10 ms·

Programming Your Culture

91 points by agurkas 14y ago

SparrowOS 14y ago
It's sorta laughable worrying about statistical issues when you're picking shit randomly. "Oh, gonna start using reason, are you?" God says... 7:24 On the third day Eliab the son of Helon, prince of the children of Zebulun, did offer: 7:25 His offering was one silver charger, the weight whereof was an hundred and thirty shekels, one silver bowl of seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; both of them full of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering: 7:26 One golden spoon of ten shekels, full of incense: 7:27 One young bullock, one ram, one lamb of the first year, for a burnt offering: 7:28 One kid of the goats for a sin offering: 7:29 And for a sacrifice of peace offerings, two oxen, five rams, five he goats, five lambs of the first year: this was the offering of Eliab the son of Helon. ---- Maybe we're supposed to laugh at the exactitude of the weight and "after the shekel of the sanctuary". "Helon" might be about telling a dog to heel. Kinda a dud, but funny cause of exactitude. God says... withdrawn suddenly stays stayed profess around impress arrows intently Just welcome Substance Times tardy Meanwhile variation swelling dispraised how_high found ship by_the_way let safety Now journeyed trembled birth what_do_you_want pale chilled do_I_have_to know 00END Ivy_league skin
davros 14y ago
Ideally, a cultural design point will be trivial to implement, but will have far reaching behavioral consequences. Key to this kind of mechanism is shock value. If you put something into your culture that is so disturbing that it always creates a conversation, it will change behavior. Thought-provoking. In hindsight, many of the things I've done that have impacted on culture have had this sort of 'shock value'. I'm currently working on changing an established culture and a shock/conversation-creating initiative is just what is needed to help the other processes along.
Matt_Cutts 14y ago
There's good stuff in this post, but I think a lot of a company's culture surfaces at moments that are thrust on you when you least expect it. At Google, I can think of a few points that influenced my perceptions: - the first DMCA request we got, from the Church of Scientology - the day that we turned on Netscape. It turns out we didn't have enough server capacity, so we turned down Google so that we could serve the traffic from Netscape. - when the Department of Justice tried to subpoena two months worth of all user queries - when John Battelle grilled Eric Schmidt on stage at a Web 2.0 conference and Eric declared "We would never trap user data." All of those situations were thrust on us from the outside, and someone had to make a call. I think those kinds of decisions are critical culture-defining moments. The decisions a company makes when everything is fine--or when you have plenty of time to plan--can set some of the company's culture. But to me, how your organization responds to a crisis is one of the best indicators of its culture.
- davros 14y ago
  Those are all great and very interesting examples where senior leaders create a culture by taking tough and visible decisions. I wonder if they worked in the same sort of way that the post describes where new people talk about them and it makes them engage with the issues around the culture? That is, did they have a long-lived effect on culture or were they one-off boosts to it? I think you've got a culture when all employees are reinforcing it rather than just the top leaders.
  - Matt_Cutts 14y ago
    Actually, I think for half of the examples I mentioned it was rank-and-file Google employees who forged Google's response. I've seen a bunch of examples of regular colleagues galvanizing Google to do the right thing. Often regular Googlers drag execs to the answer we think is right. :) I think each of the four examples I mentioned did have a long-lasting effect on the company as well, e.g. the Data Liberation Front ( http://www.dataliberation.org/ http://www.dataliberation.org/ ) is a natural result of the pledge not to trap users' data.
    - pasbesoin 14y ago
      It is good to read this, in light of some current concerns and/or generalized "feeling" about the status and direction of things. I continue to have concerns about Google, but at the same time I continue to perceive a culture where people stand up and advocate for, insist upon, or just quietly do "the right thing". (Now, where's my green energy flying car. ;-) P.S. I guess I felt this worthy of a comment, in that I continue to struggle with my own interpretation of this dichotomy. And I don't think I'm alone.
- halvsjur 14y ago
  > the day that we turned on Netscape. It turns out we didn't have enough server capacity, so we turned down Google so that we could serve the traffic from Netscape. What is this referring to?
  - 14y ago
TheAlan 14y ago
Love it when blog posts starts with a Jay Z reference!
damncabbage 14y ago
... but when a shocked new employee asks why she must work on a makeshift desk constructed out of random Home Depot parts, the answer comes back with withering consistency: “We look for every opportunity to save money so that we can deliver the best products for the lowest cost.” It's probably not a good idea to hold up the "cheap door desk" as a good example; from what I've read it seems like it's turned into more of a cargo-cult-of-frugality thing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3102401 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3102401 (From a much longer thread, back when Steve Yegge accidentally posted his, uh, feelings about Amazon: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876 )
codinghorror 14y ago
> we instituted a ruthlessly enforced $10/minute fine for being late to a meeting with an entrepreneur. So, you are on a really important call and will be 10 minutes late? No problem, just bring $100 to the meeting and pay your fine. When new employees come on, they find this shocking, which gives us a great opportunity to explain in detail why we respect entrepreneurs. Except.. this doesn't actually work. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/0515-1st-levitt.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/0515-1st-le... > The economists decided to test their solution by conducting a study of ten day-care centers in Haifa, Israel. The study lasted twenty weeks, but the fine was not introduced immediately. For the first four weeks, the economists simply kept track of the number of parents who came late; there were, on average, eight late pickups per week per day-care center. In the fifth week, the fine was enacted. It was announced that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay $3 per child for each incident. The fee would be added to the parents' monthly bill, which was roughly $380. > After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went ... up. Before long there were twenty late pickups per week, more than double the original average. The incentive had plainly backfired.
- cynicalkane 14y ago
  $3 for ten minutes is way smaller than $10 for 1 minute. When you think about how people respond to incentives, first consider the size of the incentive. Otherwise you'd be forced to conclude that, say, a $10,000 fine wouldn't work either, which is plainly absurd.
  - agurkas 14y ago
    Exactly, that is comparing apples to oranges. In one of the companies I was in we started charging $5 for being late to a huddle or $20 if you were an exec - people took cabs to get to the huddle on time, because it was the fact that you had to pay, not the amount that motivated you. Cab was more than a fine.
- guiambros 14y ago
  Sure not. Unless the fine is high enough to hurt financially the person that is infringing the rules, it will have the opposite effect. It'll allow a false sense of entitlement; "I'm paying for it, so it's now ok to arrive late to pick up my child. It's my right".
codeonfire 14y ago
Some companies need to kill the college dorm culture they are trying to emulate. How about a culture that says 'I put college behind me and I'm worth a few extra square feet and a place to hang a picture or two.' Where can I find that culture?
freework 14y ago
Culture just happens. If you go out of your way to foster some kind of fake "culture" you're only doing your business a disservice. The company I worked for with the best culture did nothing to try to create a "culture".
- agurkas 14y ago
  Cultures don't just "happen". Culture is a deliberate act of founder instilling company values in early employees, so the culture then scales from there. Best cultures always feel natural, because founders and early employees spend a boat load of time working on it and enforcing it. 15 years and 9 startups, I walk into the company and immediately can tell if I want to be there. Companies without culture are usually those in a Fortune500 list - numb, bland, like Hondas and Toyotas.

91 points by agurkas 14y ago

It's sorta laughable worrying about statistical issues when you're picking shit randomly. "Oh, gonna start using reason, are you?" God says... 7:24 On the third day Eliab the son of Helon, prince of the children of Zebulun, did offer: 7:25 His offering was one silver charger, the weight whereof was an hundred and thirty shekels, one silver bowl of seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; both of them full of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering: 7:26 One golden spoon of ten shekels, full of incense: 7:27 One young bullock, one ram, one lamb of the first year, for a burnt offering: 7:28 One kid of the goats for a sin offering: 7:29 And for a sacrifice of peace offerings, two oxen, five rams, five he goats, five lambs of the first year: this was the offering of Eliab the son of Helon. ---- Maybe we're supposed to laugh at the exactitude of the weight and "after the shekel of the sanctuary". "Helon" might be about telling a dog to heel. Kinda a dud, but funny cause of exactitude. God says... withdrawn suddenly stays stayed profess around impress arrows intently Just welcome Substance Times tardy Meanwhile variation swelling dispraised how_high found ship by_the_way let safety Now journeyed trembled birth what_do_you_want pale chilled do_I_have_to know 00END Ivy_league skin

davros 14y ago

Ideally, a cultural design point will be trivial to implement, but will have far reaching behavioral consequences. Key to this kind of mechanism is shock value. If you put something into your culture that is so disturbing that it always creates a conversation, it will change behavior. Thought-provoking. In hindsight, many of the things I've done that have impacted on culture have had this sort of 'shock value'. I'm currently working on changing an established culture and a shock/conversation-creating initiative is just what is needed to help the other processes along.

Matt_Cutts 14y ago

There's good stuff in this post, but I think a lot of a company's culture surfaces at moments that are thrust on you when you least expect it. At Google, I can think of a few points that influenced my perceptions: - the first DMCA request we got, from the Church of Scientology - the day that we turned on Netscape. It turns out we didn't have enough server capacity, so we turned down Google so that we could serve the traffic from Netscape. - when the Department of Justice tried to subpoena two months worth of all user queries - when John Battelle grilled Eric Schmidt on stage at a Web 2.0 conference and Eric declared "We would never trap user data." All of those situations were thrust on us from the outside, and someone had to make a call. I think those kinds of decisions are critical culture-defining moments. The decisions a company makes when everything is fine--or when you have plenty of time to plan--can set some of the company's culture. But to me, how your organization responds to a crisis is one of the best indicators of its culture.

davros 14y ago
Those are all great and very interesting examples where senior leaders create a culture by taking tough and visible decisions. I wonder if they worked in the same sort of way that the post describes where new people talk about them and it makes them engage with the issues around the culture? That is, did they have a long-lived effect on culture or were they one-off boosts to it? I think you've got a culture when all employees are reinforcing it rather than just the top leaders.
- Matt_Cutts 14y ago
  Actually, I think for half of the examples I mentioned it was rank-and-file Google employees who forged Google's response. I've seen a bunch of examples of regular colleagues galvanizing Google to do the right thing. Often regular Googlers drag execs to the answer we think is right. :) I think each of the four examples I mentioned did have a long-lasting effect on the company as well, e.g. the Data Liberation Front ( http://www.dataliberation.org/ http://www.dataliberation.org/ ) is a natural result of the pledge not to trap users' data.
  - pasbesoin 14y ago
    It is good to read this, in light of some current concerns and/or generalized "feeling" about the status and direction of things. I continue to have concerns about Google, but at the same time I continue to perceive a culture where people stand up and advocate for, insist upon, or just quietly do "the right thing". (Now, where's my green energy flying car. ;-) P.S. I guess I felt this worthy of a comment, in that I continue to struggle with my own interpretation of this dichotomy. And I don't think I'm alone.
halvsjur 14y ago
> the day that we turned on Netscape. It turns out we didn't have enough server capacity, so we turned down Google so that we could serve the traffic from Netscape. What is this referring to?
- 14y ago

TheAlan 14y ago

Love it when blog posts starts with a Jay Z reference!

damncabbage 14y ago

... but when a shocked new employee asks why she must work on a makeshift desk constructed out of random Home Depot parts, the answer comes back with withering consistency: “We look for every opportunity to save money so that we can deliver the best products for the lowest cost.” It's probably not a good idea to hold up the "cheap door desk" as a good example; from what I've read it seems like it's turned into more of a cargo-cult-of-frugality thing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3102401 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3102401 (From a much longer thread, back when Steve Yegge accidentally posted his, uh, feelings about Amazon: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876 )

codinghorror 14y ago

> we instituted a ruthlessly enforced $10/minute fine for being late to a meeting with an entrepreneur. So, you are on a really important call and will be 10 minutes late? No problem, just bring $100 to the meeting and pay your fine. When new employees come on, they find this shocking, which gives us a great opportunity to explain in detail why we respect entrepreneurs. Except.. this doesn't actually work. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/0515-1st-levitt.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/0515-1st-le... > The economists decided to test their solution by conducting a study of ten day-care centers in Haifa, Israel. The study lasted twenty weeks, but the fine was not introduced immediately. For the first four weeks, the economists simply kept track of the number of parents who came late; there were, on average, eight late pickups per week per day-care center. In the fifth week, the fine was enacted. It was announced that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay $3 per child for each incident. The fee would be added to the parents' monthly bill, which was roughly $380. > After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went ... up. Before long there were twenty late pickups per week, more than double the original average. The incentive had plainly backfired.

cynicalkane 14y ago
$3 for ten minutes is way smaller than $10 for 1 minute. When you think about how people respond to incentives, first consider the size of the incentive. Otherwise you'd be forced to conclude that, say, a $10,000 fine wouldn't work either, which is plainly absurd.
- agurkas 14y ago
  Exactly, that is comparing apples to oranges. In one of the companies I was in we started charging $5 for being late to a huddle or $20 if you were an exec - people took cabs to get to the huddle on time, because it was the fact that you had to pay, not the amount that motivated you. Cab was more than a fine.
guiambros 14y ago
Sure not. Unless the fine is high enough to hurt financially the person that is infringing the rules, it will have the opposite effect. It'll allow a false sense of entitlement; "I'm paying for it, so it's now ok to arrive late to pick up my child. It's my right".

codeonfire 14y ago

Some companies need to kill the college dorm culture they are trying to emulate. How about a culture that says 'I put college behind me and I'm worth a few extra square feet and a place to hang a picture or two.' Where can I find that culture?

freework 14y ago

Culture just happens. If you go out of your way to foster some kind of fake "culture" you're only doing your business a disservice. The company I worked for with the best culture did nothing to try to create a "culture".

agurkas 14y ago
Cultures don't just "happen". Culture is a deliberate act of founder instilling company values in early employees, so the culture then scales from there. Best cultures always feel natural, because founders and early employees spend a boat load of time working on it and enforcing it. 15 years and 9 startups, I walk into the company and immediately can tell if I want to be there. Companies without culture are usually those in a Fortune500 list - numb, bland, like Hondas and Toyotas.