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Require and enforce actions
I think a lot of times people define culture as a set of values or a set of ideas or a set of beliefs, and that doesn’t actually work. What a culture really is, and I get this from the the samurai, the ancient Japanese culture of the samurai called Bushido, the way of the warrior. A culture is not a set of beliefs. A culture is a set of actions. It’s a set of behaviors. Culture is important at all times because it is who you are. How do you treat each other? What kind of place is this to work? What is it like to do business with you? All of that is a function of culture.
Everybody is the hero in their own story, so they’re always going to believe that they’re on culture even if they’re behaving in a way that’s completely inconsistent with that. A company that I work with, had a belief, a value called empathy. And empathy, you know, is a very kind of broadly defined term, and what the company meant by empathy was you have to kind of understand the other person’s argument and not just kind of shout them down. You have to listen to what they have to say. The way it was used in the company was if somebody got a bad review, they would say, well, you’re off culture. You’re not being empathetic. Clearly a corruption. That’s why you can’t define a culture that way. You have to define it in terms of the behaviors that you want to have.
We have a cultural idea around doing first class business in a first class way, but the behaviors are very specific. For example, you are not allowed to be late to a meeting with an entrepreneur. You’re late, you pay a fine. That’s that. That’s a very specific thing. You have to get back to entrepreneurs that you’re not going to invest in in forty eight hours with a written explanation of why you’re not investing. That’s not a belief. That’s an action, and it’s an undebatable action. When you put those actions together and you ask yourself, you know, why do I have to be on time? Like, why do I have to pay fifty dollars for being five minutes late to a meeting? I had to use the bathroom. Like, why? Why? Why? Well, then you get the culture. Building a company is extremely hard, and we respect how hard it is, and we show that respect by not being late. And so when you ask yourself every time you behave that way, every time you show up on time, you reinforce the culture in everything you do.
You can have all the values you want, integrity, we have each other’s backs. Blah blah blah blah blah. It means nothing. The only thing that means anything is a specific set of actions that you require and enforce.
Program your culture
Program your culture is a topic that I’ve written a lot about, and there’s many, many techniques to do it. One way to kind of get to behaviors that you want is to kind of shock the people in the organization, have some cultural idea that almost doesn’t make sense. Facebook had one in the early days called move fast and break things. Which seems like an absolutely insane idea in that, like, why would you want broken stuff? But it causes everybody who’s in that organization to think that, okay. Like, at least for right now and, you know, they don’t they don’t even have this cultural idea anymore because they’re a different kind of company now. But in those days, like, the the main thing that they needed to do was to grow fast, specifically faster than Myspace. That was more important than anything else. Like, if you make a mistake, fine, but do not go slowly. And just hearing that, you know, anybody who heard that knew, like, what the behavior that they wanted was, like, is extremely clear. Nobody was confused, and they did beat Myspace. Caused some issues later on when they got very big and important. It was a great idea at the time.