Four Keys to a Happy Work Environment

Posted on April 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking about work, and what makes working at a company enjoyable. What any person might like or dislike about work can vary widely, of course, but I’ve worked at a lot of different companies, and across those various companies I’ve found four main factors that determine how pleasant work at a company might be:

  1. The wind is at your back
  2. Things work smoothly
  3. Common commitment to a mission
  4. Strong management team

Wind at your back means that the market is moving your way and revenues are coming easily (as easily as they ever do). Like you’re Instagram and everybody wants your app. Or you’re Caterpillar during a construction boom, when people are clamoring for your tractors. When the wind is at your back, everything is easier. Your decisions all seem right, and if you happen to make a mistake, it just doesn’t matter that much. Your colleagues are in good moods, your bosses are happy with your work, and bonuses are in your future. When the wind is at your back, work almost seems like play.

Having your company work smoothly is an internal state, rather than one dependent on the market. Processes are in place and lines of communication are established. Objectives are set, each group is executing on those objectives, and everybody is in synch. When your organization is firing on all cylinders you feel productive, even if the wind isn’t at your back. Sure, maybe you could be growing faster, but you are getting things done, and that feels great.

Even if you aren’t all in synch, you can all be committed to the same mission. And this doesn’t need to be a feel-good, change the world sort of mission. Going back to Caterpillar, if everyone is committed to the mission of making great tractors and selling the heck out of them, then you are all on the same team, heading toward the same goal, and that is fun. You might be facing a headwind (housing crisis!) and your company may not be very organized, but at least you are all in it together, pulling in the same direction.

If you’ve got good management, everything is a little better. A good boss makes you feel appreciated, like your contributions actually matter. And if your contributions matter, you will work harder on those contributions, and feel better about that work. Good management can make work more rewarding, and more fun. Bad management, on the other hand, makes you dread coming to work each day.

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CEOs: Imagine You Are The Janitor

Posted on March 23, 2012 | 1 comment

OK, I promise this will be the last entry on cultural change. At least for a while.
But I wanted to return to the topic that started this arc: changes in corporate culture. You might recall how I postulated that a company could change its culture only if that change started at the top. The CEO needs to live the culture that he wants the whole company to have.

But that raises a question: can a CEO, from his top of the heap position, even successfully think through cultural issues? Go back to my prior example, where there is a culture of being late to meetings because the CEO is always late to meetings. If the CEO is always late, but nobody is late to the CEO’s meetings (because he is the boss, after all), then maybe he doesn’t even realize that this culture exists, and that it wastes everyone’s time. His time isn’t being wasted, so perhaps he doesn’t even see the problem.

If this is true of the CEO, it is likely true of other high level executives, depending on the size of an organization. So how can these oblivious executives work to develop a functional corporate culture? Here I turn to the work of John Rawls, a titan of political philosophy.  Rawls tried to develop a political system that maintained the liberty of markets while countering the tendency of market economies to perpetuate economic disadvantages.

In his masterwork, A Theory of Justice, Rawls balanced these two competing strands through an invention he called the veil of ignorance. Rawls suggested that policy makers devise policies via a thought exercise in which they ignored their actual station in life and imagined how the policy would affect the least advantaged person in society. By operating behind a veil of ignorance as to how policies would affect them personally, they would develop policies that were fairer to everyone.

Maybe CEOs and other top executives should sometimes step behind a veil of ignorance. As a thought experiment, it’s not really that hard. Ask yourself “How would the average employee feel about this? What about the lowest ranking employee?” Only a CEO whose ego has been stoked to l’etat c’est moi proportions will not be able to imagine how his underlings might feel. In the case our always late CEO, surely he will recognize how people feel when he is always late to their meetings.  And if he is so Louis XIV that he is truly unable to imagine how others might feel, then that company’s culture is utterly doomed and everyone should just leave.

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Posted in Business, Philosophy, Pop culture

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Can Congress Change Its Culture?

Posted on March 19, 2012 | Leave a comment

Cultural change is the recent theme here at Thoughtbasket; I discussed how a company might change its culture, and then how America might change some aspects of its culture. Today I want to look at a particular part of America: Congress. The U.S. Congress seems unable to solve any of the problems facing our country, and consequently has an approval rating of only 11 percent, which is the lowest ever. If a group is unable to complete the sole task it is given (governing, in this case) and thus is held in contempt by its bosses (voters, in this case), then that group probably has a culture problem.

The congressional cultural problem is that the entire institution values reelection instead of service (which is why incumbents are reelected more than 80% of the time). Power is more important than policy. Much like the corporation in my first post on this topic had a culture where everyone thought it was OK to be late for meetings, congress has a culture where everyone thinks that it’s OK to prioritize staying in office over doing the job you were elected to do, which is govern.

We can blame each individual congressman – and believe me, I do – but really, it is the institution and its culture that is truly to blame. Expecting some moronic ex-exterminator who only gets a two-year term to swim against a cultural tide of reelection is probably naïve. So, much like in my efforts to change cultural components in the US as a whole, we need a team approach. John Boehner + Nancy Pelosi = change?

I wrote last year about how John Boehner could be a hero by teaming up with democrats to pass substantive policy that would address the nation’s fiscal problems. Here is another opportunity for heroic action: he could rally all of congress, teaming with his arch enemies, to promote a culture of service instead selfishness.

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Is Corporate Culture The Same As Country Culture?

Posted on March 13, 2012 | Leave a comment

I recently posted about corporate cultures, and how the only way a corporation can change its culture is from the top. Based on some of the feedback I received I’ve decided to expand my scope and explore a larger cultural change: how the United States might change some parts of its culture. For example, one aspect of America’s current culture that seems problematic is that we want all kinds of services (Medicare, Social Security, strong defense, good roads, etc.) but we want the lowest taxes possible. Those two desires are incompatible; a culture that emphasizes taking without giving will prove challenging in the long run.

In my prior post, I discussed that a change in corporate culture requires a CEO who is willing to push that change. In the case of a country, who might play that role? You would naturally think the president, but we know that won’t work. Plenty of recent presidents have talked about changing the culture, but none have succeeded. Hell, none of them could change the culture of a few hundred people in Congress, let alone a whole country. And that’s not really surprising; a country is not a hierarchical structure the way a company is, so people have no reason to necessarily follow what the leader says.

The president could try to lead by example, or by using the bully pulpit, but I can only imagine the furor  that would erupt  if a president (or governor, or senator, or mayor) announced that “OK people, your constant desire to get lots while paying little is complete crap; going forward we are all going to be more realistic.” No, that wouldn’t work at all.

What if all our leaders teamed up? Suppose a whole slew of politicians – national and local, democrat and republican, male and female – got together to announce an initiative aimed at realism. This could be risky, since taking a stand isn’t really what politicians do; they hate being out on limbs by themselves. But that is why they would team up with members of the other party. After all, as I noted in my prior post, cultural change requires leaders to actually lead. Then they could get business leaders on board; everyone from Warren Buffett to Charles Koch. Throw in some celebrities – nothing happens in America without celebrities – and then maybe we’d have something.

It’s possible that this is nothing but a pipe dream. Can we really expect politicians to team up in order to lecture voters? Probably it will never happen. But maybe we should expect more from our leaders.

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How to Change Corporate Culture

Posted on March 7, 2012 | 3 comments

I was recently at an all-day retreat for an organization that is working on changing its culture. Like many fast-growing companies, this group is finding that what worked when it was smaller is no longer working. Ad hoc lines of communication break down as organizations grow. Old timers don’t trust newcomers, and the newcomers chafe under the mistrust. This is a common problem here in Silicon Valley, where growing companies are the norm.

Part of the challenge at this company, and at most companies in this position, is that founder who has gotten the company this far, often by being involved in every decision, is unable to let go even as she brings in experienced managers underneath her. Note that I am using female pronouns here, but this is definitely not a gendered issue.  If the corporate culture is one where nobody can act without founder approval, it will be challenging for the company to grow, no matter the gender of said founder.

More broadly speaking, this raises the question of corporate culture in general, and whether it can change without the people at the top also changing. Generally, corporate cultures reflect the personality of the founder; thus Oracle has a reputation as aggressively cut-throat, like Larry Ellison, while Microsoft long had the reputation as heartlessly numbers-driven, like Bill Gates.  James Baron, a professor at Yale, is one of the leaders in studying organizational change, and he notes that “founders impose cultural blueprints.” With older companies, a culture develops over time; IBM built a culture that was bureaucratic and risk-averse, and only an outsider like Lou Gerstner could change it.

Studies seem to indicate that corporate cultures will not easily change unless that change is driven from the top. This often means a founder ceding control to an outsider, but it can also mean a CEO committing to change and making that commitment public and real. Here are some factors which are essential to a CEO successfully changing a corporate culture:

  1. The CEO must announce the new values
  2. The CEO’s direct reports need to be on board with the changes
  3. A plan should be in place to drive these changes to all constituents
  4. There has to be a cost to violating the new norms; apostates must be punished.

The most important thing, however, is that the CEO needs to live the changes. Corporate culture comes from the top, and if the top doesn’t change the rest of the organization will see the announcement as empty words.

For example, what if a company has a culture of people showing up late for meetings, or not at all? Everyone at the company might agree that this is a cultural artifact they want to change. But most likely this culture exists because the founder is usually late for meetings, if she shows up at all. There are a number of reasons why a founder might act this way, but it doesn’t really matter why; what matters is that as long as she shows up late, everyone else will too. The only way for this culture to change is for the founder to embody the change.  That’s the thing about leadership; it requires you to lead.

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Posted in Business, Technology

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Ozone Pollution More Dangerous than Previously Thought?

Posted on March 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

We’ve all heard about the ozone layer, but I reckon that most people know very little about ozone. I knew pretty much nothing about it until I read an article published by the National Bureau of Economic Research which tied ozone levels to reduced worker productivity.

It turns out that ozone is a molecule consisting of three oxygen atoms. It also turns out that ozone is known to cause respiratory problems. It is chock full of free radicals, and ozone doesn’t react well with cells in your lungs. Yuck. Health organizations (EPA, WHO, etc.) set exposure standards levels that should prevent long term effects. Of course, those standards are based on the science at the time of promulgation, and science can change, as is true for all health regulations.

However, as the NBER article shows, sometimes economics can reveal patterns that medicine doesn’t. Economists from UCSD and Columbia studied ozone levels in California’s central valley (a huge farming area) and compared those levels to farmworker productivity. It turns out that increased ozone levels are correlated to decreased productivity. Moreover, this productivity impact happens at levels well below the federal safety standards. So maybe the standards are wrong, and ozone is more toxic than people think.

I admit that this study is a little on the Freakonomics side of things: it runs a regression, sees a correlation and assumes causality. I have been critical of Freakonomics in the past (although not on this blog), because I don’t think you can just regress a boatload of data and then decide that you know why result A happened. There could be all kinds of other factors at play in this data; for example, maybe ozone levels are high when the weather is really hot, and farmworker productivity was down because of the heat, not because of the ozone at all. Hopefully the economists doing the study adjusted for that sort of thing, since zeroing out the noise of exogenous variable is a standard procedure in studies like this, but the article doesn’t say. Any way you look at it, this certainly is an interesting correlation that could bear further study.

As an aside, here is a critique of Freakonomics from the American Scientist; they are more qualified than I am.

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Posted in Environment, Technology, Uncategorized

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Marc Andreesen Finally Calls The Tech Bubble

Posted on January 5, 2012 | 1 comment

After months of saying, contrary to all evidence, (like this, this and this) that there was not a tech bubble going on, super-VC Marc Andreesen has finally publicly pulled back from investing because valuations are too high. Duh.

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The Myth of the “Job Creator”

Posted on December 12, 2011 | Leave a comment

A key Republican talking point is that the wealthy are “job creators” and that any tax on these job creators will cause them to fold their cards and go home, hurting the economy in the process. This is clearly ridiculous, and I have challenged before the concept that tax rates diminish incentives to build companies, but here is a great essay from an entrepreneur and investor (a successful one — he is clearly in the 1%) describing how people don’t create jobs, the economy does. And the economy is made up of regular folks — the 99% — who need to buy the products produced by the entrepreneurs. Without a successful consumer class, nobody will be a job creator.

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Jolly Spot

Posted on November 15, 2011 | 1 comment

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Lean Startups Aren’t So Lean

Posted on November 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

There was recently an article in PE Hub (that’s Private Equity Hub, for those of you who don’t subscribe) about the breakneck growth of internet darlings like Groupon, Zynga and LinkedIn, and about the massive hiring and marketing spending required to support that growth. Written by the ever insightful Connie Loizos (disclosure: I know Connie and her husband both socially and professionally), the article pointed out that these companies are forced to raise huge private equity rounds (as in hundreds of millions of dollars) to pay for the marketing that drives growth and the hiring that supports it.

As Connie points out, this is a great flaw in the “lean startup” model. Sure, you can build a company with $3 million now instead of $30 million. Open source software and cloud hardware resources allow you to bring a product to market without raising gobs of venture money. But those same trends allow anyone else to bring a competing product to market just as cheaply. So then the race is on to see who can grow the fastest. And that race demands capital, lots of it.

So startups can be lean, but growth companies are fat. All this trend has done is move the locus of capital raising competition a little later in the lifecycle of companies.

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