Scott Dietzen shares a key cultural challenge at Pure Storage and the way he ultimately overcame it

When pure storage was growing fast, what was the hardest cultural challenge you didn't anticipate and how did you solve it?

Yeah, I think it's. It's really hard to establish and then maintain a great culture when you're, you know, we grew from, you know, 15 to 2,000 employees while I was there, and it definitely makes it difficult. One thing that's obvious is try to get everyone in the company focused on external lenses like how do customers view the company, how do partners view it, how does the competition view it? If everyone is kind of looking outside in rather than thinking about their own particular turfs, you know, and areas, you can avoid internal politics, which is a key part of building a great culture. Something else I used to do is insist on people not using I me when their functions right. It's always we us when you're speaking aspirationally about what the company needs to accomplish. The time to use I me is when you're taking responsibility for something that's broken, that has to be fixed, pass the credit, take the blame, is just a really powerful thing for managers to do to build a great culture. I do think it gets harder to main that culture as you hire middle management. You know, middle management tends to look at the company differently. If you're running a function, you know, your goal is to grow the whole pie. But sometimes the middle managers, especially if they're coming out of bigger companies, will tend to want to grow their slice of the pie. And you've really got to try to work hard to keep them focused on, you know, the overall goals of the company and not their individual turf. One other key point about maintaining culture is put customer feedback, partner feedback, in the loop, anywhere you can. We measured net promoter score on all of our sales and product support interactions and I found everybody behaved better. The score was being kept.