Marten Mickos: Company Culture Can Drive Business

The realization that came slowly that company culture is what drives and defines a business. And Peter Drucker, who is my all time superstar when it comes to leadership and management and everything, I think he's among the smartest guys we've seen in the last 1000 years. He said culture eats strategy for breakfast, meaning you need the culture first and then you can have a strategy. But the strategy without the culture is meaningless. And we were very deliberate at MySQL at developing our culture. And this is what I think made the organization so strong that we took this David versus Goliath culture. So we were a little bit sort of like Robin Hood out there, doing things on our own, doing things the opposite way. When the logo was designed for us, the logo of the dolphin, our designer first painted it as a dolphin jumping up to the right. Like everything in the Western world, Everything in the Western world must go up to the right because that's where Gartner and everybody have their magic quadrants. But we said, no, we're contrarians. We will have the dolphin jump from right to left just to make a point. So we did that and we chose the dolphin because we said a dolphin is fast, intelligent and kind, and in groups they kill sharks. So we're very deliberate on this, on building a culture. We took, we were very global, so we had influence from every culture on the planet. We had people in 110 major locations, 32 countries, 18 time zones. So we, we had nearly everything on board. But we took some specific things from Nordic heritage. And one was openness. So we really drove openness. And we said we must share anything we can share with all employees. So we shared our problems, we shared the financial numbers, we shared our plans. And we tried to be as open as possible with people, because when you show openness to them, they respond very favorably. And that's a difference I've seen in other parts of the world where openness isn't a given. But in the Scandinavian countries, public government, for instance, a document is by definition public unless it is declared secret. Most other governments say our documents are by definition secret unless declared open. But not in the Nordic countries. And in Nordic countries, there's a thing called right of public access, meaning anybody can use any land, any. Any unused land. So if somebody owns a big, big forest, you can't lock people out. You can build fences all you like, but people have a right to climb over them and use the land. So there's sort of an idea of shared ownership of the land which lends itself to open Source and having a shared mission and sharing responsibility with people. So we learn to push out responsibility far out in the organization. And I always tried as CEO to make as few decisions as I could. When they came to me, I said, martin, how should we do this? What date should we have this on? I said, why do you need me to decide it? Because people have this tendency to believe in authorities. We have it from our childhood when we believed our parents. And then in business, we think the same, but we try to turn it around and say, no, you are the smartest people, and you go out and do it. And they said, but what if you don't agree with me? I say, it doesn't matter, you are in charge. And many times my organization made decisions I would never make. And I was looking, what is this? What have I created a culture where they do all these things which I find stupid? Well, most of the time turned out they were smart and I was the stupid guy. So luckily, I could restrain myself and sort of use duct tape to tie my hands to my seat or the desk to just not intervene. So it worked very well. And this notion of building a culture became so important that we had a culture that stipulated how we operate. And when we made decisions, we reiterated. We said, hey, our culture is to be open, therefore we are now opening up this thing. Our culture is to have fun, therefore we do this. Our culture is to be contrarians. That's why we are now doing this. So for decisions, we pointed them back at some specific principle of our culture so that people understand that, oh, yes, this is how the culture works. And fostering and building a culture is hard work, but I think it's worth work that pays off, because then it means that the organization can operate on its own.