Things You Didn't Know About Company Culture

Culture is a choice. You look at these two companies, Google and Microsoft. I've been to both of their major campuses. Which company do you hear about in the media as being a great place to work? Who said Microsoft? No one. How come? Boring. It's like a morgue. Google chose culture. Culture trumps strategy. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. You don't need a bunch of MBAs to grow a great company. You need a bunch of great people who are aligned. Google, Microsoft are almost the same. Technology companies hiring computer engineers, billions of dollars in cash. Google chose culture. So here's how culture starts. It starts with a concept that I cover in chapter one of my book called the Painted Picture. It's not covered by any of the real MBA programs now. It's covered by a lot of the media. It's used all over the world by CEOs. Now when I started talking about this concept about eight years ago, the idea is something that I learned from an Olympic coach. I sat down at a lunch one day and this high performance sports psychologist talked about athletes visualizing themselves performing the event, in fact, leaning out into the future and feeling themselves performing the actual event. We had no idea how to bring it into the business world. So he gave us another analogy. He talked about Brooke Shields when she was getting married to Andre Agassi. She didn't like her legs, so she put a picture of what she wanted her legs to look like on the wedding day. The perfect legs. Well, we all know that the wedding to Andre Agassi didn't work out. Andre getting to get married to Steffi Graf. Crazy thing was those were Steffi Graf's legs, the picture that Brooke had put up on the refrigerator. So the process of visualization worked. Unfortunately, it worked for Andre, not for Steffi. We still had no idea how do you bring it into the business world. So he talked about contractors who essentially take drawings from the homeowner. People that want to build a home or do a renovation take pictures out of magazines, photos from their friends houses when they're not looking. And they take all these sketches and drawings and we hand it to a contractor and we go build us this. Well, the contractor takes all those pictures and goes off and what does he do with them? Gets blueprints done. The blueprints is the plan to make the vision happen. Well then you take the plan and you hand it to the employees, the workers, and they can recreate the homeowner's dream. See, the problem in companies is, and in organizations and even in our families is we don't Have a vision that's written up in a way that everybody can read so that we can all see what's going on in our mind. Your vision needs to trickle down to the employees. You got to get out of the box to write it. You can't sit in your office and write a painted picture. You've got to go somewhere where you're inspired. Somewhere around nature. Go sit at a park or up in the mountains or at the lake. Go sit somewhere and just relax. Do a mind map, take a notepad, turn it in landscape mode, and just jot down ideas of what your business looks like three years in the future. If you're a CEO, I teach them to think about operations and finance and IT and marketing and sales, and describe those business areas as if you've gone into a time machine and you're looking around at it right now in the present, describe it in the present moment. If you're there in the future, you don't know how it happened. You just know what it looks like. So describe what it looks like, then bring that vision back, and your team will figure out how. So your first step is get all the bullet points written up, and then you write it up into a paragraph style. Now, our role, again as CEOs is not to be a great writer. So once you get it written up into a rough draft, you can give it to a writer who can really make it pop off the page. And then you can get some graphic design elements added to it. This is a CEO of a bilingual preschool company. So they use little illustrations looked like they were done with crayons, to make each of the paragraphs of their painted picture come to life. Your painted picture has to be like a magnet. It has to attract people to your vision. People have to go, oh, my God, I want to be a part of this. It was one of the tips I got from a friend of mine, Tim Ferriss, who wrote the Four Hour Workweek. We were talking, having drinks in Vancouver at my place, and I was getting ready to do my TED Talk, and he said, you've got to piss some people off. He said, if you go out there and just deliver a speech that everybody loves, no one will love it. You've got to polarize. You've got to attract a whole bunch of people, like a magnet. And a whole bunch of people hate you. Well, that's what happened. If you're kind of a capitalist or you like business, you love my talk about raising entrepreneurial kids. But if you're more of a socialist or you're a little bit on the left or you're a lawyer or a teacher. You think I'm the Antichrist. I'm okay with that because my role is to kind of get people to talk about this thing. Well, the painted picture is the same thing, but like a magnet, it also has to repel your painted picture, has to repel a few people. When I was writing this talk about five years ago, I was coaching a company in Vancouver that later became the number two company to work for in Canada, or number, sorry, in bc. I also coached the number one company that same year in bc so citymax and Nurse Next Door were clients. Citymax. We took all of his employees off site, ran this presentation. Dean stood up at the end. He read his painted picture. He said, 15% of you hate what you just heard. He said, that's okay because it's probably the right time for you to quit, to. To make room for the rest of us who really are vibrating in our seats right now and excited about the future. And he said, tomorrow, when you go to work. And he clicked to a next slide. He said, go to this new office address, because today, when we've been off site at this location, a moving company came. We packed up the company today, and we've moved to our new offices. And if you're excited about that, welcome to the future. Six weeks later, 15% of the company had quit. Three years later, Dean ranked as the number two company in BC to work for. Vision is not about getting your 10 employees together, putting your favorite words on a whiteboard, eliminating all of them by voting on them and mashing up the six words into a sentence and saying, go, team. That stuff never worked. The Vision is getting it out of your mind, the movie written down so that people can see it, so that it aligns people. You're rolling out a painted picture to your team. It's going to feel a little bit goofy. This is what it feels like. Let's say that you're the person dancing. You're the CEO, communicating your vision. You're going to do something until everybody joins in. But the reality is no one's joining in. So you feel pretty stupid. But you keep dancing. You keep dancing. Keep dancing. A sales guy usually joins in first. Keep communicating your vision. Keep communicating your vision. Sales guy dances along with you. Now look at the people sitting close to you. Your lawyers, your accountants, your family. They all think you're nuts. And they're not going to join in because this is stupid. I don't buy into it because all I can see is today our role as the CEO is to be that chief energizing officer and communicate our vision. Sales guy will keep dancing. CEO keeps communicating it. Like Jim Collins said in Good to Great, until people are making fun of you, your ideas have not started to stick. You keep dancing. Marketing guy joins in. Sales guy leaves. CEO keeps dancing. The VP's sitting close to you are just not going to join in because this is stupid. At this point, you start looking for the people that are the naysayers, the negative energy, the people that you have to get out of your organization. Operations. People join in. Couple it. People join in. This is when you start to feel the shift. Culture is by design. This guy kept dancing for about four and a half minutes until 45,000 people were dancing. But a few of these people who were sitting closest to him never got up. You have to find time to get those people out of the organization. The cultural cancers like the toxins in our bodies have to get pushed out. If you wouldn't invite George to come to work or come to your home for dinner, why would you invite him to come to work every day?