CEOs working today.
OLD WAY VS. NEW WAY VS. RIGHT WAY
This discussion of culture is not just a way of glorifying new-economy companies and kicking twentieth century market leaders while they’re down. In fact, very few companies—old or new—are sufficiently nimble, focused, and feisty across the board. All companies have work to do. All companies must continue to work at their culture in an engaged, determined, and conscientious way—forever. The world is too dynamic—too VUCA—to take a break on culture.
Moreover, any company—even one with a twentieth-century culture—can become nimble, focused, and feisty. It is possible to both architect such a culture and to shape and mold it. This book has been written to help all types of companies—from the startup still being planned in a basement apartment, to the Fortune 500 at the top of its game.
To illustrate how culture change can revitalize a stagnant organization, I want to look at the evolution of a company we all know well—Apple. While many hold Apple up as a model company because of its incredible success and market value, it’s worth looking at the journey Apple took to get where it is today.
Apple’s Journey
When Apple was launched in 1976, it was the Facebook, Airbnb, or Netflix of its day. The founders were passionate and they took the world by storm.
Then Apple started to get big, and it faced intense new demands to “grow up.” In a twentieth-century world, this meant adopting discipline and processes. Steve Jobs valued the culture of innovation and passion that made Apple special; and he wanted to put most of his attention on the part of the company that embodied such culture—its product development and design. But he wanted someone else—a grown-up—to take over the operations side and give Apple the discipline it needed to satisfy investors. So he asked John Sculley, who had been president of Pepsi-Cola, to be CEO. Like Keyes at Blockbuster, Sculley was a classic twentieth-century culture leader, and Jobs and he clashed badly, until Jobs was ousted in the spring of 1985.
Apple was lost in the years that followed. Its culture was rudderless. It tried to adhere to the discipline of industrial production but had no spark, passion, or innovation. Steve Jobs returned as interim CEO. The turnaround began. Apple resumed its iconic status and took that a million miles farther, reinventing modern life as we know it and becoming the most profitable and valuable company in the world by the time of Jobs’ death.
How that turnaround was engineered, however, had everything to do with culture.
It’s fascinating to watch the early speeches Jobs made to employees upon his return. He talked about getting back to the basics of great products, great marketing, and great distribution. The distribution piece showed that he had “grown up” when it came to running a big company. But he also retained his incredible passion and creativity for products that mattered to customers and mattered to Apple.
Employees embraced that passion immediately. They didn’t mind when projects they’d been toiling on were canceled because they were given new products to work on that made sense—that connected with Apple’s culture. And Jobs understood how marketing was an expression of that culture. As he put it, “Nike doesn’t talk about the product [in its marketing]. They honor great athletes and athletics. Customers want to know who Apple is, what do we stand for, and where do we fit in this world. Apple is not about making boxes, though we do that well, but at its core value, we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.”
He launched the “think different” campaign to rekindle Apple’s spark and announce its values to the world, describing it as a message that “touches the soul of this company.”
How many twentieth-century companies talk about their soul when they talk about their culture? How many nimble, focused, and feisty companies would even blink at such a notion?
It’s hard to believe, but Apple is an old company now. And with its founder gone, and its success unprecedented, it would be incredibly easy for Apple to rest on its laurels and see its culture of innovation, adaptation, design, and its drive for category-maker leadership go stale. But Tim Cook, as CEO, has done an extraordinary job keeping Apple Apple. He talks eloquently about Jobs’ attention to culture and how that keeps him focused on the same concerns.
“Steve’s greatest contribution and gift is the company and its culture,” Cook said. “He cared deeply about that.” Elaborating, Cook described how Jobs did so. “It was his selection of people that helped propel the culture. You hear these stories of him walking down a hallway and going crazy over something he sees, and yeah, those things happened. But extending that story to imagine that he did everything at Apple is selling him way short. What he did more than anything was build a culture and pick a great team, that would then pick another great team, that would then pick another team, and so on.”
Instead of letting that culture go stale, Apple continues to nurture it, and it does so intimately but also at scale. That approach went into the design of the new Apple campus. According to Cook, “Steve wanted people to love Apple, not just work for Apple, but really love Apple, and really understand at a deep level what Apple was about, about the values of the company. He didn’t write them on the walls and make posters out of them anymore, but he wanted people to understand them. He wanted people to work for a greater cause.”
And to keep that culture alive for generations of employees to come, Jobs initiated the development of Apple University. According to Cook, “[Jobs] wanted to use it to grow the next generation of leaders at Apple, and to make sure the lessons of the past weren’t forgotten.”
On the curriculum: how to communicate, examining past decisions to find flaws and better answers, and culture.
If Apple, one of the largest companies in the world, can become nimble, focused, and feisty, so can any business at any stage.
IN SPRING 2004, a few months before the company’s IPO, Google released an 80,000-word prospectus to its current and potential investors. The document opened with a letter from co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
“Google is not a conventional company,” they began. “We do not intend to become one. Throughout Google’s evolution as a privately held company, we have managed Google differently. We have also emphasized an atmosphere of creativity and challenge.”
And so began a long and carefully constructed statement as to exactly what kind of publicly traded company Google intended to be.
Though the letter was inspired by Warren Buffett’s own approach to talking to his investors, Wall Street had never seen anything quite like it before. Buffett is a legend, and investors hang onto his words like groupies. In contrast, here was a young startup—albeit a very promising one with an exciting IPO in the offing—dictating to investors in no uncertain terms how differently it would think and behave as a shareholder-owned entity.
Bold and refreshing to some, the Google founders’ letter to others was an expression of arrogant immaturity. The phrase “Don’t be evil” struck many in particular as a simplistic take on the way conventional companies generate capital and shareholder value. Yet the “founder’s letter” has become a rite of passage in Silicon Valley in the