Reflections on our culture journey

I’ve just passed my two year anniversary at SoftBank Investment Advisers (“SBIA”), and a recent family break gave me a moment of breathing space to reflect. The last two years have exceeded any challenge and excitement I could have imagined. Now, two years and some 70+ investments and approximately 400 new employees later, we’re preparing for the next chapter of our evolution at SoftBank Investment Advisers (“SBIA”), including managing additional funds and the ongoing portfolio management of Vision Fund 1 investments.

As I reflect on how SBIA has evolved over the course of managing Vision Fund 1 to date, I keep coming back to the same topic – one that has occupied a significant amount of my energy over these last two years: culture. When I talk to people about the Vision Fund journey, they tend to ask me the same questions.

How do you define and shape a culture at the same time as building the firm from the ground up? How do you bring together people from so many different cultures, and align them? How do build a healthy and sustainable culture while moving at such pace? How do you make sure that you’re making hires that strengthen the culture, not dilute it? What happens when you notice branches of the culture heading in a direction you don’t like?

For me, those are all versions of the question that Daniel Coyle asks in his 2008 book, ‘The Culture Code’, namely: Why do certain groups add up to be greater than the sum of their parts, while others add up to be less? That’s been such a fundamental subject for me over the last couple of years. Yes, we’ve assembled a team of extraordinary talents – and I’m so proud of that – but it’s not enough. If we don’t ensure that our team adds up to be greater than the sum of its parts, we risk missing the opportunity to create extraordinary impact.

At SBIA, we borrow a definition of culture from our lead regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, describing culture as

the habitual mindsets and behaviours that characterise an organisation.

Reminding ourselves of Peter Drucker’s oft-cited maxim that culture eats strategy for breakfast, we talk relentlessly as a leadership team about the ways that getting our culture right can help us drive our business results. We know that culture will determine not only how we develop the accomplished team we've already assembled, but whether we continue to attract the best talent and portfolio companies in the industry. In short, whether we will add up to more than the sum of our parts.

There’s much that I’m proud of from our journey so far; but there are plenty of areas where I’m impatient to see faster progress at SBIA.

At the heart of everything we’ve done has been our commitment to our cultural principles of Teamwork, Integrity, and Impact. When our CEO, Rajeev Misra, launched them in May 2018, he shared the following with the firm to explain how he saw them as the foundation stone of the culture, a ‘red thread’ weaving together all aspects of our organization. ‘We are one team, collaborative and aligned. We challenge ourselves and one another to reach better outcomes. Integrity governs our actions, diversity enriches our work, and transparency makes us stronger. Through our ambition and agility, we strive to make an impact. These principles guide all that we do and enable us to create value for our portfolio companies, investors, employees, and society.’ It’s no accident that we spoke deliberately last year about creating value for society as well as for our investors, portfolio companies and employees, and to that end, we were delighted to see the recent significant statement from the Business Roundtable which endorsed this philosophy.

I’m also proud that we made a significant investment in bringing the Cultural Principles to life for every member of our team, through world-class executive education. Delivered with a boutique leadership advisory and consulting firm, our Culture Workshops have genuinely shaped the ways that the organisation thinks about culture, difficult conversations, and creating win-win outcomes – and have been instrumental in raising awareness of where we are now as a firm, and where we want to go.

Of course, values and principles are all very well – and most organisations have them, in some form – but where we’ve tried to differentiate ourselves is by the extent to which we’ve embedded our Cultural Principles into the fabric of the firm. We talk about them in newsletters, in all-hands meetings, in staff offsites, and in coaching sessions. We celebrate our team members who exemplify them, and we hold those individuals up as role models for their peers. We challenge our hiring managers to keep them front of mind, ensuring that our new hires help us aim higher and reach further in building an environment we can be proud of. We measure our progress against them as an organisation, and as individuals; structuring our year-end feedback and reward process around not just what we’ve achieved, but how we’ve gone about it. We even use them as emojis in Slack to give a virtual high-five when we think a colleague is bringing them to life!

Of course, we haven’t cracked the code yet. As we look to the future, we will continue to be relentlessly focused on our core cultural principles of teamwork, integrity, and impact in respect of future funds and our ongoing management of Vision Fund 1. There is much more to achieve in all three of these principles within SBIA. We will also focus more on the social impact of our investments and of our firm overall, an area of great excitement for us. 

The last two years haven’t been without their challenges, but we’ve proven that the impossible is possible. Our aim is to prove that the impossible is sustainable. Once again, our culture at SBIA, and among our portfolio companies, will be my foremost priority.