The Economist once discussed an organisational culture book written by Ben Horowitz, a leading venture capitalist and modern management expert. “What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture” dives into various cultures, both ancient and modern, and highlights different models of leadership and culture-building.
Horowitz’s reflections made me think about the challenges that companies, particularly tech companies, have faced in recent times. A challenge that we have also been working on. How do fast growth companies create great culture?
It’s what we are calling, FastCulture.
This is something we have been working on in recent times and so, we thought, let’s do our own workshopping to uncover what has and has not worked in creating FastCulture.
There are many conflicting challenges for fast growing companies. Part of the start-up advantage is this scrappy get it done attitude that allows the out manoeuvring of cumbersome established rivals. Indeed, at Uber, the group’s values included messages such as “champion’s mindset” and “always be hustlin’”. But we saw the problems that created and the end of that story for former CEO, founder Travis Kalanick.
We know that we cannot let culture take a back seat anymore. Driven by millennials and now more importantly the future of our companies, Gen Z, culture is a key driver.
A lot of companies say the right things, but clearly actualisation of FastCulture is not easy. We have revenue to grow, funding to secure, people to hire and operations to scale. Culture is key, but it is difficult to get this right altogether.
What have you done to create FastCulture in your organisation? We want to hear from you.
We have worked with hundreds of people from fast growing companies and we want to bring that learning together with your experiences of what it takes to create FastCulture.