26
Don’t Just Let Culture Happen*
Alex Osterwalder
Alexander Osterwalder is an entrepreneur, speaker, and business model innovator. He is co-founder of Strategyzer, a leading SaaS company that helps organizations develop new growth engines, better value propositions, and powerful business models via online applications and facilitated online courses.
In 2015, Alex won the strategy award by Thinkers50, called the “Oscars of Management Thinking” by the Financial Times, and ranks #15 among the leading business thinkers of the world. In 2013, he won the inaugural Innovation Luminary Award by the European Union.
Alex is lead author of Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design, which sold over a million copies in 37 languages. USA Today named Business Model Generation among the 12 best business books of all times. The German edition was named Management Book of the Year 2011. Fast Company magazine named it one of the Best Books for Business Owners in 2010. He crafted the first book with his long-time coauthor and former PhD supervisor Professor Yves Pigneur and 470 collaborators from 45 countries. It was initially self-published in 2009, with an innovative crowd-funded business model.
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Right now, 51% of your employees are actively looking for a new job or watching for openings. This jarring stat, from Gallup’s 2016 State of the American Workforce Report,1 points out that talented people are on the hunt for organizations with a future vision for growth and prosperity, where there is a chance to contribute to that future and feel engaged with the work being done.
What’s going to keep talented people around? You could try to motivate people with incentives and unique perks like ping-pong rooms and free meals, but none of those approaches address the deeper issue of why employees are on the move.
We believe the answer is culture – the formal and informal values, behaviors, and beliefs practiced in an organization. Very few companies intentionally work on their culture; in fact, many companies just let culture happen. We believe that culture has to be intentionally designed and that leadership holds the power and responsibility to see this happen. Company culture can be a fuzzy conversation, but the right tools can make culture tangible and manageable. The corporation of the twenty-first century cannot just let culture happen.
What Is Corporate Culture?
When Dave Gray, founder of XPLANE, set out to design a tool to better manage culture, Yves Pigneur and I helped him create the Culture Map, a practical, simple, and visual tool.
You can use the Culture Map to map out and assess an existing culture or to design a desired culture.
Dave Gray often says that a company’s culture is like a garden: You can design it, but nature will still be a force. You can’t control everything about your culture, but you can intentionally take it into your own hands. Culture will emerge through constant care and nurturing.
Here’s how the analogy of a garden helps leadership and teams to visualize their culture within the Culture Map. (See Figure 26.1.)
- The outcomes in your culture are the fruits. These are the things you want your culture to achieve, or what you want to “harvest” from your garden.
- The behaviors are the heart of your culture. They’re the positive or negative actions people perform every day that will result in a good or a bad harvest.
- The enablers and blockers are the elements that allow your garden to flourish or fail. For example, weeds, pests, bad weather, or lack of knowledge might be hindering your garden, whereas fertilizer, expertise in gardening specific crops, or good land might be helping it grow. The enablers and blockers are also the only elements of the Culture Map that management can directly control. What management puts in place – policies, rituals, systems – will either help or hinder the organization and result in corresponding worker behaviors.
Figure 26.1 The Culture Map Garden
Shape and Nurture Culture like a Garden
Uber’s recent woes – lawsuits, investigations, and leadership churn – come to mind as a negative example of what happens when culture is left untended. It doesn’t just sour the brand for customers; it results in an organization that is stalled for any further potential growth. The company is now intentionally trying to transform its culture to better position it for future growth. Netflix, on the other hand, is a very different example of a company dedicated to building a great place to work where talented people contribute to a groundbreaking product. We recommend browsing Netflix’s culture slideshare online to see a company that is very intentional about its positive work culture and emphasizes collaboration. Hubspot is another example of a company that is explicit about its “culture code” – thus demonstrating the role of a great culture in attracting talented people.
Of course, there are many different types of company cultures. Some have strong collaborative cultures, some are experimenting with flat versus hierarchical cultures, and some are purely focused on creating innovation cultures. Amazon is one example that comes to mind.
We highly recommend you read Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s 2015–2016 letter to shareholders. It’s a fantastic example of how Bezos doesn’t let culture just happen, but has deliberately set out to design an innovation culture. Amazon’s stellar growth and constant reinvention is substantial evidence of the effectiveness of being intentional about your company culture. In Figure 26.2, we use the Culture Map to parse Jeff Bezos’s letter to shareholders and unearth concrete examples of how he has built a company with a culture of constant pioneering in new spaces.
Figure 26.2 A Culture Map of Amazon
The Culture Map organizes outcomes centered on the stellar growth that Bezos desires for Amazon. These are followed by very tangible behaviors that are visibly enacted inside the organization. Lastly, these positive behaviors are driven by enablers – the space where culture can really be designed and played with. Bezos’s letter to his shareholders also explicitly mentions some blockers found in most big companies that Amazon tries to avoid.
Now we can really capture the culture in a tangible way. Your culture and company will be different, but you can use Amazon as a reference for understanding what part of your existing organizational culture enables growth and what parts block it. Then you can discuss and capture how to design a future culture that better encourages growth.
How Can You Get Started?
Company culture can feel like a beast, which is why many leaders avoid having these tough conversations. But there are small ways to get started. Here are three things you can do with members of your organization to begin the conversation:
- 10 + minutes. Do a quick assessment to map your present culture. Think hard about enablers and blockers. Quickly capturing your current culture will allow you to carry over any existing enablers and positive behaviors that can also work in your desired culture.
- 60 + minutes. In a slightly longer session, you can facilitate a shared understanding of your current culture with more people contributing their perspectives. Collaboration is key. How does your Culture Map change with others sharing their input?
- 180 + minutes. In this long session, you can define your desired culture and kick off a conversation about how the company can move there from its current culture. Individuals, teams, and leadership can collaborate to discuss and capture the desired enablers and behaviors that everyone can begin to experiment with and implement internally.
Like a successful garden, a happy and engaged workforce is the result of an intentionally designed company culture; it’s not something that you just let happen. Companies should be as intentional about culture as they are about strategy and business model innovation. We believe that a tool like the Culture Map is incredibly important for capturing and discussing organizational culture. Each one will be unique to the challenge that an organization has to face, whether that’s tackling growth, crisis, or disruption. But you can’t create a culture that will be effective in doing any of that without the right tools.
Reflection Questions:
- How would you describe the corporate culture of your workplace?
- What actions do leaders at your organization take to nurture and grow this culture?
- What elements of Amazon's organizational culture do you believe are most important to its success? Are there any similarities/differences between Amazon and your own organization's culture?