Breaking into the corporate culture: Stories, heroes and rituals in startups and companies (Part 1)

I spent this year working with corporations and government agencies that apply and adapt the methodological foundations of rationalization of production.

One of the most interesting difficulties in introducing innovations, which I noticed, is based on the company's culture. Whereas startups have the ability to build values ​​and culture from scratch, existing companies that want to launch (restart) corporate innovations should renew their existing corporate culture that has become firmly established over the years. This is quite a difficult task, but the impossibility to change the culture destroys any attempts by the company to introduce innovations.

Corporate innovation requires an innovative culture

Innovation in an existing company is not just a sum of excellent technologies, major acquisitions and smart people. Corporate innovation requires a culture that fits with and supports them. Often this means making changes to an existing company culture. Convincing workers to abandon old values ​​and hopes and adopt new ones that may lead to new difficulties.

Often, corporate innovation initiatives begin and end with the mandate of the board meeting for the CEO, followed by reminders to employees, with a large number of posters and one-day workshops. As a rule, this creates a “theater of innovation”, but there are very few innovations themselves.
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Two consultants from McKinsey, Terry Dil and Arthur Kennedy, wrote a book called Corporate Culture: Rites and Rituals in Corporate Life (Corporate Culture: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life). In it, they noted that every company has a culture - and this culture briefly means "the way that everything is done in our company." Company culture includes four main components:

• Values ​​/ beliefs - a set of philosophical principles on everything that a company does, and most importantly - what is its meaning
• Stories / myths - stories about how founders / employees overcame difficulties, achieved new orders ...
• Heroes - for what they reward and what they say, how to become a hero in their organization?
• Rituals - what and how does the company celebrate?

Strength of corporate culture

This was my third startup, Convergent Technologies, where I began to understand the power of corporate culture. Values ​​and core beliefs in the work of this crazy startup were embodied in the phrase that we are "Silicon Valley Marine Corps". If you have never been interested in joining the ranks of the marines, then you never entered. If it was interesting to you (which usually happens with 20-year-old guys with high testosterone), you tried to get into them.

By the time I got there, the company already had a supply of stories about how they "achieved the impossible" and "independently introduced innovations." Here, as legends, they told how the founders changed direction from simple assembly of a computer running on a single-circuit board with a new-fangled Intel microprocessor to selling full desktop stations with an operating system and office applications (the predecessor of the PC) to other computer companies. And the general director abruptly changed the strategy during the presentation to the client, who at first was “not interested”, and then, at the same meeting, signed a contract for 45 million.

Each subsequent deal with a good client was celebrated (the deals were worth tens of millions of dollars), and salespeople were honored as heroes. When any engineering intervention was required to tailor the requirements to an expensive order (and this is almost every deal), engineers also became heroes. And when the night flight marketing department went to the place to support sales (which happened often), we were also heroes.

In the end, there were rituals and celebrations that accompanied every major order. There were bells and gongs. The general director could hand out checks for $ 100 and announce an instant bonus of $ 25 thousand, which was later talked about for years. Once he even sprayed a warning to release a new product on time on the wall of the main hall (so rude that I can't even tell, but it is still remembered 30 years later).

In spite of the fact that my position, business card and official duties described my functions, these unwritten values, stories, heroes and rituals indicated what behavior they expected from me in my work.

Part 2

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