Jack Canfield argues culture beats strategy every time: strong culture can survive weak strategy, but not the reverse. He describes how one organization capped communities at 120 people to preserve culture, then scaled to 135,000 by documenting traditions and training directors on them. The foundation is "givers gain" philosophy and social capital built through reciprocity.
Questions this video answers
120 people
135,000 people (approx.)
Chapters
What are some of the other lessons you've learned that you could say, okay, this is what I've learned. I think it'll be valuable for you to know as well.
I think an important one that I didn't spend enough time on in the early days is the idea that culture eats strategy for breakfast. A good friend of ours, Stuart Emery, talks about that a lot, and that is so true. Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
So unpack that a little bit for the average person out there.
Well, the idea is that if you have an organization with a really healthy culture, it's going to do well. If you have an organization with a tremendous strategy but a marginal culture, it's going to fail. But an organization with a strong culture and a marginal strategy is still going to do well. Of course, the optimum is to have a great culture and a great strategy that becomes an organization that's unbeatable. And so we believe we have a great strategy.
And.
And the key is maintaining a healthy culture, a good culture. Especially as you transition, as you get bigger and bigger, one of the problems of growth is growth, because as you get bigger, you can't carry on that culture as effectively. And so I learned a little late in the process the importance of finding techniques to maintain the culture.
I want to talk about that, but I'll share something really interesting. I was down in the rainforest a few years ago with a mutual friend of ours, Lynn Twist, and she took us into this tribal village of the Achuar, living on the Smastasi river in the middle of the Ecuadorian rainforest. And one of the things they have as a rule in the rainforest is once a village reaches 120people, people have to leave. The younger people have to go off and start their own village because they feel like they can't maintain that culture beyond 120 people. Now, obviously you've got more than 120 people involved. I think you told me you had 135,000 as of right now, 135,000 people. So. But you have been able to maintain a culture to a large extent. To a large extent. So talk about what you call a good culture and then how do you maintain it?
Well, I think there's a few things, and one of the mistakes I made was waiting a little while. And I think if you're starting a business, you're not thinking culture, you're thinking, meet payroll. You know, what do I want to do this week? What sales do I need to make? And you're not doing any vision making and that vision making is really important for us. Maintaining the culture really involved passing on the traditions of the organization. And so I sat down and I wrote out what I thought were the core traditions of our company. And now everybody who becomes a director for our organization has to go through that traditions training so they understand some of the core traditions, like the philosophy of givers gain, that if you want to get business, you have to be willing to give business, which is based on the social capital theory of the law of reciprocity, that people will help one another for the referral process.
Slow it down. Because I love. One of the things I learned when I was a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts studying education is as a professor gets more and more has been there longer and longer, they forget that freshmen don't know what they know and take for granted. So let's talk about what social capital is and this reciprocity law you talked about. And then why it's so important to be a giver. Because I know the problem with most networking groups, People go to get. And when they don't get, then they go. Well, that's. Forget that. They stop coming. It's all about me, me, me. And you're teaching a very different philosophy.
Yeah, let's talk about, if you don't mind, talk about that Give and get and then come into giver's gain.
