Breaking into the corporate culture: Stories, heroes and rituals in startups and companies (Part 2)

In the last part, Steve Blank began a story about his acquaintance with the subtleties of corporate culture in his own skin. Today he will tell about what conclusions he drew:

Diagnostics of corporate culture

You can learn a lot about the culture of the company before you enter their building. For example, when companies say “Our values ​​are our employees”, but they make special parking places, private cafes and high-class offices for higher ranks, this says a lot more about them than any PR move. Or when the CEO proudly talks about their corporate incubator, but most of the incubator parking is already empty at 17:15.

I learned a lot about corporate beliefs, heroes, and company rituals simply by talking to people during breaks, instead of reading the wording of a corporation’s mission or these inspired cafeteria posters. In companies 1 and 2 of the horizon (those that implement or expand current business models), stories revolve around heroes and insurgents who manage to do something new in spite of existing processes. Rituals in such companies are based on reorganizations, marketing activities, positions, promotions, etc.

Such core values ​​and beliefs, as well as accompanying stories, heroes, and rituals, also determine who is important in this organization and who the company wants to attract. For example, if a company's financial success is valued above all else, its stories, myths, and rituals may include how the hero knocked a 5% discount from the supplier for his company. Or, if the company focuses on delivering innovative products, heroes, stories and rituals are based on product innovations (for example, Apple's legend about the development of Mac, iPod and iPhone).
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Hacking corporate culture

For innovation to happen planned, and not as an exception, companies need to hack their corporate culture. This is similar to the introduction of psychological warfare in their own company. Here we need a careful, calculated process, coordinated with the HR and financial department.

1. Assess the current values ​​and beliefs of your company in terms of employees
2. Announce the need for new values ​​and the transition of workers to a new way of thinking. It will be difficult. Everything will start with thinking over new values ​​and beliefs that the company will want to follow.
3. Plan concerted actions to create a new set of stories, heroes, and rituals around these values.
4. Simultaneously with the creation of a new culture, build a system of company motivation (compensation plans, bonuses, incentives, etc.) for new values. If you do not build a new system of motivation, it will destroy all your efforts to change the culture.

To create an innovative culture, companies need heroes and stories about employees who have created new business models, new products and new customers. Stories about new product lines created as a result of some crazy idea. Or heroes, such as the manager of the old guard, who always sends the best teams to the corporate incubator; or a team of general managers who adapted and applied the purchased product and made it part of a successful product line, or a team of engineers who left the office, saw the need of customers and created the product to meet it - and all this led to the creation of a new department. And rituals and rewards should support this kind of innovation (and not just the existing implementation).

Changing culture almost always leads to problems — resistance to change (we always behave this way), moral wear and tear (the world has changed, but our values ​​are not), incompatibility (in words we approve of our values, but in fact we don’t use them). But the combination of hacking culture and its strengthening by changing the system of motivation will help you realize it.

As a result of the application of an innovation culture, a large company will turn out with a single goal that can move quickly, actively and passionately.

Lessons learned:

3

• Corporate innovation requires an innovative culture;
• Corporate culture consists of values, stories, heroes and rituals;
• Startups create values ​​and a culture focused on innovation from scratch;
• Existing companies that want to launch (restart) corporate innovations must renew their existing corporate culture — and this is difficult;
• You can hack a culture;
• A careful, calculated process, coordinated with HR and financial department, is needed here;
• As a result, you get an increase in the number of innovations.

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