We end our quadrant-by-quadrant exploration of the Double S Cube with the communal, the most appealing of the eight organizational cultures—or so it would seem. But before we get to the ways in which the communal culture can go wrong, let us give this culture its due. Because when the sociability and solidarity comprising the communal culture are healthy, the culture can make companies tremendously effective and the people who work for them feel immensely fulfilled. It can indeed be the culture that most contributes to making an organization unbeatable. 1
What do communal cultures look like? Imagine a networked organization and a mercenary one combined, the first bringing its high levels of friendship and commitment and the latter its performance focus and energy. It is hard, perhaps, to picture the two types of behaviors working in tandem, but it can happen. When it does, you find deep friendships coupled with a passion for the company and product. You find creativity and openness toward ideas joined with a fierce determination to defeat the competition. You find a meaningful interest in process and a strong concern for results. No wonder the communal culture is
so beloved by those inside it and inspires such consternation in its marketplace opposition.
The rules of survival in the communal culture underscore the high levels of the two Ss and the frisson they generate. Interestingly, when we work in communal companies, this dynamism usually means that employees offer us dozens of rules to live by, but they all boil down to the same five concepts.
THE COMMUNAL CULTURE RULES OF SURVIVAL
In the positive form, they are as follows:
1. Join the family.
2. Love the product.
3. Live the credo.
4. Follow the leader.
5. Fight the good fight.
In its negative form, sociability and solidarity can work against the good of the organization, creating the following rules:
1. Leave your family.
2. Don't worry about the competition.
3. Educate (stupid) customers.
4. Trust your colleagues to know.
5. Surrender to the leader.
As we've noted before, communal cultures are prevalent in start-up companies because many of these organizations are small, focused on one product, and run by the founder. That founder has typically hired, to start off, his friends, who share his enthusiasm for the product and who stand to reap significant rewards if it takes off. Indeed, in the computer age, the story of
three buddies in a garage who become millionaires is virtually a cliche. It also happens to be a reality.
The communal culture, however, is not just for start-ups. Some long-established, very large companies exhibit it as well: Johnson & Johnson and Hewlett-Packard to name just two, and it exists, of course, in many companies of middling size. Indeed, we have even seen pockets—rogue cells, if you will—of communal cultures in mercenary and fragmented organizations. The London office of J. Walter Thompson—the international advertising agency—exhibits many characteristics of the communal form. Staff are treated to parties in glamorous locations, and there are master classes in creativity, often led by celebrities. Dave Stewart, formerly of the rock band Eurythmics, played at a recent presentation. At the same time, there is enormous focus on winning and achievement. Those who gain awards at the company's annual conference can find themselves on an all- expenses-paid lunch trip to Paris. So at J. Walter Thompson there is high sociability and solidarity. But this may not be true for its owners.
Similarly, a colleague of ours who left academia to join an investment banking firm on Wall Street has even created his own communal company within the most mercenary organization we have ever encountered. He and his team of fifty-five deal makers have their own operating principles, values, and ways of relating to one another. The rest of the company regards this group as renegades—one common complaint is they're too nice—but its results are so strong that they are basically left on their own.
How did this individual create a communal culture within his team? The first step was to introduce the behaviors of friendship and kindness that are part and parcel of high sociability. Communal cultures are characterized by rituals of induction and departure, for instance; milestones in people's lives are recognized and honored. And individuals are understood and respected as whole people: The woman who runs the trading desk is not just
a trader, she is a mother of two, a deeply religious Jew, an aspiring painter. The new MBA doing research is not just a new MBA to wring for all his ambition but a young man who has just lost his mother, a person confused about career options, and a fine pianist. When someone gets sick and misses work, the automatic response is not irritation but sympathy. When someone does well, the automatic response is not professional jealousy but pride, even delight. In other words, in communal cultures, as in the networked, there is a powerful sense of family, of commitment and interrelatedness through good times and bad. The communal supersedes the networked in this domain, however, because the family coheres around a cause—the product.
Love the product goes the rule. In communal cultures, this is the critical dimension high solidarity adds. Within Def Jam, the highly communal division of Polygram Records, music by the rap artists Redman and Mon tell Jordan plays loudly through the offices all day, with people frequently commenting on its power and importance in the history of music. The employees of the company at every level, in fact, consider themselves on something of a mission—to promote the form of music they consider the authentic voice of the street. They wear the same clothes as rap artists, use the same slang, share the same values, and abhor the same things too, such as the slick commercialism of corporate America.
The passion for rap continues outside the office. Def Jam executives often spend their evenings and weekends together, visiting rap clubs in search of new talent and keeping in touch with rap trends. As one Polygram executive commented after visiting the division from headquarters, "My God, it's just rap, rap, rap all the time. They can't get enough of it." He added, "It's fantastic, their commitment to the music. I wish all our labels had the same fire in their bellies. We'd be indestructible." And as a result, Def Jam has made major inroads into the American music market, though we should note that because they love the prod-
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uct so much, selling the music is sometimes more important than making a profit from it.
Communal companies have a sense of urgency about their products a sense that people using competing products are making a mistake or missing out. We once overheard two former Harvard Business School classmates chatting on a plane. One worked for Bain & Co., the communal management consulting firm based in Boston. The other had gone on from HBS to become a senior executive with a large machine-manufacturing company in Ohio. After catching up on personal news, the executive told the Bain consultant, "Too bad I won't be seeing more of you in the future—we just hired McKinsey. A lot of us on the executive committee wanted to hire Bain, but our CEO is a real McKinsey advocate."
A heated argument followed and the two parted ways on much less friendly terms than they met, the manufacturing executive feeling unfairly criticized. The Bain consultant seemed oblivious; he was preoccupied by his passion for his company's product and the belief—typical in communal organizations— that it is not so much the best choice but the only choice. (No doubt the McKinsey guys feel the same about their product.)
Values get the same kind of treatment in communal cultures, thus the rule Live the Credo. Johnson & Johnson's credo is perhaps the most famous in American business—a page-long document that exhorts employees to value and respect the "doctors, nurses, patients, mothers, and fathers" who use the company's products. (It also calls on members of the company to be responsible to employees and the communities in which J & J people live and work. The credo concludes: "Our final responsibility is to our shareholders.") This credo comes to life within J & J in numerous and frequent ways. All managers in fact undergo "credo leadership training," in which they work in teams to think up business situation dilemmas and how to resolve them with the credo as their "moral compass." They must even role-play the
dilemma and its resolution. All of this helps to build J & J's enviable reputation for ethical behavior with consumers.
Another example of living the credo comes again from Bain, where the mission statement calls on all employees to be ever "at cause." In concept, this term means being focused on the work at all times. In practice terms, it means employees should not indulge in personal agendas. (If you work hard, the in-house advice goes, you'll get promoted, so don't bother politicking.) Being at cause also means employees should never bad-mouth clients, each other, or the firm itself. The value placed on being "at cause" is high—achievement along the dimension is part of every professional employee's performance and compensation review. We know a first-year consultant at Bain, in fact, who received high marks on every other aspect of her work, in particular her analysis of difficult-to-obtain and complex market data. She did not, however, receive her full bonus because of a middling score on the "at cause" variable. "Remember that plane flight to Muncie?" her manager asked her. "You made several very cynical remarks about the client's level of intelligence." The consultant remarked that everyone had laughed at her comments, to which her boss replied, "Yes, and their reviews show it too."
This same adherence to shared values can also coalesce around competitors in communal cultures, again a benefaction of the form's high solidarity. If you love the product with a passion, you hate its alternatives with equal intensity. We saw a case in point in the Bain versus McKinsey example above. In addition, this attitude often carries over into a fervor during recruiting—"You can't work for Acme, their products are horrible." It also shows up in the way communal companies talk about the competition in-house: It is clearly identified and analyzed, and its demise plotted. For instance, at a San Francisco video production company operating in the highly competitive marketplace for music videos, the CEO regularly convenes a meeting where his senior team assesses each competitor's strengths and weaknesses. The
executives attending the meeting are then assigned one competitor apiece; they must develop strategic plans to not only outperform the competition but to eliminate it. The CEO admits that a bit of this is drama—the company can't possibly kill off all its competition but he also says the process has spawned ideas for several new products and approaches to marketing. It has also, he says, been a great method of harnessing the organization's intense competitive spirit.
This CEO, by the way, is an excellent example of a classic communal leader. Tie founded the company, and he leads it with vision and passion. He is highly charismatic and serves as a high-profile model for the behaviors of both sociability and solidarity. Indeed, this is a critical point. Because the behaviors of sociability and solidarity can be so inherently contradictory, it is enormously useful to have both modeled in one person, so that others can see and copy them.
Communal leaders tend also to be inspirational. When Bain was struck by a period of organizational and financial disarray in the early 1990s, for example. Chairwoman Orit Gadiesh delivered an intensely emotional, visionary speech called "True North," which has become like the gospel within the firm. It has been taught today as a prime example of motivational leadership in the Harvard Business School class entitled "Leadership."
The communal leader, in other words, sets the tone and the agenda for the company. Alan Gaynor, CEO of the fast-growing international oil exploration company British-Borneo, also sets a powerful example. Sharing his time between the company offices in Houston and London, he vividly represents the company's core values: open communication, teamwork, a strong sense of urgency and will to win. The result is a staff of highly capable and devoted colleagues, strongly committed to the company's mission. A unique challenge similar to that faced by other strong leaders within this form is to ensure others develop leadership capabilities that will be necessary at the inevitable time when Alan will need a successor.
In fact, in many communal companies, the leader is the sun around which the rest of the organization rotates. These leaders dominate every aspect of the company, but not in the same way the mercenary leader does—as the company's high-profile symbol of success. Instead, communal leaders are sources of meaning for the organization, giving moral authority to company practices, strategies, even rituals. 2 When Steve Jobs led Apple, for instance, one of the company's core values was framed as "extending human freedom." Now there's a reason to go to work in the morning! Similarly, the leaders at other communal companies give their organizations motivational missions—Richard Branson claims that working for Virgin makes life an adventure, and at Glaxo-Wellcome, CEO Richard Sykes galvanizes the corps with the lofty message that the company exists to cure illness. At Fidelity Investments, President Ellyn McColgan runs the firm's huge 403(b) business, which serves nonprofit organizations such as health care and higher education. She imbues the work her organization does with meaning by making sure her seven hundred employees are ever aware that they aren't just answering phones, crunching data, or filling out reporting forms but are protecting the life savings of hardworking people. Fidelity's work isn't about managing money—it's about building trust.
In communal organizations, employees become followers of both a person and a cause in one. In ordinary organizations, such commitment and loyalty can take years and years to build, but in the communal, the ethos of Follow the Leader makes short work of it. These cultures still have long, involved debates over strategy and off-site retreats to discuss values, but the wellloved and respected individual at the top drives these processes and gives them momentum.
This dynamic feeds into perhaps the most paradigmatic of the five rules of the communal culture: Fight the good fight. 3 There is often the sense in communal organizations that something special is going on, something extraordinary, important, and differ-
ent. That is why these companies are full of story and history telling. Employees become characters in a legend that is unfolding. The leaders trail myths behind them. 4
At one successful communal advertising agency located in Chicago, every new hire hears this story, for instance: In the company's first year, it found itself in tight competition for a major TV account for a firm located in Houston. The company's six employees worked around the clock for two weeks to develop the concept for an ad campaign that they believed to be radically new and exciting, finally completing the commercials' storyboards thirty-six hours before the deadline. This, however, was in the days before Federal Express, and worse, none of the employees had the money to fly the package to Houston. So the entire crew jumped into the founder's truck and drove nonstop across the country, taking turns at the wheel and stopping only to freshen up. (They didn't even stop to rest and eat, the story goes, using McDonald's drive-thrus the entire way.) At 8:00 a.m. the day of the deadline, the truck pulled up at the Houston firm's headquarters, and the employee who looked the most presentable marched in to drop it off. The group then found a local park and slept (in the truck) for twelve hours. They won the account.