I've been fornuate enough to work within a few different businesses now.
Every experience has taught me more then the last and one of the most interesting learnings across every business experience was the changes in their cultures.
Bringing a taste of what I learned I've brought in the wisdom of big hitters to help back me up with their observations on what a great culture looks like in practice.
Fundamentally, I've observed that great cultures resemble spas.
Let me explain.
With spas hot water is pumped in and warmer water will sink to the bottom to be pumped out. If the hot water stops and the warm water is not removed, the spa temperature will stagnate killing the water by becoming green. Only then will its full replacement suffice. That is the importance of culture.
Culture is getting hot water and keeping it as long as it stays hot and always removing it when it becomes too warm.
Warren Buffet has said that the ABC's of business decay begin and end with arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency.
Jeff Bezo's shares a similar idea at Amazon known as Day 1. Day 1 is the belief that the crux of Amazon's enduring success will hold true only to the extent that it continues to operate by the standards set in Day 1 and ensuring at all costs Day 2 never arrives.
The idea of Day 1 represents to Jeff Bezo's the complete anti-thesis to business decay. Day 1 tells us that it is only through consistent humility, commitment to individual initiative and dissatisfaction toward our past results and ideas does Amazon stand any chance of continuing to run "hot".
Bezo's Day 1 recognizes that all warm water must be replaced and that no water will ever be safe.
To further explore the idea of what it means to have a Day 1 culture we can use Charlie Munger's exceptional wisdom of inversion to understand what it means to have a Day 2 culture.
- We would learn to never challenge the status quo whatever it may be because we are always right.
- We would become satisfied with our past results.
- We would intentionally deny and disbelieve evidence that suggests otherwise
- We would stop learning more about our customer
- We would stop learning more about new methods to solve customer problems
- We would believe that we knew better because...
- We would push things around to dissipate into the void
- We would talk more about work then we do
- We would would accept the roadblocking of other people's work
- We wouldn't allow people to do things without a committee to sign it off
- We would frustrate everyone within the business and be okay with that because...
- We would accept that sloppy work is acceptable
- We would actively deny reality
- We would accept the way things are and that they will not change
- We would openly deny people open to change
- We would put no effort into finding better ways
- We would intentionally slow things down for the sake of our ease
- We would allow expenses to become bloated
- We would stop tracking KPI's because they don't matter
From this we can determine that the Day 1 standards must therefore be based on showing other people that you care, that we are accountable, that we measure and that we have a desire for excellence.
We would pump in as much hot water because we care
- We would have a bias to action
- We would do things because we recognize many actions are reversible
- We would be frugal and do more with less