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All right, I'm Glenn Carroll.
I teach a class at the Stanford
Graduate School of Business titled
Leading Through Culture.
I'd like to talk to you about five
key takeaways from this class.
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In traditional management,
the manager observes the worker,
measures his output,
coaches him gives him feedback and
tells him how to do it better.
In Cultural Management,
you build the system,
you trust the system, and
you sit back and let it happen.
The hardest times for a manager in
a culture a managed system is in
times of crisis because in times
of crisis, the impulse is always to
grab the wheel and to try and
direct things to get in charge.
But in a strong culture system, you
just have to trust that the system
has been built properly, and
that things are going to work out.
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In his book no rules, rules.
The CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings
tells a story about how in
Sheryl Sandberg, the CEO of
Facebook, following him around all
day to see how he managed.
At the end of the day he caught her
say, the amazing thing was this
with you all day long, and to see
that you didn't make one decision.
Reed smiled and said I felt great,
because that's exactly what we were
aiming for.
The reason he could do this is
because Netflix has a strong
culture, and the culture has people
who are making decisions very
similarly to the way that Reed
would have made them himself, but
he didn't have to make
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The third key takeaway is that you
can build a strong culture around
any set of beliefs, values, or
practices.
This is what organisational
theorists call cultural content and
cultural content Is irrelevant for
whether you have a strong or
weak culture.
Don't believe it?
Consider the fact that I could name
examples of strong cultural
organizations from businesses of
all kinds, manufacturing, retail,
service, finance, you name it.
Religious cults, schools, terrorist
cells, urban gangs, SWAT teams,
military special forces, the
content is irrelevant for whether
the culture is strong or weak.
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Most managers use three key levers,
defining the culture,
setting up incentives and launching
training communication program.
But in fact there are something
like 20 different levers that
are available for a manager to use.
They include things like making
the organization transparent,
homogenizing the groupings,
broadening the job definitions,
instituting job rotation.
This list of levers is long and
can be used in many different ways,
it's a mistake not to use or
considered these the full set of
levers.
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So the fifth key takeaway is about
the most impactful managerial
lever, it is culturally selective
hiring, you can't always do it,
you need to be hiring,
you probably need to be growing.
To do it requires lots of time and
interviews.
Cultural destructive hiring is
often criticized today
because if it's not done right,
it can introduce a lot of bias and
discrimination.
Because when you select on cultural
traits, you also get a lot of other
things that are more homogeneous
than you might like.
The issue though,
can be resolved and done properly.
And the important thing to remember
is the culturally selective hiring
works and it is the most impactful
thing to build a strong culture
quickly and effectively.
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I always did well in school but
I was also a little bit of
a troublemaker or
at least I hung out with the kids
who were troublemakers, you
can ask my colleagues or my Dean's,
I still cause trouble occasionally
in their minds, I'm sure.
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