Mercenary is a provocative term to describe an organization's culture because it implies, by strict definition, that the organization's members work only for money. Few individuals want to be publicly accused of such behavior, although some might admit to it privately But in general, most people don't want to live this way That is, most people don't seek to spend the sum of their days engaged in what could be construed as a selfish or unfulfilling endeavor: work for pay, no more no less. Most human beings seek instead to have more purpose in their lives.
Thus, the label "mercenary culture" has a way of making people shudder or utter denials. But even with its negative connotations, the term mercenary captures something essential about organizational cultures characterized by relatively high solidarity and low sociability. It captures the term's connotations: intensity, focus, and determination. It evokes the mercenaries of medieval times who killed with efficiency for whomever rewarded them best. They were paid to fight, but that didn't make them any less fervent about achieving victory—we might even presume it made them more so.
Thus, when we start to explore a company culture and ask for
the rules of survival for that hypothetical new employee starting Monday morning, we know we are within a mercenary culture when someone swiftly replies, "Get to work on Sunday." This is true for both the positive and negative forms of the culture (although it is more extreme in the negative, with people occasionally offering the advice that the new employee show up earlier still). In both the negative and positive form of the mercenary culture, it is also the case that someone in the group usually adds the advice, "And tell your wife you won't see her until Friday." This kind of drive about work is not produced by money alone but in tandem with the other almost addicting qualities of the mercenary culture—its passion, energy, sense of purpose, and excitement.
THE MERCENARY CULTURE RULES OF SURVIVAL
In its positive form, they are as follows:
1. Get to work on Sunday.
2. Make things happen.
3. Destroy the competition.
4. Flit your targets.
5. Don't overbrain it.
In the negative form, the rules sound like this:
1. Get to work on Saturday.
2. Do unto others before they can do unto you.
3. Keep something up your sleeve.
4. Only do what's measured.
5. Focus on your own bit, and damn the others.
THE HARD TRUTH ABOUT THE MERCENARY CULTURE
Let's start by looking at the positive side of the culture we're exploring. And let's also be candid. There is no soft-pedaling the fact that the mercenary culture, even in its healthy mode, is restless and ruthless. Indeed, these are the hallmarks of high solidarity: strong, rather fierce, agreement around goals, a zest to get things done quickly, a powerful, shared sense of purpose, a razor-sharp focus on goals, and a certain boldness and courage about overcoming conflict and accepting the need to change. 1
Get to work on Sunday. Make things happen. These rules speak to the same point. If the networked culture tends to obsess about process, the mercenary is the opposite. Once an idea is hatched, the next question is not, "How do we sell it within the organization?" It is, "Who is making it happen?" And then, "When will it be done?" There is a certain efficiency about action in mercenary cultures that dispenses with debate and discussion and gets right to it. The time period between idea and movement is remarkably brief.
The international candy company Mars demonstrates some of the quintessential features of the mercenary form in this respect. Several years ago, Mars's senior management arranged an evening gathering for some of their European operations managers—about twenty people in total. The meeting was held at one of London's finest restaurants, renowned for its superb gourmet menu. You can probably already imagine what this evening would have looked like with the members of a networked company: lots of eating and drinking, passing around of plates to share new tastes, gales of laughter, personal and often intimate conversation with gossip and teasing mixed in; in short, a social event—a party.
The managers arrived early in separate taxis and cars. They sat down and shared quiet business-related conversation until
their bosses arrived. When they did, a new assignment was announced; the goal of the dinner session was to formulate a new advertising slogan for a candy bar. The winning table would receive a magnum of vintage champagne. Suddenly animated and full of energy, the managers dove into the task. They ripped off pieces of the menu to scribble ideas. The waiters brought full plates of food and placed them in front of the guests. Eventually, they removed them, some virtually untouched. Several hours of brisk debate later, the tables submitted their slogans and a winner was announced. At a networked or communal company, fine wines would have been ordered, toasts offered and food savored. At Mars, the executives went home to catch some sleep before another day at work.
The point is this: At a mercenary company, work is about work. There is a sacredness about the task of work itself. Work does not need to be made more fun or interesting by personal relationships. The work itself is challenging enough. Good corporate lawyers have a lot of this quality about them; doing deals—not the beauty of their nation's legal system—ignites their energy. The same can be said for a breed of very successful salespeople too—they are hooked on the thrill of the close. It's like bagging bear to them, or hitting a home run. Yet mercenary cultures are not just collections of individuals like this—rather, the value of this culture is that it becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Mercenary cultures are composed of eagles, but of eagles flying in formation.
This aspect of the mercenary culture brings a story to mind: Not long ago, we were flying between Milan and New York. Seated in the same row was an executive with a major clothing retailer, returning to the United States after two grueling weeks of viewing the annual fashion shows—grueling because her choices about what to buy would have a major impact on her company's performance in the coming year. Her head must have been spinning with decisions about styles, colors, quanti-
ties, and the like. We say this because she looked exhausted— just completely drained.
The plane rose to ten thousand feet and the wine was offered. The executive passed. Next a snack was offered, and she passed again. In fact, as soon as the plane leveled out, the woman pulled out her laptop computer and started banging the keys. She only stopped when dinner was served, and that's when we began to talk. She noticed we were British—she asked us not where we lived but where we worked. When we told her of our university affiliations, she told us of hers (Wellesley College, Columbia Business School). We did chat a bit about London, but her observations were not about the city's attractions but its retail climate. Did we think The Gap had made a wise choice in moving up-market in the U.K.? What was our assessment of Laura Ashley's new strategic direction? Where, she even asked us, did our wives shop for clothing? Her follow-up questions were probing, intelligent, and informed. They were also completely about her work. As is typical of a member of a mercenary culture, she was passionate about her business, not necessarily her company, which she mentioned only in passing, nor its people. As she herself had demonstrated, in mercenary cultures, socializing is primarily instrumental. It gets you something—information, advice, insight. But not friendship. That's not the point.
Restless, ruthless. The mercenary culture is about getting things done—now. This bias toward action can happen because in the mercenary culture there is a widespread assumption of shared interests. So when Joe comes up with an idea for a new product, the reaction of the group is not "What's in it for Joe?" or "Is Joe working on a promotion here?" It is "Joe wants what we want."
If his ideas are challenged after that—and often they are—it is done constructively and productively This dynamic is spawned by the high-solidaritv logic that in a mercenary organization everyone shares the same goal: winning.
A good example of this virtue—winning—comes from the dynamic Portuguese-based company Sonae, with a sales turnover in excess of $2 billion, deriving from their interests in hypermarkets, real estate and shopping centers, financial services, and wood-based products. Dominant in Portugal, they are expanding aggressively in Brazil. Central to their character is a statement that describes the characteristics of the "Sonae Man"; employees should be physically and emotionally resilient, hardworking, and able to deliver high performance. They must be able to "lose and learn again." This is a company where when you get knocked down you jump right back up again. You are either "a leader or a candidate to be leader."
Nobody exemplifies the corporate character better than chairman Belmiro de Azevedo. Despite his demanding work pace he always finds time to play competitive sports like squash and soccer (where he's still a mean player) and enjoys seeing others follow his example. His company has delivered sustained growth—a testament to its mission statement, "Sonae with its men is big today. Tomorrow it will be bigger." From our work with the top team we are confident they will succeed. They are strong in the critical area of breaking complex plans into actionable steps and allocating these with clear accountabilities—both common characteristics of the positive form of this culture.
The goal of the mercenary culture isn't just about winning but about destroying the enemy. This drive to annihilate the competition sets the mercenary culture far apart from the others in the Double S Cube. In the networked organization, for instance, members often debate who the competition is and find it difficult to agree fully on the matter. In the fragmented culture, no one really cares who the competition is, except as it pertains to their individual career. In the communal, the competition is
identified but often vilified—the organization is so good, it has nothing to fear. But in the mercenary organization, the competition is front and center.
Consider the case of one of the largest popular music companies in America, which is based in New York and boasts a growing roster of new stars making their way in the world's most competitive music market. The chairman (now retired) used to hold Monday-morning meetings with the managing directors. Every single time, his opening question was, "OK, guys, how are we going to f— the bastards this week?" It was understood in this case that the "bastards" were Warner Music, the company's main opposition. The point of the chairman's galvanizing question was to explore all the ways the company could undermine Warner in the week ahead: spend heavily to promote one of their own releases on the same day of a big Warner release, for instance, or leak a negative bit of news about a Warner star to deflect publicity about the star's upcoming tour. The clear focus of the meeting encouraged lots of good ideas about the company's competitive struggle but unfortunately caused the company to become a little too obsessed with what Warner was doing and not enough concerned with their own creative processes.
It helps, of course, if the enemy is obvious. In some turbulent or rapidly changing industries, the identity of the competition is unclear or a moving target. Who should cable TV stations, for instance, consider as their competition? Network TV? Satellite TV? Video rentals? Books? Family time? If a cable TV station is mercenary, however, it will find a way of picking one of the above and demonizing it. Some mercenary companies even cojoin this approach to the enemy with a "war cry." The Japanese company Komatsu, for example, made Maru-C —translated as "Encircle Caterpillar"—its in-house rallying slogan back in 1965, and it guided the organization's strategic direction for decades. 2
The drinks division of PepsiCo, the ubiquitous $20 billion company based in Purchase, New York, also possesses this para-
digmatic mercenary approach toward rival Coca-Cola. 3 Ask any member of the organization who the competition is and they won't even wait for you to finish the question. Coke, by contrast, has a much more global perspective on competition. Ask senior managers what product stands in the way of Coke, and most would reply, "Any product that can take shelf space." They don't mean this technically, of course. What they mean is that Coke does daily battle with any liquid people drink that isn't Coke. This perspective is very likely a function of Coke's substantial lead over Pepsi in the so-called cola wars; it doesn't need to engage in Pepsi's battlefield mentality. When you are the underdog, however, the mercenary culture's fixation on the top dog can be enormously directive and energizing.